You can stop right there. You must do something before you start writing your marketing plan. This is crucial to the success of your business. Let’s take a look at it!

It is creating a company strategy. Your business strategy is what identifies the uniqueness of your products and services. These terms are similar to help you define your business strategy.

• Unique Selling Point (USP)
• Unique Selling Proposition
• Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
• Competitive Advantage
• Unique Offering

You can call your business strategy anything you want, but it must be effective. Your company’s business strategy is what sets you apart from your competition. Your digital marketing metrics is defined by your business strategy.

If you have a clear business strategy, here are some tips for writing a marketing plan. Here’s a breakdown of 14 key components that make a marketing plan successful.

1. Market Research

You should research the market viability of your business idea, no matter how great it is. The market will ultimately judge your product. Wouldn’t it be better to know this before you invest your entire life savings?

Market Research gives you a real-world, data-driven assessment of whether your business can succeed on the market. Market research companies offer comprehensive reports covering almost every industry. These reports include:

• Size of the market
• Rate of growth
• Consumer base
• Leaders in the industry
• Regions
• Trends of the Year
• Analyse of competitors
• Industry Risks

There are two types of market research that stand out: primary and secondary. Secondary market research is market research that has been sourced from other sources, such as: http://glowtify.com/

You or your team can conduct primary market research on their behalf. Primary market research is, in many ways, superior to secondary research when done correctly.

Market research can help you identify your target audience’s market pain. This is one of the most important lessons. Market pain refers to a problem, inefficiency, shortcoming, or challenge with a product, process, or service. Validating the market pain that your product is intended to address is what your market research efforts should be doing.

2. PEST Analysis

How do you effectively analyze your business environment? The PEST Analysis is a powerful tool to help you do this. It is a four-point framework that allows you to evaluate the market factors.

• Political
• Economic
• Socio-Cultural
• Technological

An analysis can help you understand the forces of change within your environment and guide your strategic decisions.

Political – Start by looking at the political factors that can affect your business. Consider, for example, whether there are any upcoming elections and how will they play out. What are the likely effects of any changes in legislation or taxation laws on your business?

Economic – Next, do the same with economic factors. How stable is your economy? Are you seeing an increase in the economy or a decrease? What is your unemployment rate? What is the impact of inflation on your industry? These factors are likely to change.

Sociocultural – Next consider the socio-cultural influences of your environment. This includes trends in population growth rate, age distribution and income levels. It also considers attitudes towards career, health, lifestyle, and any cultural barriers.

Technological- These factors are related to technology innovation and regulations that could affect your market’s operations. Technology incentives, technology change, technological innovation, research and development, as well as the level of automation are all factors to consider.

3. SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is useful for identifying both the internal and external aspects your company, no matter if it’s a startup or established business. Your SWOT analysis will begin with a segment that examines your company’s internal strengths and weaknesses. The second section looks at external threats and opportunities.

A four-square template is the best way to complete a SWOT analysis. This is commonly known as a SWOT matrix. Each of the four elements, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, has a specific box. These are some of the most common items:

When you create a business plan and a SWOT analysis, make sure to review it at least once a quarter. A SWOT analysis can help you to see your strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities that you can take advantage of, and give you answers about the threats.

4. Key Competitors

Understanding your industry competitors and, more specifically, your three closest competitors will allow you to pinpoint what makes your offering unique, as well as refining your business plan.

When evaluating your key competitors, it is important to be open-minded. However, you need to first understand which market segment your company falls within.

Let’s say that “Very Vegan Pizza Ltd.” is an example. Very Vegan Pizza wants to open a few stores here in Vancouver, BC. To better understand the competition, they conduct a competitor analysis.

International Franchises

• Pizza Hut
• Dominos
• Little Caesars
• Papa Johns
• Panago Pizza

Local Pizza Restaurants

• Freshslice Pizza
• Pizza Factory
• Romano Pizza
• Lombardo’s Pizzeria

Vegan Pizza Restaurants (Key Competitors)

• Virtuous Pie
• Vegan Pizza House
• Pizza Garden

You should conduct a competitor analysis to uncover information you didn’t expect. You might find competitors in your market that are positioning themselves to draw customers from your niche.

It is vital to know your competitors. Visit their locations, test their products and services, and get to know them personally. Your business will succeed if it offers something different. Knowing what you are up against is the only way to make sure you offer something different.

