Marketing teams across small and medium businesses start to develop marketing plans from the beginning of the year. In some cases, these professionals lack some critical input, and this sometimes leads to the ineffectiveness of these plans. Or in simple terms, the marketing objectives fail to align with the business objectives. 

The Business Strategy

The very first and the most important thing that you need to keep in mind is the business strategy and how it helps the business in achieving its goals. The strategy will also help the marketing team to get a better understanding of how the business plans to target its buyers. The strategy not only aligns the marketing activities it also indicates what all needs to be in place in the next years to come. All this will require marketing actions in the coming year. 

Thus, when the marketing team has a well-documented strategy, it becomes easy for the marketing team to align its activities with the growth, vision, and all the routes to the market. The strategy also helps to strengthen the marketing and product functions. Thus, the marketing professionals must be able to translate all the strategy information toward the audience, brand, value, and terms of operations. 

The Target Audience

The next thing you need to do is to understand the target audience for your business. The best way to do this is to have thorough market research. This will help you to get a good understanding of the customer demography and how the business can serve them in the best possible manner. A sync-up with the product management and research team will also help in getting additional information about the target market.  

Develop a USP for each Market 

Most people think that USP and positioning are the same. Well, this is not true all the time. Positioning refers to the ways in which the customer perceives your product, brand, or company. Or, in simple words, it can be said that it is all about what you do and how it is different from your competitors. Here you also get to know how the competitors are providing products and services to the customers.    

The Revenue Plan

A good understanding of the revenue plan is important for marketers to move in the right direction. The marketers must know the proportion of the revenue that is about to come from the customers as well as the business prospects. This includes information about the upsell and cross-sell, and retention. 

The marketing professionals must know and understand how the revenue is distributed and planned across the different channels. Good knowledge of geography is also important so that the marketers know in which direction the marketing plan must work. 

Competitive Analysis 

Apart from looking at what goes in your own business, it is also important to determine what is going on in the market. So it is time to have a look at what your market competitors are doing to reach your target audience. This can be best achieved with the help of competitive analysis. This analysis should cover information such as, what are the product offerings by the competitors, what are the sales techniques these businesses are running and what are their results. What type of content the sales and marketing teams are using, and which are social channels these companies are using to promote their brand and generate high revenue. 

Once the marketing executives get all this information, the next step is to understand what needs to be done with all this information that is collected. The best use is to align all the objectives around all this information and target the right audience for business growth and success. 

Source – Forbes