Top Questions to Help You Develop A Strong Marketing Plan

In the previous article on the importance of a marketing plan, we defined a marketing plan as a detailed operational document that outlines your marketing or advertising strategy to generate leads for the coming month, quarter, or year.

To create and establish an effective marketing plan that will help you identify your ideal target market, attract the right audience and develop a loyal following, you need to answer some important questions – questions you need to consider in building a solid marketing plan.

Below are some questions to guide and give you some clarity on the areas you need to cover before you get started on creating your marketing plan:

Question 1: Do you know your products or services?

You can’t buy a product you don’t trust, right? Likewise, you can’t sell a product you aren’t intimate with. To effectively market your product or service, you need to have an intimate understanding of your product/service and be able to articulate every part of your product. You should be the number 1 expert knowing all that your product/service offers and stand for. You should know:

• What your product is
• How it works
• How much it cost
• What the packaging looks like
• What the benefits of the product are
• What challenges the product addresses
• What the product guarantees the consumer

You’ll need to answer these questions to test your knowledge of your product and be able to very well convince your potential customers to patronise you over your competitors.

Question 2: Who is your target audience?

In marketing, you aren’t talking to anyone if you’re trying to talk to everyone. You need to know who you are trying to reach if you want to create a marketing plan that will work effectively and bring in more money to your business. Targeting in marketing is a strategy that focuses on a particular group of people (consumers) who are most likely to want your product or service. These are the people who should see your ad campaigns – the people you want to reach through your social channels.

Targeting breaks down a large segment of people into smaller units so that you can focus on a specific group of customers. These are some insights that will help you create your target audience:

• Demographics: age, gender, education, marital status, religious beliefs, physical location, and other key information 
• Psychographics: values, beliefs, interests, opinions, personality, lifestyle, etc
• Geographics: city, region, neighborhood, country, country, etc.
• Behaivourals or activity: purchasing or spending habits, user status, brand interactions, types of content they consume, etc

Things will begin to fall in place when you’re able to define your target market.

Question 3: Do you have a mission statement?

A mission statement is the foundation of your marketing plan, and an effective marketing plan starts with a clearly defined mission. A mission statement describes the needs your product was created to fulfill; it provides a pathway for how your marketing plan should fulfill the mission; ensures marketing decisions are in alignment with the mission and provides an incentive to implement the marketing plan.

A mission statement should consist of the following elements:

• Purpose: The purpose of the existence of the business
• Values and culture: business principles, loyalty, and commitment, etc
• Strategy and strategic scope: Geography, market, business method, product, etc
• Policies and standards of behaivour: Positive or negative customer feedback, customer services, etc

Question 4: Is your content consistent?

If your content is not consistent, your customers will be confused about what your brand stands for. In a highly competitive market, consistent marketing is a way great way to grab the attention of your consumers and keep them glued to your product. Amidst the many factors that contribute to the effectiveness and success of a marketing plan, consistent content stands as king.

Can your target audience recognise your message in a noisy saturated market? Do you regularly post on your social media accounts and other mediums to inform your target audience of your products? It has been proven that consistent, high-quality engaging content is responsible for the decisions customers make.

Question 5: What mediums should you use?

Email marketing (newsletters and promotional campaigns), SEO, billboards, content marketing, newspapers, social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) are various channels you can use to connect with your target audience, boost brand engagement, generate new leads, drive sales, grow revenue, build a community around your business, build your brand and raise its awareness.

With these mediums, you can tell your brand story, influence conversations, and get to connect to your audience through social listening.

The good news is that these mediums, excluding newspapers and billboards, are totally free! So start publishing your content making use of these free mediums.

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