Why Are Marketing Plans So Vital?

All the fantastic content, backlinks and keywords in the world are great, but they have a cap on the value they can provide your company without one vital partner: Marketing. It’s one half of the term “internet marketing,” after all, and even the smallest businesses need a comprehensive marketing plan to boost their SEO.

What goes into a simple marketing plan, and what makes them so important? Let’s find out.

Marketing Plan Basics

In the simplest terms, a marketing plan is the strategy for how you’re going to execute your business plan, or business goals. You know your target – the marketing plan is the arrow. You’ll lay out your goals, any potential roadblocks and any other details involved. Some of these details can include:

• Market: Who is your competition for your customer demographics? Which of their strategies might be damaging to you? How can you differentiate yourself, and how will the market itself help differentiate you? All these are questions you’ll ask.
• Targets: Who you’re targeting, what your demographics are interested in, and how you’ll go about reaching them.
• Strategy: Things like price points, product descriptions and promotion strategies.
• Goals: Your target thresholds, both from a time and monetary standpoint.
• Budget and Timeline: How quickly you plan to accomplish your plan, and how it will be funded.

Why is it Necessary?

A marketing plan is the blueprint that sets the baseline for your entire search engine marketing strategy. No element of your marketing will be done off the cuff – everything will be planned out, budgeted and given a timeline. Fewer surprises means more focus on the goals at hand and less time scrambling to come up with a new plan on the fly. The best marketing plans will have built-in contingencies, of course, but will maintain a focus on the central goals.

Regular Updates

It’s vital that you frequently revisit and update your marketing plan. Details will always change along the way, and it’s good to keep your team updated with these. Maintain open lines of communication between team members to prevent confusion or duplication.

This can also be a great way of tracking progress. See if you’ve exceeded or fallen short of goals, and find ways to adjust the strategy if you’re behind.

A marketing plan is vital to the success of your business, and you can’t trust it to anyone but industry leading professionals. SEO Werkz is a premier provider of search engine marketing, and our experts are standing by to help you plan out the roadmap for your business today.