While a good business plan and access to capital are strong predictors of a business’ chances of success, they may not be the most essential elements to sustain a company. The best product in the world won’t sell if customers don’t realize that it exists, think that they need it or know where to get it.
That’s where your marketing strategy comes in. It directs your efforts and budget to foster growth. Trying to market a brand without a plan is like throwing spaghetti at the wall. It might stick, but you aren’t sure why it does, and you don’t know how to replicate the success.
Some of the top reasons that businesses fail include an insufficient understanding of the target market, poor internet presence and inadequate marketing. You can address these issues with a well-directed marketing strategy that grows with your business, and to help you do that, we have this marketing team plan and objectives template to get you started.
What Is the Objective of a Marketing Plan?
Marketing is a strategy to encourage customers to purchase from you. It involves a great deal of psychology. To be effective, your marketing activities must demonstrate that your product or service will solve a specific problem that your customer has.
Creating the Problem to Solve: The Case of Marketing Antiperspirant
Antiperspirant became popular as a result of persuasive and effective advertising. Odorono, a new brand of antiperspirant, wasn’t selling as well as its founder had expected.
Market research revealed that many potential customers knew about the product. However, they didn’t think that they needed it. It was common to sweat through your clothes on a hot day. People thought of it as a fact of life instead of a problem. Odorono advertisers had to create the problem. They launched an advertising campaign that framed body odor as something stinky and offensive. It was a source of embarrassment because even if you didn’t think you smelled bad, people were likely talking about you behind your back.
Bringing up social mortification was the way to do it. Although the advertisements were controversial and caused a negative public reaction, sales of the antiperspirant soared.
Understand Why People Buy
Your ideal customer is not always walking around wondering what they can spend their money on. But they may be wondering how they can eliminate a particular problem from their life. It’s your job to step in and answer that question.
To do so effectively, your market research should analyze the troubles and difficulties that your target customers complain about. When you can answer the following questions in your target market’s own words, you will have resources to draw on when crafting the language and emotional pull of your marketing strategy:
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What do they dream about?
- What are their goals?
- How do they usually pursue their goals? What gets in the way?
- What is important to them?
- What do they hate?
- What are your target customers’ biggest pain points?
- How do they usually solve their problems?
- What obstacles do they face when meeting their needs or solving their problems?
Marketing Objectives Keep You Focused
Your marketing strategy will be propelled by the knowledge of your potential and current customer base. Everything that you create should reflect the answers to the questions above.
The following are some examples of marketing objectives that also help you direct your strategy:
- Improve brand awareness – This is a never-ending need that can be implemented in a general sense or for the launch of a new product or service.
- Increase customer acquisition – Gathering leads is one of the first steps in a successful sales funnel; use additional marketing strategies to nurture those leads and persuade them to buy.
- Increase website traffic – If you build it, they won’t come unless they can find it; website traffic gives you a chance to capture leads and convert potential customers into buyers.
- Boosting sales – This strategy involves increasing revenue from current offerings.
- Increasing market share – Campaigns to increase authority, boost your reputation, understand the competition and strengthen relationships with customers help to heighten your market share.
- Reducing lost sales and customer turnover – An abandoned shopping cart is a missed conversion; strategic marketing team planning can enhance customer loyalty and keep them clicking through.
- Increasing positive reviews – Your reputation is important, and positive reviews establish your authority and reputation in the industry.
What Is the Objective of a Marketing Team?
How are you going to reach your marketing objectives? A marketing team is responsible for developing and implementing the strategies that will get you there.
Some of the most essential roles and objectives involved in marketing team planning include:
- Conducting data analysis
- Researching market trends
- Analyzing the customer profile
- Developing a consistent brand image
- Setting marketing plan objectives
- Developing and monitoring marketing channels
- Coordinating efforts with sales teams
- Managing social media campaigns
- Maintaining the website and newsletters
Marketing team planning should address two to three marketing objectives at a time. You may revise your plan monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or yearly.
How Do You Write an Objective for a Marketing Plan?
