What is a Marketing Plan?
Your business is off the ground, the lights are on, but how can you ensure that customers will walk in the door? There are many different advertising and marketing strategies one can utilize to attract business, whether it be social media, television and radio ads, billboards, and so on. But without a clear vision and goal, your marketing aspirations are almost certainly destined to die on the vine. In order to properly assess your success and correct missteps along the way, you need a marketing plan.
A clear and focused marketing plan is designed to foster and maintain customer loyalty and engagement, as well as capturing – and increasing – market share in your targeted audience. This is done by planning, implementing, and tracking marketing initiatives over a certain period of time. A marketing plan can organize these initiatives, create utilizable campaigns and the channels they will include, designate specific tasks to marketing staff, outline expected budgets, and project long-term goals of success.