Ensure business growth in 2020 with an effective marketing plan

Is your business ready to take on 2020? With a new year just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to shake things up when it comes to marketing for your business. An essential tool to ensure business growth is to have a marketing plan with annual objectives that clearly outline a roadmap on how to achieve success, stay competitive in your industry and ensures your marketing strategy is aligned to your overarching business objectives for the year ahead.

If you’re unsure on how to put a marketing plan together or are time poor and don’t have the resources, work with a marketing agency to help get you on track and hit the ground running in 2020.

Clear goals and objectives keep the focus

A marketing plan is a great way to set clear goals and objectives for the months ahead. Understanding your goals and devising a strategy to reach your target audience, allows you to form a coherent plan that enables every aspect of your business to work together towards certain goals and objectives.

Here are some examples of clearly defined marketing objectives:

• Grow e-commerce revenue by 20% by December 2020 via a multi-channel marketing strategy focused on lead generating activities.
• Achieve page 1 search engine rankings for selected keywords by end of December 2020 through implementing a tailored SEO strategy.
• Establish business within a new industry segment and achieve 10% total revenue from new market segment by raising awareness of product offering to customers and new prospects through targeted marketing communications such as campaigns.

It’s important that any objective set for your business can be measured, this allows you to track performance throughout the year and be responsive with your marketing strategy to ensure business growth and success.

Establish your industry position

By completing an industry analysis, it will give you a strong idea of your position within your industry and in relation to your competitors. Scoping out the competition will give you an idea on how you compare with their product offering, who they’re targeting and how they engage with target audiences. This helps identify any opportunities for growth or risk based on the current market. It will also help you identify any new trends in the industry so you can be proactive with your planning.

Once you have determined your position in the market, it’s vital to review your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) message and statement. A UVP message succinctly outlines clearly what your business delivers and the resulting benefit. Your UVP statement is the key messaging that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer’s needs and who you are servicing.

Get to know your audience

Drawing up a marketing plan is essential in understanding the behaviour of your potential customers.  A good marketing plan features profiles of the ideal customers for a business, we call these “ideal client avatars”. This breaks down your target audience and includes information about their demographics, personality, goals and values and outlines their challenges and frustrations. Enabling you to build a deeper understanding of your target market and their buying drivers. It also provides you with the opportunity to tailor your messages so they get your audience’s attention and they can relate to.

Multi-channel marketing mix 

To effectively reach your target audience using a multi-channel marketing mix is key, as each customer or prospect consumes obtains content differently, this allows you to implement a single strategy across multiple platforms.

A marketing plan should outline the key marketing activities required to support the marketing strategy. The objectives will be delivered via an investment into a combination of tailored marketing channels. These channels may include:

Get a stronger ROI from budgeting

Did you know that marketing drives revenue growth for over 38% of companies? By planning ahead and creating a marketing plan, a realistic budget can be applied. This ensures the goals and marketing activities selected are achievable, outlines which marketing activities need to be prioritised and enables you to keep track of your marketing spend.

Once marketing has commenced, it’s important that the activities are regularly monitored, and the performance of each deliverable is analysed so that informed decisions can be made about the marketing strategy. Looking at the metrics will help guide which activity is performing well and which areas need to be reviewed and adapted. This ensures you will yield a stronger return on investment, as you are adapting and being agile with what is working and what isn’t for your business.

Need a stellar marketing plan for 2020 but not sure where to start? Optimum Marketing is a marketing agency based in Melbourne and we work with you to deliver tailor-made marketing plans based on your desired business objectives. Take a look at our marketing strategy services here.

Form more information email info@optimummarketing.com .au or call 1330 225 183.