Using SMART goals to design a marketing plan allows you to see the big picture as you’re working on the details. This strategy involves breaking down large objectives into smaller tasks.
(Use our SMART goals worksheet template to get started.)
For example, most companies’ main objective is to increase sales, revenue and profitability. This goal can be broken down into multiple avenues. You have to analyze your current sales and marketing data to decide where to focus your efforts.
If you don’t have many followers or leads, you should place more emphasis on brand awareness and lead generation than conversions. On the other hand, if you have plenty of leads, you can focus on persuasion techniques that encourage these potential customers to place an order.
You may be wondering, “How do you write a marketing objective for a marketing plan?” Here are some quick tips:
- Base your objectives off of your research.
- Make sure that your goals are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based.
- Use numbers in your goals – by how much do you want to increase sales? How many leads do you expect one marketing campaign to bring in?
- Each objective should correlate with a detailed strategy for achieving it.
How Do You Write a Marketing Plan Outline?
A marketing plan outline should address your business’ most pressing needs. At the same time, it should contain a strategy to maintain and grow your current offerings. In other words, you can’t neglect your core customers and products while you’re focusing on the launch of a new service.
Think of the marketing plan outline as a high-level view of the business and the promotional strategies that will boost its success. Your plan should include the following categories:
- Business summary – Your mission statement and the names and bios of the marketing leadership team
- SWOT analysis – The company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (you can use our SWOT analysis template to get your started)
- Business initiatives – A situational analysis, including a list of goals, plans to achieve those goals and metrics for tracking success
- Target market analysis – Includes the industries that you’ll target, buyer personas and competitive analysis
- Market strategy – A general summary of your offerings, including price, promotional strategies, staff involved in marketing team planning and process for promoting and selling
- Marketing tools – List of the channels, resources and technology that you will use for your campaigns
- Budget – List of each marketing expense and its estimated cost
Tips for Writing a Solid Marketing Plan Outline
You can pull a great deal of this information from documents that your company already uses, such as a style guide, look book or business plan. Some other tips that you can use to write an effective marketing plan are as follows:
- Have a clear picture of what you want to do, why you want to do it and who you want to do it for.
- Use historical data to craft a situational analysis and determine your strengths and weaknesses.
- Take time to do a competitor analysis and evaluate your competition’s performance and market share.
- Get specific when imagining your target customer profiles; describe their hobbies, values, desires and demographic information.
- Consider all of your options for marketing channels, including publicity, viral marketing, unconventional PR, speaking engagements, online and offline events, community building, content marketing, SEO, paid advertisements and community building.
- Use a marketing planning template to shape your ideas and create a professional document.
What Is a Marketing Plan Format?
Creating a marketing plan in a professional format has multiple benefits. It creates a straightforward expression of the company’s vision and allows employees in various departments to be on the same page. A clear business plan also shows investors and partners that you’re serious and focused when it comes to growing the brand.
Compiling the information into the proper format makes your marketing plan easy for anyone to read and comprehend. A comprehensive marketing plan should be several pages long. You can create a second version that combines the information in a brief, easy-to-scan document.
What Is a Marketing Plan Template?
Using a marketing planning template can help you organize your thoughts as you strategize and implement campaigns. It not only provides you with the formatting but also gives you details and examples of the specific information that you should insert into each category. The marketing plan template cuts out the guesswork so that you can focus on your business.
The best marketing planning templates include the headers for a comprehensive strategy. They include instructions for adding the details that are relevant to your business.
You may notice that marketing planning templates provide space for you to identify key progress indicators, or KPIs. These are essential for making sure that your strategies are effective. Identifying the KPIs that you are going to focus on for each objective gives you a framework for recording the data.
Your marketing plan template is not set in stone. You can adapt it to fit your business needs. You may also change it as you track and measure the results of your strategies. If something is not working, alter the strategy so that it is better aligned with your marketing objectives.
After you have completed your marketing plan, you can use it as a benchmark for your marketing campaigns. As you come up with specific promotional strategies, make sure that they meet the objectives that you set up in your plan. If they don’t, they may need to be adapted or shelved as you prioritize the elements that are going to optimize your success.