Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given time period. Marketing plans can include separate marketing strategies for the various marketing teams across the company, but all of them work toward the same business goals.
The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down your tactics and strategies in an organized fashion. This will help keep you on track, and measure the success of your campaigns. Success in marketing is measured with the achievement of two main goals: Brand awareness and sales.
A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular mission or goal.
A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies.
HOW WE BUILD A SUCCESSFUL MARKETING STRATEGY
BUSINESS MISSION
The first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission.
Although this mission is specific to the business marketing department, it should serve a business’s main mission statement.
There is plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you’ll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.
DETERMINE KPIs
Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission’s progress. To do so, you’ll need to determine your key performance indicators, or “KPIs” for short.
KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.
IDENTIFY BUYERS PERSONAS
A buyer persona is a description of whom you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, job title, and more.
Each buyer persona should be a direct reflection of your business’s customers and potential customers. Therefore, it’s critical that business leaders all agree on what your buyer personas are.
CONTENT STRATEGY
Which types of content you’ll create. These can include blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, ebooks, and more.
How much of it you’ll create. You can describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly.
The goals (and KPIs) you’ll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic.
The channels on which you’ll distribute this content. Some popular channels include Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
IDENTIFY COMPETITORS
Part of marketing is knowing whom you’re marketing against. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one in this section is vital for us and your business.
Keep in mind not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business.
If there are other aspects of your business that you aren’t serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign.
DEFINE A BUDGET
Your content strategy might leverage many free channels and platforms, but there are a number of hidden expenses to a marketing team that need to be accounted for.
Whether it’s freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.
With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it’s time to explain who’s doing what. Defining day-to-day projects, and it should be known which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.
HOW DOES THE PROCESS WORK
PAID SEARCH
Capture the right audience as they search for a solution.
You want customers to find you. We deliver thoughtful, automated campaigns that maximize ROI, increase click-through, and put you front-and-centre for your target audience.
Our keyword and audience research digs deep and crosses every discipline. That gives you a holistic, insightful view of your target audience’s motivation and behavior. And the best opportunity to be seen by that audience.
Alongside insight is innovation. From Google to Bing, or Facebook to LinkedIn, taking advantage of the latest machine learning and automation is critical to today’s paid search efforts. By letting tech do the heavy lifting, we free up resources to focus on structuring your campaign, detailed metrics, and your end results.
This isn’t “set it and forget it.” Even with automation, you’ll work directly with the specialist running your paid search campaign every step of the way. This way, you can adjust, iterate, and ensure your campaign meets your goals.
Getting a click is only the first step – what matters are leads and conversions. By feeding CRM data back into the ad platform, we gain insight that helps guide your campaign, convert leads, and move them further down the funnel.
Our paid search services provide the tools you need to build better campaigns:
• Keyword and Audience Research
• Ad Account Buildout
• Campaign Targeting Strategy
• Ad Copywriting
• Ecommerce Feed Setup and Organization
• Monthly and Ad Hoc Reporting
SEO
Be visible for the search terms your ideal buyers use.
Our collaborative approach to search engine optimization balances opportunity with content to provide client partners with the performance that they need for growth.
The best search engine optimization comes from understanding data – yours and ours. Internally and externally, we gather and filter every bit of intelligence. Then, balancing user experience, strategy, content, and best practices, we work collaboratively to make sure that our clients and their target audience are on the same page, speaking the same language. So, whether you’re a hands-on client or prefer not to get into the weeds, your SEO is backed by real data and real experts who know your business and situation.
We look at SEO from every angle – editorial, e-commerce, technical, and local – and make adjustments as necessary, to ensure that our clients are as well-positioned as possible. Our SEO team works seamlessly with our clients’ internal content and creative departments when those resources are available; and solve crucial technical problems that may hinder search engine results page (SERP) growth. This responsive approach gives our client partners the flexibility they need to get maximum value from their engagement.
Driving web traffic often means hitting a moving target – what worked yesterday may not always work today, or tomorrow. We have proven, tactical approaches to current search challenges like Digital Assistants and Voice SEO, Google’s continued development of SERP features and optimizing for formats like video, social media and third-party citations. You don’t have to keep up, because we do. We work to stay ahead of the curve, so whatever comes next, we’ll be ready to optimize for that, as well.
Our aggressive approach to search engine optimization provides our client partners with the expedited search engine results page (SERP) performance that a business needs for growth. Our use of powerful tools also gives our SEO experts the ability to closely track, update and compete for increasingly invaluable schema-driven SERP features like the Google Local Pack, Local Teaser, Knowledge Card, Featured Snippet and more.
PAID SOCIAL
Reach buyers on their favourite platform, optimize return on ad spend.
Smarter engagement for better results. With calculation and collaboration, we deliver impactful paid social campaigns that creatively connect with your target audiences.
We use what you’ve got to get what you want – leveraging your existing customer data to better understand behavior and engagement. This enables us to model look-alike audiences based on everything from e-mail lists to customer lifetime value – and find new customers that match your most valuable existing customers.
