Everything You Need to Write a Marketing Plan, a business marketing plan article written by Clifford

Chi (HubSpot June 2020), highlights its aim to help marketers in writing a concrete marketing plan
“that is rooted in data and produces real results.” It also answers several questions in making a
marketing plan such as: “What is a Marketing Plan?”; “What are the Types of Marketing Plan?”;
“Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan”; and lastly, the highlight, “How to Write a Marketing
Plan?”. To give the foundation of all these questions, a marketing plan is “a strategic roadmap that
businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given time period.”
There are eight (8) steps in writing a marketing plan. These are as follows: 1. State your business's
mission. 2. Determine the KPIs for this mission. 3. Identify your buyer personas. 4. Describe your
content initiatives and strategies. 5. Clearly define your plan's omissions. 6. Define your
marketing budget. 7. Identify your competition. 8. Outline your plan's contributors and their
responsibilities. For the first step, I think that this is the most important among them all because it
states your business’s mission. This will be your foundation — your drive — in continuing the
marketing plan. In this part, you must elaborate “on how you'll acquire new customers and
accomplish this mission”. Secondly, a mission will be useless even if it is a good one. That’s why I
would highly suggest the second step which is to determine the KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
for the mission. The main point of having a KPI is that it will help you track the mission's progress.
“These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your
progress to business leaders.” In the third part, I would consider this too as an important part in
making your marketing plan, since this talks about a buyer persona, “a description of whom you
want to attract”. Information such as age, sex, location, family size, job title, and more are included
as buyer personas. This is very critical because business leaders must all agree on what your buyer
personas are. Next on the list includes the main points of your marketing and content strategy.
Upon reading this, I would say that this is also critical because you must be wise in choosing and
explaining the content and channels you will be using. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube,
Pinterest, and Instagram are some of the popular channels on which you'll distribute this content.
The fifth step mainly talks about the things you will be omitting. But it doesn’t mean that these
things are not going to be focused on. Simply, to say this, “A marketing plan explains what the
marketing team is going to focus on. However, it also explains what the marketing team is not going
to focus on.” For the sixth step, budget will truly dictate the outcome of your marketing plan. Even
if you successfully completed the stated steps, once you aren’t able to develop a marketing budget
and the outline of each expense, everything will fall. “There are a number of hidden expenses to a
marketing team that (still) need to be accounted for.” The second to the last step arouses your
competitiveness in the arena of business marketing. This will truly never be in oblivion, since it has
naturally become a part of marketing industry. That is why I would recommend to “research the key
players in your industry and consider profiling each one in this section.” Lastly, “with your
marketing plan fully fleshed out, it's time to explain who's doing what.” It doesn’t mean that you
must go deeply in this part because it just wastes your time, which can be spent on more important
things. By just knowing who are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, etc., everything
will be smooth and truly, responsibilities will be clear.
“These marketing plans serve as initial resources to get your content marketing plan started — but
to truly deliver what your audience wants and needs, you'll likely need to test some different ideas
out, measure their success, and then refine your goals as you go.”