How to Create The Best Marketing Plan [Step-by-Step Strategy] | Part 1

It is time for you to create the best marketing plan with this complete step-by-step strategy.

This video is part 1 of 3 in the series, and I cover the first two steps that you need to take to create the best marketing plan.

Step 1: You’ll learn in detail about the term “Two-Pager”, plus you’ll find a corresponding template for you to use.

Step 2: I explain how to identify your target customer’s persona, referred to as “Buyers Persona”, and how to use and interpret this information when creating your marketing plan.

Continue onto video PART 2 to hear all about Steps 3 and 4 about “High-level Product Launch Timeline” with corresponding templates.

Watch PART 3 to hear more about promotion channels, the key initiatives and the budget.

As a B2B Marketing Consultant, Author and Speaker, I focus on helping marketers to build marketing and sales alignment. I also help global companies tailor their marketing to a local audience. In addition to my YouTube Channel, I also write blog posts and own my podcast. Check out blog posts and podcast episodes and subscribe to Apple Podcast.

Want to see how I can help you? Schedule a call with me. Let’s talk.

TRANSCRIPT

Today I want to talk about a marketing plan. What can you do in a very easy and constructive way?

Hey, Pam dinner here. I’m a B2B Marketing consultant, speaker and author of three books. I struggled with marketing plans when I started, and over time, I learned and developed step by step process that you can follow to develop a solid marketing plan. That’s what I want to talk about today.

So let’s get started with seven key elements of a marketing plan.

The number one is what you want to accomplish as a part of your marketing plan, a two-pager that you need to align and rally everybody. And also, if you present this to the management, this other two-pager will guide them. It’s like an executive summary. Does that make sense? You can share it with them before you get started and dive into the details. And what is the business goal? What is the business objective?

Once you have these two, you must align that with the marketing objective and strategy. Right? Chances are there are many goals. There are many objectives. If that’s the case, you might have multiple marketing objectives and strategies, which is fine. But right here is basically one slide to show your management how the company’s goals and objectives align with your marketing objectives and strategies.

And I want to share with you a quick example right here.

Business goals are revenue, segment, share, or even growth percentage. Whatever you want to do as a business goal, write that down. And also specific objectives. Why does your product or services exist in a wide, high-level, overarching vision that you want to help your customers? Here is one example of a business objective, empower our customers to make superior decisions by delivering end-to-end, you know, blah, blah, blah, software solutions, right?

So, our software solution will empower our customers to make decisions. You can explain specifically what those decisions are in your objective as you see fit. Then once you have the business goals and objectives, you can start writing your marketing objectives, which are establishing your company as a thought leader, or you are building brand awareness and a driving demand blah, blah, blah, blah, that makes sense.

So starting from goals, business objective, right now your marketing objectives from there, you write on strategies, the strategies are how, what are the specific initiatives or the steps, not necessarily a tactical level, the specific initiatives that you want to do to accomplish your objectives.

So right here, I wrote down five, we need actually to have a thought leadership content, and we need to have the plan to syndicate that right.

We also need to support launches, and we are also going to launch and integrate marketing automation and CRM tool. So write them down regarding what you will do at the high-level strategies high-level house. You need to identify the buyer’s persona, make sure everybody is on the same page, and tell your sales teams you will see the VPs and say these are the people we will be marketing to. Are you okay with that? This is my recommendation.

Then, if your company markets across multiple countries, you need to identify the priority countries and the specific tactics you will use. And how are you going to measure the success of the marketing efforts, then that’s talking about what are the specific persona that you want to go after it tends to be title related, you know, while the people who are the decision-makers you want to go after actually to reach out to them and then the targeted countries if you have targeted countries identified chances are you have a headquarters when you are in a headquarters, and you have geography so country you work with, can you also write on a high-level tactic or tasks that they need to do?

Lastly, is a KPI. How are you going to measure your success?

Is the number of leads, the PR impressions, or a certain percentage of your contribution to sales revenue? So whatever that is, make sure that you make that very clear. This is a very important part of a marketing plan. You put in much upfront and communicate that with your management. So These are what I call two pagers. Put everything upfront to share that with your management.

Number two is to whom do you market? Right? Who is your buyers’ persona? If you’re on the b2b side, many companies already have a buyers persona, the persona FIDE the buyers and give this person or segment of customers a specific name. And they understand what they do and how they make the purchase. Right? So you create it, say, a specific persona, a specific summary, and share that with your management and say – Hey, these are the people. We understand them well.

These are the people that we want to market to them. Talk about their goals and challenges, and help your management understand how they will help you and guide your marketing plan, your editorial plans or the content you’re going to create. How many personas should you include in your marketing plan? That has a lot to do with your budget.

How much budget do you have? Many of us have a finite budget and resources, and we cannot market to everybody.

We don’t have that kind of money to market to everybody. So it would be best if you were very, very specific. And in general, about two to three personas. And that’s the most you can do regarding the marketing budget that people have. But if you want to make it more or your management has specific requests or focus on what persona they want to go after, that’s a discussion between you and management. Does that make sense? So the number of personas has much to do with your budget and resources. Hey, you just finished watching the first two elements of making the best marketing plan.

Which step is most helpful? The two-pager or the buyer’s persona, so watch part two of the series. I will be talking about a step number three and four. If you find this video helpful, please click like – that will help this video to get in front of more marketers. As I said, stick around for part two. And if you liked the videos like this, please subscribe and click on the notification bell so you will get new videos like this in the future. So take care. Bye bye