Start the new year off right with a marketing plan and budget! By planning now, you can create an effective marketing plan to help you boost your business for a year filled with growth and success.
If you are seeking impressive results from your marketing efforts, you need to have a strategic plan. At Higher Images, we’ve put together a guide to help you create a strategic marketing plan for 2023 and how determine the right budget meet your needs.
Why is a Marketing Plan Important?
When creating a marketing plan, you need to sit down and analyze your market, business, and customers to help you determine the most effective ways to meet your goals.
When creating a strategy, you need to take the time to research the market and trends, assess your needs, and plan for the future. During this process, you should keep your plan in a central document that you can easily reference so that others can use it as a guide throughout the year.
How do I Start Creating a Marketing Plan?
We recommend that you start by sitting with all involved stakeholders and reviewing your past marketing goals and their results. You want to evaluate your previous effort and see whether or not you reached your goals and determine why you didn’t.
You should also review the tactics that you tried throughout the year, noting what worked well for your brand and what didn’t. You also need to look at whether you have all the resources you need to be successful and determine what you need to produce more effective marketing results.
Additional Steps for Creating Your Business Marketing Plan
Set Your Goals
Review your goals from last year and take the time to reflect on changes within the business, and set new objectives for your business. We recommend choosing one or two main goals and then setting a few secondary goals.
You can strive to improve customer experience, open new business locations, increase sales, and more!
Audit Your Current Marketing
Take a look at your current marketing plan and see what elements you have, what needs to be updated, and what needs to be added. You want to make sure you have all the necessary marketing assets, such as brochures, web pages, business cards, etc.
You also want to be sure that you have accounts set up on all marketing channels relevant to your industry. Also, check to see which ones you can update or get rid of. It’s also crucial to ensure you have a system in place for collecting customer data; if not, it’s time to set up a platform for collecting this data.
You should also check and update your pricing strategy, make sure your buyer personas match your current goals and determine what products or services will be your main focus.
Research the Market
To stay ahead of the competition, you need to research what your competitors are doing. You need to also look at any trends that could impact your business and any trends that could affect your physical location in that area so that you can be prepared.
Additionally, you want to see what the average costs for marketing tactics are for your specific industry to ensure you are getting the most for your money.
Set Your Budget
After you’ve set attainable and realistic goals, you also need to set a realistic budget that you can maintain throughout the year. Determine your gross budget to ensure you can effectively manage your marketing efforts.
Research shows that most companies spend anywhere from 10% to 13% of their total business budget on marketing, varying from industry to industry.
You need to determine clear goals for revenue growth and customer acquisition and figure out how much you will need to bring in that number of new customers.
It’s also important to calculate how much each new lead costs. To do this, you can divide the total amount of money you’ve spent on marketing by the number of leads you generated. This should be done for each marketing channel you use. This can help you track what is working well and what isn’t and can help you determine which efforts are getting you the best return on investment.
You also need to determine your average conversion rate by taking your number of sales and dividing it by the number of leads you have generated. This data will help you determine how your marketing efforts are actually contributing to sales. Without this data, you are just throwing money into marketing channels without knowing its true impact on company revenue.
Once you’ve nailed these numbers down, you need to determine how many new leads the company needs to reach your new customer goals for 2023. This can be done by dividing the goal you have for new customers by your average conversion rate. This will give you the number of new leads you need to generate to reach your new customer goal.
Take your cost per lead and multiply it by the number of leads you need to reach your goal. This will help you determine roughly how much you should plan to spend on marketing in 2023.
Pick Out and Schedule Your Marketing Strategies
Once you’ve set your budget and determined your goals, you need to outline your marketing plan. Pick out the strategies that you think will work best to help you reach your goals, and then be sure to assign them a place on a calendar.
This is the time when you need to set your dates for various marketing campaigns, both campaigns that have worked well in the past as well as new ones you would like to implement. A calendar will give you a place to set launch dates as well as schedule the deadlines and resources needed to prepare for each new campaign.
On this calendar, you also want to set dates where you review your progress toward your goals.
Plan Your Marketing for 2023 With Higher Images
Call your Higher Images Sales Representative or complete this
marketing audit form to get help planning your 2023 Marketing goals & Budget.
Bryan Thornberg founded Higher Images. 22 years ago. As Owner and Chief Marketing Officer, he leads his team in all digital projects, consultations, development, marketing, public relations, sales, analytics, account management, and product support.
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