A Strategic Marketing Plan summarises the strategic marketing direction of your business. It will, and should, very neatly lead to your Tactical Marketing Plan (i.e. the Marketing Doing) and make doing your Tactical Marketing Plan so much easier. Like: really easy.
What goes into your Strategic Marketing Plan
There is a LOT of work that goes into strategic marketing planning. It should be the culmination of work that involves:
- Understanding what your organisation is about
- Having clear objectives
- Market place research
- Determining your market positioning
- Segment and Persona research and creation
- Knowing which marketing tools and budget you have available.
Like any good Strategic Plan, it needs to refer to a greater body of work.
When we run our 5-week Marketing Pipeline Course, we aim for all attendees to finish the course with a Summary Strategic Marketing Plan – and five Workbooks FULL of their thinking, research and ideas.
These workbooks are where all the hard work is stored – the Strategic Marketing Plan is the final part that they easily read and take chunks from to share. It’s the hard work behind the scenes that counts.
How long does it take to create a Strategic Marketing Plan
It depends on what you have / know already and who it is for.
When I created one for clients I have in my consultancy business, it took between 3 to 5 Phases of work and for each Phase I billed between 2 to 4 days of my time. So, that’s between 6 to 20 days of someone’s time who does this for a living.
Some reassurance
I’ve given you these timescales because I promise to be realistic with you.
However, my advice is: you can do this.
Why do I know you can do this? Because you probably have a lot of the information already.
Even so, still allow a good chunk of time to do it, preferably over a set period of a few weeks. We deliberately run our ‘Design a successful marketing pipeline‘ course over 5 weeks, asking people to commit at least 10 hours a week to it, because they can get all their thinking in the right place, build on it, and then finish it in five weeks (rather than it dragging on).
What is the Structure of a Strategic Marketing Plan?
There are key things that have to be in every strategic marketing planning process. As a good guide, I always make sure that Strategic Marketing Plans I’ve set up have these 14 areas covered:
- Mission
- Vision
- Culture / Values
- Desired brand positioning
- Business Objectives
- Market and Sectors
- Overview of the market place
- overview of Segments, their DMUs
- Customer Personas for each Segment
- Marketing Resources
- People – skills, time
- Budget – amount
- Products
- Overview of your Products / Services Matrix
- High Level descriptions of each Product / Service
- Growth Strategies
- The Ansoff Strategies for Growth and which you are considering
- Strategic Marketing Objectives
- Which products / services to which markets / segments to achieve your Business Objectives
- KPIs
- The Key Performance Indicators (metrics) you are going to use to check your Strategic Marketing outcomes have been met
- Key Marketing Strategies
- Which marketing strategies are you going to use? Eg Known Expert strategy, Content Marketing Strategy, Positioning Strategy
- Overview of each strategy
- User Journey – Map
- High level, how you are going to take each segment through their Buyers Journey
- Key Messages
- What are your top level messages about your organisation, product lines, people.
How to get started
Either find a structure or set up a Word Doc with those headings, and just go for it, starting with the information you have.
If, like me, you prefer for follow a structure that someone else has put into place, then you can do our online course, ‘How to write your Strategic Marketing Plan’. Then you don’t have to think about what to do next – you can just follow the steps and use your thinking time on getting the answers into place.
As you go through it, there will be gaps in your knowledge or things that need updating. Make a note of these.
By the end of your first go at completing your strategic marketing planning, you’ll come away with a list of things to do – most of which is research.
When our Mastering Marketing participants reach the end of the ‘Design a successful marketing pipeline‘ course, they have a list of ‘Marketing Projects’.
This is often things like, ‘segment research’, ‘update the website’, ‘design a campaign based on this messaging’. A mixture of marketing foundations (things that are crucial to building your marketing on), one-offs such as ‘research which events our key targets go to’, and marketing and sales communications, like, ‘Run a campaign about this issue and how we can solve it.’
How to use a Summary Strategic Marketing Plan
This is THE document that guides how you create and structure your Tactical Marketing Plan. If the Strategic Marketing Plan says you are targeting the CEOs of IT Companies in the North of England, then your Tactical Marketing Plan is all about how to reach them and take them through their Buyers Journey.
Elements of the Strategic Marketing Plan can also be used to brief team members and external marketing suppliers.
For example, you’re redesigning your website / creating a piece of key marketing collateral. You take the, ‘Mission, Vision, Values, Desired Brand Positioning and Persona Profiles’ give them to the website design agency / graphic designer / copy writer and say:
“These are the type of people what you are creating has to appeal to but it has to be in line with our mission, vision, values and brand positioning”.
Your Strategic Marketing Plan can be cut up and used again and again to ensure your organisation brings everyone along with you and keeps you on track.
Conclusion
Yes. It is a lot of work.
Yes, you can take some shortcuts but come back to them later.
No, I can’t offer you something easier.
Yes, you can get away in a business without doing one but accept that it means you are adopting a more fun and opportunistic approach to business that way (which is perfectly fine, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing!).
And yes, you can do this. It’s just about following a structure and getting the right information into it. Do it step by step and it will all come together.
Feeling overwhelmed? Not sure how to fit it all in? Get some inspiration from our top 5 tips on how to make space for marketing planning and thinking.
Not yet convinced you need strategic marketing planning? Then watch this short video to find out what happens when you don’t have an up-to-date Strategic Marketing Plan!
