At Zynk30, it’s no secret that we help our clients to develop marketing plans and strategies that allow them to reach their goals when it comes to finding leads, selling products, and closing deals.
But the lesser-known fact is that not all marketing plans are created equal.
Some marketing plans are better than other marketing plans.
Our expert marketers are focused on building high-quality plans for our clients.
Here are just a few of the strategies that we use when carefully crafting marketing plans.
Analysis of your current situation.
Self-awareness is the cornerstone of the ability to sell stuff.
If you don’t understand how your business is doing right now from a marketing standpoint, it’s going to get really hard to implement new strategies.
We will walk you through our proposed marketing plan after analyzing data and making a professional assessment of your current situation. We want to help your business grow and succeed, and it all starts with the marketing plan.
The marketing plan starts with where you are now.
Any plan to improve at anything requires a strong understanding of what currently needs to be improved. You can’t improve things that you don’t understand.
Establish your core values.
Without having core values, it’s going to be really tough to build a marketing plan.
For example, it’s important to create social media content and other pieces of copywriting for your marketing effort, but what do you want to say? What sort of story do you want to attach to your brand?
What do you want your brand to be known for?
This sounds like a deep, existential question, but marketing plans aren’t that complicated.
Your business should stand for something, and we want to help you find that thing and then establish goals, content, and other marketing efforts around the ethos of your company.
Values don’t have to be complicated, but they are an essential driving force behind a strong marketing plan.
Marketing plans are tough, but they’re real tough if you don’t know who you are.
Set specific goals.
Goals are good, specific goals are better.
This is true in life and business, but it’s especially true in marketing, and here’s why:
Marketing efforts are very specific responses to specific problems. If you want to build a better social media presence, you need to learn about social media platforms and create markers that will help you identify progress on your goals.
The same is true for email marketing.
It’s the same for SEO.
You can’t just post photos on Instagram or LinkedIn and expect them to go viral.
In fact, you probably don’t even really want to go viral, but that’s a conversation for another day.
The point is, you can’t set out to win a race without first learning how to tie your shoes. You can’t sell a product without understanding the micro-goals that have to be reached en route to selling that product.
Micro-goals are the first steps on the road to macro successes.
Establish a target market.
Who do you want to buy your widget?
“Everyone” is actually the wrong answer. It’s also a lofty goal to chase.
Don’t believe us? Try to sell diapers to people in their early 20s. You’re going to have a really hard time.
This doesn’t mean that no one in their early 20s will ever buy a diaper, but it does mean that the average customer for a diaper customer is not a college student or a recent high school graduate.
One of the most important parts of having a marketing plan is understanding the type of people that you’re trying to sell to. Establishing a buyer persona (we’ll talk more about this some other time) and creating a target market based on your core values (mentioned above) is a crucial part of preparing to market your product.
Understand your competition.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to hate the people who are competing against you in a business effort.
However, you do have to get to know them a little bit.
This is a requirement for understanding how your own marketing plan is going to work.
If you’re Pepsi, you best know everything there is to know about Coke. If you’re Target, learn about Walmart. If you’re the barbershop on 3rd street, learn about the barbershop on 5th street.
This doesn’t mean you have to curse your competition and hate their very existence, but you can learn a lot from people who are in the same industry as you.
They probably know something you don’t, and vice versa.
That’s all a part of the learning process.
Closing Thoughts
At Zynk30, we’ve been working for years with clients on all different aspects of marketing efforts.
We’re in the business of marketing, but really, we’re in the business of telling stories and helping our clients to tell their stories. Businesses exist to solve problems, and those its powerful, relatable stories that help businesses become better at promoting and selling their products.
We don’t want to help you make your products “more attractive”, we want to help you make them irresistible.
These are just a few of the marketing strategies that we use to help our clients build marketing plans that not only help them build brand awareness but also attract leads, and sell their products and services.
In summary, we don’t just want to create marketing plans, we want to create the most effective marketing plans possible, and doing that requires:
- An analysis of your brand’s current marketing effort.
- An understanding of your brand’s core values.
- Specific marketing goals.
- Establishing a target market.
- Understanding your competition.
If you got something out of this article, feel free to share it or contact us with feedback!
To learn more about our marketing services, follow this link.
Hopefully, this article has helped to clear up some of the confusion surrounding marketing plans.