A marketing plan and strategy are of the utmost importance for the success of any organization. Marketing allows you to develop a plan that uses your strengths, improves your weaknesses, and focuses on getting your company out there. No matter the size of your company, a marketing plan can help you continue to grow.
6 Steps to a Marketing Plan
Creating a marketing and local SEO plan can be overwhelming. However, with these six easy steps, you can create a complete marketing plan that will help your company continue to grow and thrive.
- Define Objectives
For any marketing plan to be successful, objectives need to be defined. Whether you want to increase the market share of a product or service or grow revenue. It is of the utmost importance that you set up goals and reasons for coming up with the marketing plan. Additionally, your objective should be something measurable. This allows for the goal to be discussed quantitatively once results come out. Additionally, if your company has multiple revenue streams, you should set up a separate market plan for each one of these streams.
- Perform an Analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
The SWOT analysis will help develop a marketing strategy for your company, as well as keep an eye on the competition from other companies. Here are a few questions you will need to answer for the SWOT analysis to be completed.
What are your company’s strengths?
What does your company do well? How strong is your company? This will include the employees, your beliefs, and the processes. What advantage do you have in the market?
What are your company’s weaknesses?
What needs to be improved within your organization? What are your competitive disadvantages? Are there any processes or team members that need to be added?
Are there any opportunities?
Could you provide add-on services or products? What are your competitors’ weaknesses? Can you improve on their weaknesses to stand out? This is a great time to get your employees involved and brainstorm opportunities that you can take advantage of in the market.
Are there any threats?
Can your business become obsolete or replace with new technology? Are you developing strategies to avoid that from happening? Are there any potential problems in the near future?
- Analyze Current Market
Now that you know what you want to achieve with your marketing ideas, and what areas you can focus on after the SWOT analysis, you can meld the information together. By putting the information together that you have so far, you can get a clearer understanding of what your objective should be. This is a great time to adjust your objective accordingly. Additionally, this is the time that you will find the areas that you can quickly take advantage of. While you can develop areas that might take longer to get the advantage, a successful marketing plan needs to work quickly. The goal of a construction marketing plan is to strategically allocate capital to its most efficient use.
- Set Up a Budget
A budget for a marketing plan can be confusing and it will depend on what kind of marketing you want to include in it. For instance, if you want to have radio or TV ads, you might want to spend four percent of the revenues. However, if you are focusing on cheaper ad spots, you can aim for as little as 0.5 percent of your revenue. It is of the utmost importance that you set up a solid number for your budget. Otherwise, you might overspend on a marketing plan that could end up not working out. Additionally, in the case that everything works out, it is important to plan accordingly as well. If sales increase, do you have enough personnel to handle that?
- Develop a Strategy
For this step, you will determine the avenues that you will take to achieve your goal. It is important to develop a mix of strategies to reach the market as well as understand your target audience to create the right mix of avenues. Your market research should help you find the avenue that is more efficient to reach your target audience. Additionally, you can learn about your target audience by talking to past clients.
- Monitor Results
To make sure that your investments are going to the right place, continue tracking your marketing plan. Additionally, you can check statistics with the local permit office to learn about the number of permits bring pulled, which will help you better understand the market. It is important that you can measure your marketing strategy’s success to get a clear idea if it is working or not.
Quick and Easy Tips for Better Marketing
While you can set up a great marketing strategy, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.
Make it Easy to Find Your Number
It is essential that your target audience can easily contact you. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that your phone number is easy to find. This can be through a google search, on your website, or on ads that you run. If you tie a phone number to your company on google, a client can easily click on your company and call with just one tap. Additionally, your phone number should be above the fold on your website.
Create a Helpful Website
You can have the best service, but a bad website can ruin your business. Nowadays, most clients look at your website before anything else. Therefore, you need to have a good website that shows your work, provides information to prospective clients, and reviews from previews clients. Additionally, your website should be responsive, meaning it should work on desktop and mobile devices, and it should be easy to navigate. If you need assistance with this, contact an SEO company.
Create Good Content
Nowadays, every business needs an online presence to thrive. Therefore, you must have good social media content that is engaging. Additionally, you should have good quality content on your website. In general, good content is not just well written, it also provides information and knowledge to the reader. Most users will be less likely to trust you if all your content does is sell something to them.
While a marketing plan is not a sure way to bring you growth, following these tips can lead you towards success. Additionally, a marketing plan will allow your company to reach prospective clients that would not know about it otherwise. Not to mention, with the marketing tips, you can create a presence online that is trustworthy. Contact our team to find a game plan today!