5. Price point

To understand your market, first determine your price point. Are you offering a unique product launch marketing plan or service that is more expensive than your competitors? Are you able to offer a product/service that is in the middle of your industry? Are you able to offer the lowest prices in your industry for a product/service?

Every price point has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Be aware of the industry’s price points. Your company’s business strategy will help you understand your offerings and how to reach them. And your marketing plan will explain who your target market are, what they want, and why. This equation is dependent on your price point.

6. Target Market

Your marketing efforts will fail if you don’t identify your target market. Your target market, or target audience, is the consumer to whom you want to sell your products and services.

This would include a company, a nonprofit organization, or government body for business-to-business (B2B), service providers.

This would be used to identify business-to-consumer companies that are B2C based using demographic, psychographic and geographic segments. These four factors are part of market segmentation. This is when a company chooses which market it wants to target. Below is how to identify each market segment.

Demographic

To fully understand your target market’s demographics, you need to know their age, education, gender and family size.

Psychographic

 To build a psychographic representation for your target market, it is important to forget about demographics. You must instead understand your target audience’s personality, values, lifestyle, and attitudes.

Geographic

You can target specific people using geographic factors. This could be as broad as a country or as specific as a neighbourhood. At least one of these geographic factors is climate, continents, cities, countries, or cities/towns with a certain threshold in population.

Behavioral

Find out what your customers want from you and how they experience it. This includes things like brand loyalty, buyer readiness and expected benefits.

7. The Ideal Customer Avatar

An ideal customer avatar is a good place to start when creating your target market. When creating a target market, we typically find three target markets or target audience. Each segment should have a client or customer ideal.

Here is an example of a target market list. For most businesses, it is a good idea to have three target markets. This is the target market for a Washington, D.C. waxing shop.

Guys

• Men
• Ages 18-55
• All ethnicities
• Religion: Usually, non-religious
• Interests: Fitness and Health
• Location: Washington, D.C.
• Benefits to be expected: Thoroughness

Younger Women

• Women
• Ages 18-29
• All ethnicities
• Religion: Usually, non-religious
• Interests: Fitness and Health
• Attitude: Easy-Going
• Location: Washington, D.C.

Women of Middle Age

• Women
• Ages 30-55
• All ethnicities
• Religion: Usually, non-religious
• Interests: Self-Care
• Income: Disposable Income
• Benefits to be expected: Thoroughness

8. Sales Funnel

The sales funnel is an important concept to know when you run any type of business.

A. Awareness

While there are many styles of sales funnels, they almost all share one thing: awareness. A sales funnel is a way to find clients. Awareness is the first step. It’s amazing how you can create awareness with potential clients in so many different ways. A former client might refer your business to them (awareness), and they may also hear your advertisement on the radio, see your Facebook page, or search for your industry using your Google ad.

You must be very tactical when building awareness for an SME (small- to medium-sized business). Large corporations spend millions of dollars on marketing channels that include billboards, radio ads, Digital marketing KPIs, and print. You are likely to own an SME if you’re like most businesses. SME owners must decide how to build awareness with potential clients. Our firm, for example, doesn’t advertise anymore on Instagram. Instead, we advertise on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter because we know our target audience is active on these platforms so it’s better to build awareness on those specific platforms.

The main message? Make smart choices about where and how you build awareness. Make sure you are using the channels and platforms that your target audience is using.

9.Call To Action

A call to action (CTA), which is a winning call, should be short and sweet. It will encourage your audience to take immediate action. Call to action can help convert potential clients. Remember to give your audience reasons to take desired actions. This should be reflected in your value proposition, or unique Selling Point (USP). The USP is undoubtedly the most important piece of acquiring leads. Therefore, creating a USP/CTA mix-up is vital to increasing conversions.

10.Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is the position a company holds in the client’s mind and how it differs from other companies. This is a strategy used to market businesses and help them stand out.

Clients should instantly connect with companies through brand positioning. How well your brand is known by others is one of the key factors to success. It is not enough to have a website that people love and then hope they come back for more. It is not enough to have a generic website. A company cannot thrive on the market without a strong brand.

Verizon Wireless got their brand positioning right and won the trust of millions of Americans.

America’s Largest and Most Reliable 4G LTE Network.

Your brand positioning can make the difference between being a household or a small business trying to survive in crowded markets. To ensure that your brand positioning is consistent and recognizable, you should be open to changing your statements as needed.