If you have answered no to these questions, or if you are not clear about the answer to any of them, you urgently need to plan. Now is the time to put your marketing plan into action.
How can a marketing plan help you?
?
The most common situation for the development of a marketing plan is usually the beginning of the year, when a new strategic plan to implement over the course of the months is marked. But it can also be helpful if you want to launch a new product or service, or enter a new market.
{{cta(‘bb2971b9-bf36-4c36-8edc-75223dba5208’)}}
In either case, a marketing plan will set the path for your technology company to follow. Regardless of whether you are a start-up or not, this plan is a report that you should make to set goals, choose the means, determine what your resources are and justify the tactics based on a budget.
The marketing plan will be, among other things, very useful to define your brand identity; to attract new customers and build customer loyalty; and to improve your company’s sales. Because in a sector like technology, where competition is growing every day, you have to be prepared to face changes. And that is why it is necessary to prepare a detailed document where the necessary information to anticipate them is collected.
This plan must be a detailed document where the necessary information to anticipate them is collected.
This plan should be the result of a thorough research that will help your marketing team and your sales team to meet your objectives. Because at the end of the day, the objectives are common and these teams must be committed to achieving them together. In short, it is a useful and structured guide that any worker in your company (even more new ones) can access.
.
How to create your own marketing plan
.
Any marketing plan, especially for your technology company, should contain the following sections:
1.
1. Company information
.
The basic information about your company should always appear in your marketing plan. It may seem obvious to always include this information, but if you use a template you will not have to change this section continuously and it is a reference when, for example, a new worker must get up to speed quickly or if you must outsource some work.
2. Situation analysis
.
Your company’s mission, your value proposition, your target market (for a general or specific marketing campaign), your strengths and weaknesses, your main competitors… These are some of the examples you should take into account when analyzing the current market situation.
Threats and Opportunities (the external factors).
So, what should you take into account?
What should you take into account?
- Information related to economic, political and cultural data in your sector that will allow you to assess how it is going to evolve or what the consumption trend will be.
- Information related to the image of your company, your products or services, your positioning on the network, your reputation, the demand for what you offer.
- Information related to the image of your company, your products or services, your positioning on the network, your reputation, the demand for what you offer.
- Information regarding your main competitors and your indirect competitors to assess how to position yourself and differentiate your products and/or services.
- Information that allows you to define your target audience, both sociodemographic and psychosocial characteristics that allow you to know how they will behave (what their expectations and motivations will be) when consuming what your company offers.
3. Targeting
Determination of objectives
.
Do you know your medium and long-term goals for each of your channels? In this section you must establish what your objectives will be for this plan based on the communication channels you are going to use in the strategy. It is essential that the objectives you set are realistic and measurable in order to be able to analyze their evolution.
To do so, think that the objectives must be SMART:
- Specific: specific for each channel and taking into account what needs to be achieved.
- Mesurable: measurable, for which you have to include quantities or percentages.
- Achievable: achievable, so they have to be realistic and based on previous data.
- Relevant: relevant to the plan, no need to invest more resources and time needed.
- Time-based: with a set date to evaluate the evolution and implement necessary changes.
4. Strategy development
.
This is the core of every marketing plan. The tactics that you will follow and implement in each of the channels must be defined in your marketing plan. These strategies must be based on the objectives that your company intends to achieve.
These strategies will be the ones that, according to each channel, will allow you to gain more traffic, but more importantly, will allow you to achieve more conversions with which to gain potential customers and final sales. In this case, you must be more specific in your strategies as the more general actions have been carried out. But remember that all actions must fit your budget, so you must assess which channels are the main ones, which are secondary.
Which channels are the main ones, which are secondary.
When developing strategies, you must take into account what type of audience they are aimed at, since they will be more or less effective based on the characteristics of your target. In this case, you can use segmentation to focus your efforts on specific niches.
5. Setting budgets
Based on your budget and the strategies you have considered necessary to achieve your objectives, you will often have to go back to the previous step. For this reason, it is important to define which channels are priorities and which channels are more expendable. In some cases, you will even have to rethink some strategies and objectives, so these must be realistic and achievable.
6. Control methods
.
It is important to keep track of the established plan, otherwise, it would be useless. Control allows you to know to what degree you are meeting your objectives and how effective your strategies are. Without monitoring and analysis, you will not be able to detect the failures in your plan, but neither will you be able to detect the successes.
Philip Kotler in his book Marketing Management sets out a fantastic chart that can be of great help in establishing a control process
.
All in all, for a campaign to be effective, you have to analyze the effectiveness of the content. Before you start the process all over again, make sure it’s working well. This is the only way your technology company will be able to improve.
