As business owners, a marketing plan is essential to guide your marketing efforts and drive you to hit your goals. But creating one can get really complicated, especially if you’ve never created one before. You’re not familiar with marketing jargon and acronyms like SWOT and KPI. Not to sound too melodramatic but it can feel like you need an MBA in Marketing just to hit the ground running.
This is why we present you with our guide to creating a one-page marketing plan. But before creating the plan, we need to understand the basics.
Marketing plans vs strategy vs tactics vs objectives
A marketing plan is a guide for implementing your marketing strategy over a specific period of time (usually one year).
Although many people use the terms interchangeably, a marketing plan differs from marketing strategies, tactics and objectives. In fact, they have very different meanings. Here’s the simplest way to put it:
- Objective: What you want to achieve
- Strategy: What you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.
- Tactics: The methods you will employ.
- Plan: Everything is laid out so that you can act.
You might find it overwhelming to execute your strategy if you don’t have the plan. Your marketing plan explains how your marketing tactics work together to carry out your marketing strategy and meet your marketing goals.
How to create a one-page marketing plan
Creating a one-page marketing plan comes down to answering four simple questions. Let’s go over them one by one and how to respond to those questions.
1. Who are you targeting?
Before creating a marketing plan, you need to do some research on your market. After that you need to develop your marketing strategy. In other words, you need to know the audiences you’re targeting. Reiterate this in your marketing plan to keep you focused on track.
Consider the following example for a cleaning company:
“Commercial entities in need for cleaning services for their properties”
That simple version can get you easily to know who we’re targeting and help you stay on the right track.
2. What are your objectives?
Creating a marketing plan is intended to map out how you’ll (hopefully) achieve certain marketing objectives. So you need to identify your marketing objectives.
This is another bit of marketing jargon, SMART, that can help you understand easily but it’s quite straightforward and simply means that your goals should be:
Specific: Clearly stating the desired outcome.
Measurable: Having something you can track the success of.
Achievable: Being realistic.
Relevant: Aligning with your overall business objectives.
Timely: Having a time frame attached to them.
Consider these two examples:
- “Increase the number of sales”
- “Increase the number of sales from 10 to 20% in the next 12 months”
The first one is not clear at all. It lacks a time frame and isn’t measurable. On the other hand, the second one is more representative of SMART. It is more detailed, has a 12-month time frame and is easily measurable.
In general, having a few objectives, but no more than a few is preferable. You won’t get very far if you do anything less. You’ll end up spreading yourself too thin if you go any further.
3. How will you achieve your objectives?
You need to be specific by considering the tactics you will use to accomplish your marketing objectives and their costs so that you will be able to achieve your marketing objectives. Setting the goalposts is easy but scoring a goal is hard.
Always keep in mind that your tactics should be in line with your marketing strategy and objectives. Don’t just conjure them up out of thin air or rely on flashy new tactics. Consider whether tactics are compatible with your marketing strategy before moving further.
Consider the example of our simple marketing strategy at its core:
Providing informative and useful content about a hygienic life on company’s website and local business directories like GMB as parts of local SEO strategies.
Because the tactics you choose should always be dictated by your strategy, it’s obvious that any techniques we utilise will be content-related.
So what kind of tactics should you employ to achieve this objective?
From the given objective, there is really only one thing we can do here: local SEO and content marketing. However, if you truly want to develop an actionable marketing strategy for yourselves, you must be more specific by doing a bit of research.
You can use various SEO tools to do this, like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, etc. These tools will provide you with comprehensive information on how well your SEO efforts are performing. They will also give recommendations on how to fix SEO issues, if any.
One of the tactics you may employ to boost our organic search exposure is optimising the page by adding a heading on each content. By doing so, it will help to improve the on-page SEO. It is because a good page requires a good heading.
Using GMB attibutes also can help to boost the local SEO for local search presence. The more detailed a listing is with attributes, the more likely that listing could rank for a specific targeted search with an attribute modifier — for example, “one-stop-shop for all your cleaning needs” or “full home cleaning services”.
4. When will you do everything?
In a marketing plan, a specific period of time is covered. So the answer to this question may seem obvious. If you’re creating a year-long marketing strategy, then the tactics you outlined in the previous step have to be implemented in that timeframe.
While this is true, merely making a list of things to accomplish over the course of a year isn’t really useful. Breaking things down into manageable portions will allow you to track your progress throughout the year.
It’s up to you how much you break things down but a quarterly plan is a good place to start. If you find that only 20% of the keywords you target are ranking on the first page, then you need to intervene and optimise workflows to ensure you meet our objectives by the end of the year.
Moreover, you also can break down all the parts of your marketing plan into sections and determine what time frame each part should take. For example, if you want to create a new blog post for your company’s blog, it might take you an hour or two. You’ll want to think about how much time you have available each day or even week. If we’re talking about a weekly marketing plan and someone has 12 hours, they would only be able to work on the first four items on their list in a week. It’s important because if you’re working long hours at work or have other commitments during the day, then this is what your one-page marketing plan will look like for the week ahead of time.
Final takeaways
Considering the fact that most marketing plans run dozens or even hundreds of pages, our one-page marketing plan is admittedly way oversimplified. But that’s the point. It gets you started as quickly as possible without needing to deal with a lot of marketing jargon or acronyms.
Achieving marketing objectives for your business is one of the most important pieces to any successful campaign. While some may find themselves at a loss as to how to do this, it doesn’t have to be that difficult. In fact, you could even hire a digital marketing agency. It’s not always easy to know what your marketing objectives are, so get you a team of industry experts that is ready to help you tailor your marketing plan and make sure your objectives are achieved. Our experts have more than twenty years of experience in everything from website design and development to SEO and social media and content marketing. This ensures that we have the expertise necessary to provide your company with a comprehensive digital marketing strategy tailored specifically for your needs.
To find out how we can help you with your Website + Marketing, using our unique location marketing platform called Top4, get in touch today at www.top4marketing.com
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