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Create a marketing plan in seven simple steps

Help improve your return on investment and maximise your time and resources by developing a marketing plan you can stick to.

4 minute read

With so many ways to get your message out to your customers (social media, direct selling, content marketing, webinars, print media, TV, radio, and online advertising to name a few) it can be helpful to have a strategic plan in place to ensure you’re maximising your marketing resources. Follow these steps to help you meet your sales and marketing goals.

1. Identify your target market

By understanding who you’re trying to target and splitting this into clearly defined segments, you can help make sure you’re channeling money and resource into the right places. Having different audiences lets you customise your messaging and the channels you use to talk to them, which helps make sure you get an efficient return on investment.

If your targeting is too wide, it’s likely you’ll get some wastage from your marketing and advertising. If it’s too tightly defined, your audience may be too small to target. Some of the elements you can use to define your target audience are:

• age
• location (work or home)
• occupation
• salary
• number of employees
• marital status
• interests and hobbies.

Some examples

• Female professionals, single, aged 20-30, earning over $100,000 per year, living in Auckland city.
• Owner-operator tradies in Canterbury with under five employees.
• Retired couples, keen gardeners, aged 70+, living in their own home in Tauranga.

It may help to review your customer records and accounting data to see what information you currently have on your customer and use that to create your audiences. This might also help you to define who your most valuable customers are so you can focus more budget and resource on finding them.

2. Define your customer behaviours

Carry out research into your target customer segments to discover what marketing channels they interact with. This lets you target your messaging better and maximise your advertising budget.

Here are some ways you can find out this information:

• Look at referral traffic to your website to see how customers discovered your products and services.
• Look at social media insights to see what interests your customers have.
• Run a focus group with key customers.
• Conduct a survey.

3. Set your objectives

Start by listing what your business objectives are, then tailor your marketing objectives to them so you’re clear on what you’re trying to achieve and why. For example:

Business objective:

• Increase overall revenue by 10%.

Marketing objectives which could help to achieve this could be:

• increase online sales by 10%
• grow newsletter subscriptions by 20%
• increase awareness of x product or service.

4. Develop tactics

Now you know who you’re targeting, what your business objectives are, and how marketing could support this, it’s time to consider how you’re going to reach your target market to get the outcome you desire. Taking the retired Tauranga couple in step one as an example, you could:

• join the local bowling clubs and advertise in their newsletter
• trial targeted advertising on Facebook
• collaborate with complementary businesses targeting the same demographic
• find a list of local relevant events and sponsor with a call to action.

Fit the tactics to your target, for example, spending money on social media and search engine results makes sense if your target market is active online.

There will always be outliers, but if there are enough customer types to create a viable market, then it’s probably worth your efforts.

5. Develop a timeline

It can be helpful to break down your marketing activity into key promotional areas, so it’s easier to track what activity has had the biggest impact on your business. By planning in advance, you’re also more likely to deliver the strategy you’ve worked towards.

Seasonality might also be key for your business or important in your target market’s sales patterns, so mapping out your activity based on these trends will help you maximise your budget.

6. Work out a budget

Determine how much it will cost for all of your promotional ideas, assign a budget for each activity, then add these numbers into your 12-month cash flow plan. For each tactic, calculate what level of sales you need to cover your costs by completing an advertising break-even. An example: if you spend $10,000 on a promotional idea and your gross profit on each sale is $1,000, then you’ll need ten sales to cover the advertising cost.

7. Evaluate your results

Take the time to measure which promotions have been the most effective. For some channels it might be hard to quantify, but for others it might be easier to track. For example, custom discount codes or referral traffic in Google Analytics or tracking call volumes. Then simply repeat what worked best and pause the tactics that didn’t.

Once you’ve completed your plan, regularly review each step each year. You may find new customers to target, new ways of reaching them and new tactics to adopt as technologies, needs. and wants change.

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This article is solely for information purposes and is not intended to be financial advice.  If you need help, please contact BNZ or your financial adviser. Neither BNZ nor any person involved in this article accepts any liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage arising out of the use of, or reliance on, all or any part of the content.