For any business, having a solid marketing plan is essential for its strategic development. The marketing plan outlines the resources the business needs to allocate meet the business objectives. However, as far as B2B marketing is concerned, writing a marketing plan can be a large undertaking. Nonetheless, it can be a great learning experience as it offers the opportunity to think about your business from a different perspective.
Following these simple yet practical strategies will help you write a compelling and effective marketing plan to grow your sales.
Step 1: Identify your marketing goals
The marketing goals for any business are derived from the business or strategic goals. For example, if you manufacture budget laptops, and planning to launch gaming laptops with backlit keyboards, then you need to determine what new set of customers are you going to target? Answers to these questions should help you formulate reasonable marketing plans. The more specific you can be in finding these answers the more useful your marketing plan is going to be. Grouping your goals into short, medium and long run goals can also help you measure progress and performance easily.
Step 2: List your target segment
A good marketing plan also has a clear focus. Many businesses lose focus because they start aiming for every potential customer with their service or product. Such an approach is bound to fail because no business can effectively satisfy every kind of customer. To write a successful marketing plan, you will need to identify a single target audience for your business. There are many ways to segment the market. You can choose to focus on clients within a certain region or city and direct your marketing efforts within that region. Another approach is to group potential customers by company size. This helps you direct your marketing efforts more efficiently and effectively.
Step 3: Devise an action plan
Marketing plans for B2B sales should list all of the steps in the form of an action plan. What are the tactics or steps that you will take to attain the goals identified in Step 1? Whether you have decided to start an email marketing program or send out service packages, you need to list every step. Each step becomes an action item against which you can measure progress and performance. It also helps you identify the specific work involved at each stage and whom to assign each task.
Step 4: Determine your marketing budget
The kind of marketing activities you will be able to undertake will depend largely on the budget that is available to you. It is important to get the budget approved as early as possible. This helps to avoid competition for funds with other departments later on. You should then allocate the budget to different marketing activities such as vendor payments, and so on. Be sure keep track of expenses to ensure that you stay on budget and do not overspend. If you anticipate additional expenses, get the additional budget approved in advance.
Step 5: Maintain consistency
No matter how detailed your plan is and how extensively you have carried out your research, there will be instances where new trends will emerge that will cause you to go back to the drawing board. This means that you must always focus on your marketing plan while scanning the environment. The entry of a new competitor or product in the market might require a change of strategy or product development. You will also need to maintain constant communication with your clients in order to prevent them from reaching out to your competitors or forgetting about your brand.
In Conclusion
In order to create a marketing plan, you have to focus your efforts on your customer, product and business goals. You can start one by writing a simple strategy statement and then building upon that as you acquire more information. Following the above tips will help you develop your first marketing plan, after which you can go on to develop more detailed and complex plans for your business. Businesses don’t need to worry if they lack professional marketing personnel within the business. Creating a marketing plan has more to do with studying your business and understanding how to reach out to your customers.