The best performing paid media doesn’t look like paid media. So our performance creative and paid media teams partner up early in the process, delivering impactful copy and clean, organic, on-brand designs. They also work together to implement detailed tracking to provide a hands-on, seamless, holistic approach to social media advertising.
From initial engagement to eventual conversion, we track every user action, turning data into insight that ultimately informs better bidding decisions. This “test, learn, adapt” approach offers unmatched flexibility and drives better campaign results.
CONTENT MARKETING
Build trust among buyers with helpful, engaging content that meets them where they are.
Capturing and holding audience attention is harder than ever. We combine behavioral data, heatmapping, SEO, and performance creative to ensure that your content consistently connects with the audiences you want.
Lead generation, social media and e-mail are just the tip of the iceberg. With your thought leadership as the foundation, our in-house experts build captivating experiences that produce valuable engagement and drive website traffic. So it’s your voice, only stronger.
Churning out content isn’t enough. Understanding how, when and why content is consumed focuses your efforts where they matter. By using behavioural science to drive social actions and reactions, we help our clients to generate leads, build relationships and move prospects towards conversions. And, we adjust our approach as we analyze partner performance and adapt to reach their goals.
To cut through the clutter, it’s not just what you say, but how, where, and when you say it. That’s why our content marketing managers and associates collaborate with our performance creative team to craft attention-capturing assets and optimized scheduling.
CREATIVES & VIDEOS
Captivate your buyers with stunning creative and video.
Creatives built to perform: Creativity works. But creativity built on strategy and supported by data? That delivers. Take your creative up a notch. Leverage the best performing creatives that can solidify your brand’s name and boost conversions.
Our talented team of developers, designers and writers leverages insights collected from our Development, SEO, Paid, and content experts to design assets built for maximum performance.
In addition to partnering with subject matter and data experts, the Harvard Consulting Service creative team works closely with our search and social experts to communicate the essence of your brand and build creative that drives performance.
leverages insights collected from our Development, SEO, Paid, and content experts to design assets built for maximum performance.
In addition to partnering with subject matter and data experts, the HCS creative team works closely with our search and social experts to communicate the essence of your brand and build creative that drives performance.
Whether it’s a 15-second social video, banner, Facebook Canvas ad, or motion graphic, our creative team works with our channel experts to ensure that we match the right medium to your message – and convert leads to sales.
With ongoing optimization, our entire team is always looking at ways to push boundaries and make our creative deliver on every platform. Our designers also collaborate with our Paid Media experts to implement creative A/B tests to maximize efficiencies in your ad budget, while partnering with our content team to create effective messaging that brings the creative to life.
As part of the creative process, we actively audit all content assets and the user experience (UX) to ensure that creative deliverables are optimized for your audiences’ funnel stage. We take the time to leverage data-backed insight, and understand our clients’ digital playing field, business, and competition. This enables us to build content assets, landing pages, and site navigation that suit their unique needs.
Video is a critical and growing component of every creative campaign, across every platform. From live action to animation, explainer videos to product launches, our creative and production teams use audience insight and best practices to deliver videos with impact and relevance.
EMAIL MARKETING
Nurture buyers and close more deals without relying on complex algorithms.
Impact the inbox. As a direct dialogue and relationship-building tool, e-mail is a powerful part of your performance marketing that we’ll help you flex. Offer a weekly email that can keep high the prospect’s engagement. Leverage post purchase and retargeting mail campaigns.
There’s a reason email remains a go-to component of both B2B and B2C performance marketing strategy. When executed thoughtfully, it works. We help clients with the distribution of valuable, relevant content — designed to attract and retain a defined target audience, and ultimately drive customer action.
For B2B lead nurturing, we help your e-mail marketing act as a perfect baton pass from lead generation efforts and top-of-funnel interest, providing prospects with contextually relevant, hyper-targeted educational content across multiple touchpoints to ease them into a next step or action. In B2C efforts, our email marketing strategy spans each stage of the customer journey, hooking audiences with customized offers, well-timed promotions and relevant, engaging content and keeping them coming back for more.
There’s as much art as there is science to optimizing your e-mail marketing. From leveraging thought leadership to dropping at just the right moment, our cross-functional team helps to design, create, and deliver email content that connects.
So, how do we know what’s working? We take advantage of segmentation, lead scores, open rates, and content engagement metrics. This enables us to continually test, measure, analyze, and tweak e-mail marketing programs – and provide clearer understanding of their correlation to sales.
DATA INTERGATIONS
Lay the groundwork to connect marketing data to the rest of the business.
At Harvard Consulting Service, data is central to our services, so we understand the importance of integrating it into our processes – and yours. When combined with CRM and ad platforms, your disparate information becomes insight.
You want your data to work for you, to deliver insight, and to drive business. But that’s hard when data is in different systems across your organization. You’re left guessing ROI, leaving you unclear about what works and hesitant to try something new. Pull disparate data together and leverage in your CRM and ad platforms to develop relevant strategy and tactics that move the needle for your business. That’s where Harvard Consulting Service can help.
You have a mountain of data: business intelligence about your industry, your partners, and your customers. But how do you make sense of it all? Working across all platforms, Harvard Consulting’s data and analytics team pulls all of this raw data together and plucks out the story of your brand’s digital performance. Then, we align and centralize your data, connecting dots to leverage that insight, hit KPIs, and ultimately drive growth.
