Create Your Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

By Mark Quirk

If you're looking to create a marketing plan I'm assuming that you've done some market analysis and found or created a good product. If you haven't, take a look at the article Use 10 Questions to Analyse Your Market to give some ideas about what to look for.

So, to the plan. Here are the steps I take to create a basic marketing plan:

Set a sales goal using a sales forecast
Set a budget
List potential marketing activities
Prioritise your activities
Set dates for activities
Assign budget to activities
Track success

Set a Sales Goal Using a Sales Forecast

I like to start with the end in mind - with a sales forecast created with a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. If your marketing works and your research was broadly accurate, what sales would you forecast?

Take a look at this sample forecast (as an Adobe Acrobat - pdf document). Here we have a single product, 'product x' sold in two variations, directly for $19 and indirectly via affiliates giving me $8.55. Create the forecast for 12 months to get your annual sales forecast number. I've also created a sample Excel spreadsheet that you are welcome to download (NB. the spreadsheet contains no macros and works perfectly well with the 'macros disabled' security setting).

How do you decide what are the right numbers? Without any past experience of selling product x its an 'educated guess'. You may want to create 3 forecasts, a pessimistic one, an optimistic one and one in-between.

Use the forecast you create as a 12 month goal - your marketing plan is about reaching or exceed that goal.

Set a Budget

Given that you have a sales goal, how much are you prepared to initially invest to achieve those sales? $50, $10,000 or maybe $0? Your budget will determine the range and intensity of your marketing activities. Even with a budget of $0 you may still be able to achieve sales through activities like search engine optimization, if you have the time and skills yourself.

List Potential Marketing Activities

There are many standard items you can add to your list, I'll list some below. But its also where you can be creative. You might find this simple creative process useful...

Take a look at your market research. Note the kind of people likely to want your product, the places those people might visit, the kind of affiliations or groups they may belong to, what kind of activities they get up to. Spend 30 minutes analysing your research and thinking about your marketing opportunities - consciously coming up with marketing ideas.
Now, stop. Go and make yourself a drink Sit down somewhere quiet and comfortable with a pen and paper (or voice recorder if you prefer) and just relax! Put some relaxing music on if you can. Let your mind wonder, allowing your subconscious to get to work. Don't consciously try and create more ideas, just be open to whatever thoughts come in to your head. Relax for long enough (you might put a 30-60 minute limit on each session) and new ideas or variations on existing ideas will just flow.

So what are some standard activities you might include? Here's a non-exhaustive list with some items linking to further information available at OnlineMarketersChoice.co.uk:

Create a Blog
Create an affiliate program
Advertising - Pay-per-click, in eZines or related web sites or in print media like magazines
Email marketing with Auto Responders
Write a regular eZine
Write articles relevant to your potential customers and publish them on several article directories
Create joint ventures
Create or affiliate to complimentary products that together with your product solve a clients issue better
Search Engine Optimization
Have the ability for clients to buy directly from your site
Viral Marketing
Finally, things related to the quality of your web site:
- Include Audio / Video
- Make the site easy to navigate and be clear about its benefit and purpose
- Use graphics artists / designers to improve the look and feel
- Provide good quality content
- Make sales content really sell with good copywriting
- Ensure your web site stays up all the time (tiny outages might be acceptable, but generally expect 24x7 from your web hoster)

Prioritise Your Activities

You may now have a very long list of possible activities. Where do you start?

I like to start with something that's quick and easy. For example, if you subscribe to a service like ValuedClientSystem.com creating the infrastructure for an affiliate program and adding a 'Become an Affiliate' link to your site is quick and easy. There is more to a good affiliate program than the infrastructure, but its a quick start!

So, put some of the easier elements of your plan at the start. This will help you create momentum in your execution.

Another consideration in prioritising is the effect of the activity verses the effort involved. Clearly the ideal activity is one that brings a high number of potential clients for a low cost and little effort. These often depend on your circumstances. If you have a good network then asking appropriate people in that network to join your affiliate program might be easy - or going further and creating joint ventures if you have something significant to offer may be easy in your circumstances. If not, that's OK, but use this effect-for-effort guidance to set your priorities.

Set Dates for Activities

Once you have a prioritised list, decide when you will start the first activity and how long you expect it to take. Some activities will take a day to start and then require an hours maintenance once per-week (like creating articles or an eZine) so include this extra time in your overall time plan.

If its the first time you've tried an activity, be generous with your time. For example, if you think writing a 10 stage autoresponder follow-up to potential sales might take you 4 hours, allow a full day.

Assign Budget to Activities

We started out by deciding how much money you wanted to allocate to the overall marketing plan. Some people prefer to allocate budget as they prioritise, I tend to do it at the end. Which ever approach you come to prefer, be strict when you start out about how much budget you will allocate.

You may decide to allocate all of your initial budget to the first few item on your list to kick start your sales. Then add further budget to fund more activities based on your sales income. Either way, once you start to see results from your activities, you may decide to change your budget allocation - adding more to successful activities.

Track Success

This may be the last on the list, but its fundamental.

Track the effect of you activities in order to tweak them, extend them or drop them. For example if you are spending $100 per day on pay-per-click advertising and seeing an income of $90 you know that you need to tweak the wording or keywords of your advertisement. If tweaking it doesn't work, drop it from your campaign, simple.

Tracking and measuring is how you reach the full potential of your campaign. Sometime just tweaking the headline of your sales copy can double its effectiveness. But you would never know it you didn't track it!

In closing, don't overdo the plan. You will need to tweak it, it won't be absolutely right the first, second or third time. That's normal, expect it. Your goal with the planning is to give you direction and momentum. Some people will spend all their time planning and never quite get around to the implementation. I'm sure that won't be you.

To your success,
Mark

Between them Paul Quirk and Mark Quirk have more than 40 years experience in the IT industry.

ValuedClientSystem.com is their service providing Ad Tracking, email marketing with multiple sequential auto responders, credit card shopping directly from you site, affiliate program creation and administration and digital product download as an integrated part of your internet marketing solution.

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Create Your Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

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