The main goal of any business is to gain more customers and close more sales, and there is no better place to start than by perfecting your marketing plan.

A Marketing Plan is one of the most important business tools for any company to utilise. Whether you’re looking for funding to start up a business, to win over investors or even to sell your business, you will need a solid marketing plan to achieve this. Of course, marketing is also what drives your target audience to buy your product or service, bringing in the money that keeps your business alive.

What is a Marketing Plan?

You might be wondering, how does a marketing plan differ from a marketing strategy? Well, the marketing strategy outlines how the business is positioned, how its offering is segmented, who its target audience is, what its core mission, vision and values are and how that informs the marketing messaging. 

The marketing plan, however, is the blueprint of how the marketing strategy is going to be implemented. It outlines the methods you're going to put in place to make your customers buy your products and services. It acts as a roadmap that walks through your marketing strategies, tactics, marketing activities, costs, and expected results and is therefore much more tactical in its nature. 

Why is a Marketing Plan So Important?

Let’s take a look at 5 key reasons why a marketing plan is so critical: 

1. Clear goals are a great way to stay motivated and on track - with a marketing plan, you can focus on tangible targets, measuring and improving your sales and business performance throughout the yea

2. Marketing plans help you to remain consistent within your business, ensuring everyone is given the exact instructions on what to do to meet the company's business goals. The best-performing businesses are those where everyone within the business has absolute clarity of what they are doing.

3. It helps you to plan and manage resources effectively - a clear marketing plan enables the business to understand what sort of budget they need to set aside, for what specific activities, and what level of resources they need to deliver it.

4. It’s a great way to impress stakeholders, investors and secure funding - you’ll struggle to do this if you can't present a marketing plan that outlines your business direction. It's massively important if you want to level up your company.

5. Marketing plans allow you to be proactive and decrease the risk of company errors occurring - if you think about things in advance, rather than just dealing with them when they occur, you're more able to pre-empt and solve issues immediately.

How to Create a Simple but Effective Marketing Plan

Now we understand why a marketing plan is so important, but how do we create one? Here’s a quick rundown:

Step 1: Gather all the necessary documents for your marketing plan (financials, sales figures, details of your products & services and your target markets).

Step 2: Research the current market, such as risks and opportunities.

‍‍Step 3: Get clear on the objectives of your marketing plan.

Step 4: Find out as much information as you can about your target audience and complete a customer journey map.

‍Step 5: Consider your content strategy and implementation plan, so you have a road map and clear next steps. .

Do you have a 2024 marketing plan? If not, we hope the information in this blog has urged you to question why.