We utilize the full suite of Google Analytics tools, auditing and implementing measurement programs for our clients’ digital projects at an expert level. We can also provide campaign tagging, custom dimensions, metrics, and segments and custom dashboard reports. In addition, we deliver Google Analytics audit and configuration, tag management and implementation, A/B testing and optimization experiments, landing page analyses and website performance reviews.
What’s in it for you? Smarter campaigns that work harder and deliver measurable results. When data is integrated and applied to your CRM and ad programs, measuring the success (and ROI) of campaigns becomes clearer. You’ll gain better transparency into how much revenue and closed sales are the result of each campaign.
RESEARCH
Understand your buyers so you can market to them better.
Know Your Buyers.
Research answers key questions you need to develop effective marketing messages, content and campaigns. It’s the foundation of a profitable marketing model.
Your marketing messages should resonate with specific segments of the market. Identify these profiles with Persona Research and arm your sales team with deep audience insights.
Position your products or services to appeal to your target market. Leverage Audience Research to develop key marketing messages to highlight what makes you distinct.
Place your marketing messages in front of your buyers where they like to be. Audience Research helps build awareness with the right buyers and guide them along their customer journey.
First, our experts design the right methodology to achieve your goals and fit your budget. Then, we recruit target study participants and collect their perspective. Finally, we analyze the findings to derive actionable insights that will guide your marketing strategy.
GROWTH INSIGHTS
Focus on key business performance metrics to optimize returns.
Going from information to insight to action – without guesswork – is how HCS Strategies’ Growth Insight services drive your business.
engagement. Leverage post purchase and retargeting mail campaigns.
Even the best data is worthless if you don’t know how to apply it to your business goals. For example, what are your most profitable platforms? Based on last year’s sales, what are this years’ best opportunities? Growth Insight services from HCS strategies bridge that gap with a cross-functional team of experts that help you not only understand your data, but what you can do with it to grow your business.
Our Growth Insights empower deeper customer knowledge and better market analysis, such as profitable regions, and which platforms work best together, as well as improved confidence in your web analytics data-based decisions. You’ll gain better analytics implementations and an unmatched level of KPI transparency, with less guesswork about your audience and their likely behavior.
To start, our team of experts will help make sense of every piece of data available to you. We work with you to clarify what you know and uncover what you don’t. Then, we help draw the line from information to action, laying out how you can apply this insight to your marketing and overall business goals. Applied to every part of your analytics deployment, from documentation to governance, Growth Insights elevates the information you already have to make it work harder for you.
PLATFORMS AVAILABLE
Every paltform offers a unique insight on the respective market. If on one side it is true that Facebook and Instagram are widely used in a vast array of markets, there are other platforms that can be leveraged in many others. LinkedIn for instance offers unique possibilities in the services market. Asmallworld offers an easy access for the most affluential people. We have covered in these years a vast array of marketing platforms to insure flexibility and dexterity. Here a list of the main platforms we deal with on a daily basis:
FACEBOOK & INSTAGRAM
On Facebook, the campaign manager has many options for objectives, ad sets and ads. You have a multitude of combinations to test out and plenty of ways to preview all the available ads.
On Instagram, the ads manager went for the simple-is-best route. In just a few taps, you can have your ad set up with an existing post or story. If you don’t want the nitty-gritty data and you just want the big picture with an easy interface, Instagram is the best ads management platform for you.
Google Ads works on an auction system, which takes place every time a user performs a keyword search. To “win” the Google Ads auctions and see your Google advertisement appear for relevant keywords, you’ll need to optimize your Quality Score and bid amount. The higher your Quality Score, in conjunction with your bid amount, the better your ad positioning.
Constant analysis, optimization, and attention are required to make advertising on Google as profitable as possible. However, for many small businesses and companies with limited resources, managing a paid search campaign on Google Ads can be a full-time job.
YOUTUBE
The thing is, advertising on YouTube is very different from running a PPC or paid social campaign. There are specific creative constraints and a ton of options for this platform, and you need a base knowledge before you even scope out your next video project to make the most of the paid possibilities. There are three key types of video ads in which you can invest on YouTube: TrueView, Preroll, and Bumpers.
Pinterest ads offer marketers the chance to earn awareness and consideration from Pinterest’s 250 million users early in their consumer journeys. And connecting early works: 98 percent of Pinners say they’ve tried new things they found on Pinterest, versus 71 percent on other social media platforms. Your Pinterest ad campaign type will determine what ad format you use, as well as your bid type and available placements. So it’s good to know the attributes of each format before starting a campaign. A platform that performs particularly well in the apparel and accessories industry among many others.
- While LinkedIn ads tend to be more expensive than other platforms, they can be worth the money if you use their specific targeting options (companies, titles, education, etc.) and do micro-campaigns (instead of doing one big campaign that reaches 50,000 people, do 50 micro-campaigns that reach 1,000 people each). We’ve all heard that LinkedIn is where your company needs to be to generate more business. Stats show that the professional networking platform is effective. It can generate up to 277% more leads than Facebook and Twitter.