Creating a Strong Marketing Plan

Posted by Becky Bornstein on February 20th 2012 | 0 comments

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The key to an effective campaign is creative ideas facilitated by preparation and execution. No matter if you are working on a PR plan, social media plan or overall marketing plan, all of the essential components and fundamentals are the same. Below are the key components you will need to create a strong marketing plan.

1. Extensive research. Your first step should be research on the product, the brand, the company, the target consumer, the competition and of course an analysis of current metrics.
2. Do a SWAT analysis. This is a great tool because it evaluates the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). It’s easy to follow and explain to anyone at your company.
3. After doing the analysis, list out your objectives. Then list out your strategies and how you will complete them to meet your objectives.
4. Create a timeline to help you stay on track with your marketing plan. Create milestones that you can refer back to and make sure everything is being executed on time.
5. Don’t forget to measure. Create a list of things that you will be measuring, how they will be tracked and what the expected results are. This will help fine tune future plans.

As you can see most of the tactics above are pretty common. But a few of them tend to be forgotten such as measurement and the list of objectives. People usually go straight into the strategies and never list the objectives. It’s important to separate them out. And it’s important to always remember measurement tools so that you know how well you plan worked and what can be tweaked.

What other tactics would you add to the list above?

Photo courtesy of flickr