When it comes to your business, how you market can make or break your brand positioning and ultimately impact how customers see your business. Your marketing plan helps you focus on where to focus your effort; it ensures you target the right audience and enables you to keep an eye on the direction of your business.

Your business needs to take time to plan and map out how the marketing processes are going to be implemented and followed through, then you risk your business missing out on potential growth and fall behind your competitors. Whether you’re promoting a new product or service, trying to improve your brand image or gain some ground to obtain a more significant market share, your marketing plan needs to be strategic and unique to your business.

What is a marketing plan?
To understand how to create a unique marketing plan, we first need to understand what it is. A marketing plan is just as it sounds- it’s a plan that sets out all of the elements connected to your business’s marketing goals.

I want to keep this as simple as possible, so the five steps to create your own unique business marketing plan, you’ll need;

1. Work out what your business goals and objectives are. It’s essential to differentiate these two because they are fundamentally different yet equally important. Create a guideline that targets what you achieve, which is a goal. While goals are more specific, are measurable, defined and are often time-bound.

An example of how these two work is, you can have a goal to increase customer retention by 50% in the next 12 months, but to reach that goal, you’ll need to set out some objectives to help you. Some of those objectives could be; creating a customer loyalty program, contacting the customer a few days after they have purchased your product to see if they have any questions or feedback.

2. Work out what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) are. Performing a SWOT analysis allows you to position your business and help you prioritise objectives to develop your business.
You’ll be able to look at your business’s strengths, weaknesses and how you can leverage them to take advantage of the opportunities and threats that exist in your market. For this to work well in a more significant business, gather your managerial team and discuss what they think about the different things that the business does well and what needs work. You’ll find that your staff may have different opinions, and it’s up to you to take on that feedback and implement some changes regarding the input. It would be beneficial also to involve external stakeholders and other external parties involved, such as customers or even your accountant. The more feedback you receive, the more equipped you’ll understand how people perceive your business.

3. Find your target audience and identify specific customer needs. If you don’t know who you’re selling your product or service to, you’ll have trouble making any progress with your business.

4. Create actionable, measurable metrics to give you a clear picture of where you should focus your efforts. This roadmap will propel your business forwards and give you a unique voice in this rapidly changing market. I’m sure you want your business to become valuable, memorable and have strong relationships with customers or clients, so even though creating a strategic marketing plan may become complex and taxing, it will pay off.

5. Put the four steps to work! Every 6 to 12 months, evaluate, modify and repeat.