Heard of a “DIY Strategic Marketing Plan?” Well, this 2020, you’ll know what it is and how you can implement it to be the brightest contender for March 2020 appraisal! Or, if you are starting on your entrepreneurship journey, may your marketing kickstart with your great leadership!
Table of Contents
DIY Strategic Marketing Plan for 2020
What is a Strategic Marketing Plan?
Once you have the product/service ready, it is time to chalk out a strategic marketing plan. A marketing plan as such establishes your marketing strategy that is agile enough to adjust to the demands of your business. This means that a plan is not evergreen; it evolves with time.
How to Design one?
Technically, it is the CMO with his senior marketing executives who design the strategic marketing plan according to the business objectives for a given year. Most of the time, big businesses outsource this task for bandwidth issues or for lack of market insights needed to draft a robust plan.
How can I Create a Strategic Marketing Plan?
To help you contribute confidently to your company’s marketing objectives, or draft a strategic marketing plan for your startup, we have created an 8-point checklist.
Goals & Objectives
To start with drafting a strategic marketing plan, brainstorm goals and objectives in tune with your overall business prerogative. Once you have the goal ready, cull out the objectives to measure the success of a goal. Notice that while a goal is a collective assessment of the objectives, objectives by themselves are to be individually assessed intermittently.
For example, you can have one annual goal and four supporting quarterly objectives. If your goal is to establish your social media eminence for 2020, figure the four objectives slated for each quarter. To successfully realize a goal, you continue with an objective even after you have built its premises during the focus period.
Situation Analysis
If you are an MBA student or a professional with good work experience, you are aware of the SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat) analysis. A SWOT analysis gives you an overview of your marketing performance. For example, during analysis, you may find out that your business is not very unique (weakness), but your strength is the market with no previous exposure to your service (strength).
During the analysis, you can see that similar market players with customer service, attract better sales (opportunity) while a decrease in GDP, could be a warning (threat) to a decline in demand over some time.
Messaging & Mission Statement
At any point in time, remember that a marketing strategy isn’t successful without consistent brand messaging and mission statement. Start with the necessary information and represent the information artfully, so it effortlessly describes and enhances your product/service’s brand positioning. For example, “Amul The Taste of India.” “The Taste” is such a broad parameter that it encapsulates all the products and emphasizes the taste “Amul.”
When your mission statement, PRs, and marketing materials resonate with the same message, you’ll know that your branding will take off right. Curious about the process? Here’s the lamp to rub for all the knowledge you’d need as a marketer.
Mark your Territory
This is something to be mindful of so that you know where to market your product/service. If your target audience is athletes or sportsmen, then offline branding would result in better ROI than online. How? Simply because sportsmen don’t languish on social media; they are mostly practising on the grounds.
It is important to have an agile strategy that can be molded for online communications. For example, Cricket fever in India is not only an offline epidemic but also online. Territory marking or broadly your area of promotion need due diligence before incorporating them into your marketing plan.
On your Timeline
Have you heard of a project management software o it already deployed at work? Great! With the help of project management software, you can manage a strict deadline. Whether it is your own company or you support some other company, having a schedule for the timely execution of projects is a leading trait among successful people.
It is a fact that our time estimation might not be perfect every time, and to accommodate that, factor in some extra hours. These extra hours are not a replacement for technical downtime unless you are likely to miss the deadline. Additional hours help review deliveries to have better control of anomalies.
Big Fat Budget?
It is a notion that until you have a big fat budget for your marketing, you are not able to do the best. The modern marketing plan is to reap the maximum from the minimum. Making a list of areas crucial for marketing activation will give you a clear runway for a takeoff.
To be able to choose the most cost-effective options ensures the overall success of a marketing plan. While paid advertising is undoubtedly an effective and easier way to earn visibility, but there is nothing like organic marketing which is always a cost-effective strategy.
Delegate & Measure
If you are very passionate about your work, it is undoubtedly a joyful thing. However, have to ensure is prevent a burn-out which is likely to happen when you are stretching too far. Whether you are a person company or a short-staffed agency, delegate work to skilled professionals so that you can focus on the execution part more than the nitty-gritty.
If you are a part of an established organization, you can delegate work according to your team member’s merit. If you are a team member, focus end-to-end on your work. Remember, no output is ultimate until you have measured it against your goals.
Be Agile, Not Fragile!
Remember, once you have set up your marketing plan, you are not done. Depending on the length and breadth of your project duration, you have to be sure to review the output. In most of the cases, marketing managers review if the strategy is fraught with mistakes detrimental to the success of your overall business.
Also, it is fair that your marketing goals absorb newer ideas and change in dimension than its original intent. Agility is an important aspect of growth; a fragile conceptualization of plan can mar the prospects. Agility can be inculcated in your marketing discipline when you are open to industry news and trends that can pollinate your strategy over some time.
Learn More: How to Build Successful Marketing Strategy
Wrapping Up
What you have read in this article is the fundamental foundation for getting started with a Strategic Marketing Plan 2020. You can expect to be a pro at it if you wish to. Wait, is that you wish you could but no time? upGrad understands this dilemma, and hence, we have parked the solution right here. Visit today and if you have questions, email us, tweet to us, or comment. We want you to be independent as much as you want yourself to be independent.
If you are keen on upgrading your career with Marketing, an Executive MBA course, upGrad is offering the MBA(Executive) program in collaboration with the NMIMS Global Access School. The program has been designed to stand at par with the best on-campus Executive MBA programs across the globe.
Also – upGrad’s excellent flexible and interactive learning and evaluation systems allows you to balance your personal and professional life in a hassle-free manner. Check out for more information & let our student counsellor help you with your questions.
How does a strategic marketing plan help marketers?
Marketing involves a strategy, which is referred to as a marketing plan. Marketers can present a marketing strategy in a variety of ways. It's usually a formal document that goes through a thorough review to ensure that everyone in the company is on the same page. Marketers create marketing goals to serve the more expansive company goals. They can wrap a vast range of topics, including corporate growth, revenue, market share, profitability, customer perceptions, and market penetration. Marketers should collect and analyze relevant indicators to determine the success of marketing campaigns, which marketers can only do with better planning and future results.
What are the stages in a strategic marketing plan?
A well-thought-out strategy for providing value and solutions to your target market enables your organization to determine and fulfill the needs of your target market in a cost-effective and timely manner. There are three stages to a strategic marketing plan: planning, execution, and evaluation. The planning stage is the most essential since it examines internal strengths and drawbacks, external competition, technical advances, and changes in industry culture, as well as providing an overall picture of the organization's state. The action component is the implementation phase. The checking phase is the evaluation phase. It focuses on ensuring that the program's outcomes harmonize with the objectives established.
How can my company effectively reach its target audience?
To reach your target audience, you must first figure out how your prospects connect with the rest of the world. You must determine whether they read newspapers, magazines, use specific social media, use YouTube, perform Google searches, pass near billboards, use specific websites, use email, use eCommerce, belong to specific organizations, and so on. Then you'll have to discover what you can give for free at first to entice people to come to your website. Checklist documents, download guide, case study, eBook, printable, workbook, template, resource list, or white paper are examples of free goods. You should have a call to action with your contact information for the next step. You can align your marketing to your prospects with the correct lead magnet.
