How to create a marketing plan

If your financial year starts in April, there’s a reasonable chance your marketing plan is already in motion. Campaigns briefed, budgets allocated, content calendar in place. The train has left the station!

But what is that plan built on?

For a lot of businesses, the likely answer is that the plan was built on last year’s plan, with some adjustments for budget and a few new ideas added in. That’s understandable, there’s always pressure to have a plan ready, and building from scratch every year can be tough in a small business. The problem is that tactical marketing activity without a clear strategic foundation tends to produce results that are difficult to explain. Some things work, some don’t, it’s hard to know why, and the next planning cycle starts with the same uncertainty.

Strategy is what makes the difference. Not strategy as a dusty document or a presentation that gets read and filed away, but as a set of deliberate, actionable choices that determine where you play, who you’re talking to, and what you’re trying to build.

Start with diagnosis

Before any strategic choices are made, you need a clear picture of where you are. That means really understanding your customers, who they are, how they think about the category, what drives their decisions, and what your brand means to them today versus the competitors. It means understanding your competitive position. And it means establishing a baseline for your brand, what associations exist, how recognisable you are, what people think of when they think of you.

This isn’t research for the sake of it, it’s the baseline that informs everything that follows. Without it, you’re making strategic choices based on assumptions, which is a much more expensive way to be wrong.

Who are you talking to?

The segmentation and targeting question is one that many businesses answer too quickly and too narrowly.

Firstly look to segment. Determine your mass market, this is all of the people who could potentially buy your product. For example, if you are cosmetics brand for mature women in the UK, your sophisticated mass market is all women over 40 years old. You then need to segment this audience into smaller, manageable groups that share similar characteristics, behaviours, or needs. For example ‘career women’ or ‘active retirees’. Each segment should have a clear profile and size, so you know which one is most valuable to your brand now, and which one could represent the most value in the future.

Once you have your segments defined, you can target. At the brand level, you should be practising sophisticated mass marketing. Your brand building activity should reach the broadest relevant audience in your category, because mental availability is built through reach and frequency over time, not through hyper-targeted communications that only ever find people who are already thinking about buying.

At the product level, you’re getting specific. Which segments represent the most compelling opportunity right now? What are their particular needs, and how does your product address those needs better than the alternatives? This is where you get targeted, and where your communications can be more direct and conversion-focused.

Both levels matter. Conflating them, or only thinking about one, leads to a marketing mix that’s either too broad to convert or too narrow to build anything lasting.

Positioning: the strategic centre

Positioning sits at the heart of brand strategy, and it’s covered in more depth in a separate piece on this site. The short version is that your positioning is the single most important strategic choice you make. It’s the answer to why someone should choose you over the alternatives, held consistently over time. There should be brand level positioning and product level positioning (for your target segments).

Everything else in the strategy flows from it. Your creative territory, your channel choices, your tone of voice, your pricing architecture. If the positioning is clear, these decisions become significantly easier. If it isn’t, you’ll feel the friction in every subsequent conversation.

Set the right objectives

Marketing objectives are often where strategy goes wrong. They’re either too tactical (think follower counts), or too lofty (think category leadership) to be genuinely useful in guiding decisions.

The objectives that help are the ones that connect directly to business outcomes, are specific enough to be measurable, and are realistic given the budget and time horizon. A handful of focused objectives, with clear owners and a defined review cadence, will do more for your marketing than a long list of KPIs that nobody can keep track of.

Think about a football match. The manager doesn’t just tell the team to go and win the game. They look at the opponent, they look at the team they have, and they make choices on where they will focus their efforts during any individual game. Your marketing objectives should work the same way, specific, considered, and calibrated to the situation in front of you.

Try to align your objectives to your funnel, and look at them from both a brand and product perspective. For example, if your market research has told you that you have 25% unaided awareness, set your objective as ‘Increase unaided awareness from 45% to 55% by December’. Then on a product level, if your research has told you that one segment (running enthusiasts for the purpose of this example) has great unaided awareness of the brand but gets stuck in the funnel at consideration stage, choose something like ‘Increase consideration among the running enthusiast segment from 30% to 40% by December’.

The plan follows the strategy

Once the diagnosis is done, the targeting is clear, the positioning is set and the objectives are defined, only then should the tactical plan follow. Channels, content, campaigns, budget allocation. These decisions are much easier to make, and much easier to evaluate, when they’re anchored to something strategic.

If you simply start with the tactical plan, you end up committed to channels and formats before you’ve decided what you’re trying to achieve or who you’re really talking to. Optimising a plan like that is like adjusting the sails before you’ve decided where you’re going.

April is as good a time as any to pause and check the foundations. Not to rip everything up, but to make sure the activity you’ve committed to is genuinely pointing in the right direction. If it is, carry on with more confidence. If it isn’t, better to know now.

If you need help creating a strategic marketing plan for your business, get in touch.