How to Create a Marketing Plan You’ll Actually Use
At Hive, we listen and we don’t judge. So, hands up if you’ve created a marketing plan and then completely forgotten to look at it ever again?
*silently judging*
But in all seriousness, a marketing plan can and should be your very own roadmap to success. We get it. The key that we have found however, is to craft a strategy that’s not just practical but actionable.
Ready to hear how YOU can create a marketing plan that you’ll actually use (and see results from). Let’s go.
Before we begin, let’s really talk about what happens when you don’t have a solid plan in place? Often marketing efforts become inconsistent, reactive and ineffective. Totally the opposite of what we actually want to be doing.
A well-crafted marketing plan:
- Aligns you and/or your team on clear goals and objectives
- Helps you allocate budgets and resources effectively
- Provides a structured way to measure success and optimise the efforts you put in
But the trick isn’t just writing the plan… it’s making it something your team can realistically execute and track.
Step One: Set your goals – and ensure they are clear and achievable
This is the time to set your expectations while also thinking about what is actually realistic? Say goodbye to vague goals and instead, adopt the SMART method – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely.
We love the SMART method, and so do our clients. It’s the time we’re clear with our goals and we also share what is actually realistic to achieve within the timeframe we’re given. For example:
- Increase our Instagram followers by 10% within three months
- Generate 10 leads per month through social media advertising
- Develop 6 SEO-rich blogs for our website over the next quarter.
You get the point.
Step Two: Define your target audience
This isn’t new news for you – especially if you’ve followed us for a while now. Identify your ideal customers by outlining these three key insights:
- Demographics (age, location, income, job role, gender (if relevant))
- Their interests, pain points and motivations
- Buying behaviors (where and how they consume content)
There’s various analytic tools you can also use to really define and understand your audience too, such as Meta Insights and Google Analytics.
Step Three: Get your content into order
The content you choose to put out into the universe is really what drives a major part of your marketing plan. This is where you should think about:
- What kind of content are you going to share? Videos? Blogs? Regular posts on social media?
- What are their purposes? Are you trying to entertain? Explain something? Share some insider information about you and your business?
- How often are you going to post? There’s no right answer here other than to be consistent.
- Your tone of voice needs to be aligned with every bit of content you produce and importantly, ensure it aligns with your brand too!
- Finally, your content pillars. These are essentially your themes that you use throughout your content consistently and are basically the foundation of your content. These really do make life so much easier (trust us, we know the time it saves by implementing these across all our clients!).
Step Four: Don’t forget your budget
Budget plays an important role in your marketing plan because it really determines what you can do and how much you can invest across your marketing platforms (which you’ll read more about in the next and final step).
The key things to consider include:
- The resources you pay for vs find for free. In this day and age, there’s so many options! Free tools that you can access include Canva, Google Analytics, Mailchimp’s free plan.
- Affordable paid advertising tools to help you optimise and make informed decisions including Meta Ads, SEMrush, email automation software
- Outsourced vs. in-house tasks. Would it be beneficial to hire an agency that takes on 1-2 components of your marketing plan or would it be better to try and build an internal team? Are there things you can take on without overloading yourself?
Step Five: Choose the right marketing platforms
Not all platforms are created equal. Focus on channels where your audience is most active, but also one that you’re familiar with:
- SEO & Blogging: Great for long-term traffic and authority-building
- Social Media: Ideal for engagement and brand awareness
- Email Marketing: A must for nurturing leads and repeat customers
- Google Ads & Paid Social: Best for lead generation and growing your revenue
Pssssst… Unsure on how to begin with any of the above? That’s where we come in.
