It’s hard to grow a company with marketing these days. Competition is fierce in most markets, so you have to do everything possible to stand out from the crowd. That’s why 63% of companies increased their digital marketing budgets in the past year.

Do you want to learn more about what it takes to create a successful marketing business plan? Read the guide below to learn how to create a business marketing strategy that works.

Define Your Marketing Goals

A well-defined goal is the first thing you need to create a business marketing plan. Yes, you can set up a few ads and send them to random locations on your website. The question is, will you send the right people and send those people to the right place to take action?

In most cases, the answer to that question is no. Unless you have clearly defined goals, you won’t be able to get the most out of your marketing campaign.

The first step is figuring out your ideal way of generating leads. Are you a product business that sells products on your website? Or are you a firm with a long sales cycle and needs to speak directly to customers?

Once you know this information, you can create a sales funnel and push people to the start of that funnel. That will help you make the most of your ad dollars and convert more people to customers.

Create Audience Personas

The next step to a great marketing strategy is determining who will buy your products. General messages may be able to get a few sales. But you can’t ramp up your marketing campaigns and convert more people unless you create highly targeted messaging.

The first step of the process is to create audience personas. A persona will help you learn about your most likely customer. Here are a few things you’ll learn during this process:

• General demographics
• Customer problems
• Ideal solutions
• Interests
• Job roles

All of this is information you can use to figure out what type of messaging to create. You’ll use it to learn what words to use, what to include in your messaging, and much more.

On top of that, you can also create several audience personas. Some avenues, like paid ads, allow you to create highly-customized ads. That means you can create several campaigns that target different personas.

Pick Your Ad Platform

You’re ready to pick your ad platforms once you figure out your audience personas. Your chosen platform is important because different demographics will browse the web differently.

If you want a more general approach, Google PPC is a great choice. Pretty much everyone uses Google, so you should be able to find your target audience there.

However, Facebook is a different audience. Many young people have left that platform, so you’ll find an older audience on much of the site. A new and trendy product may make some sales there, but you may be better off advertising on a younger platform.

Take Instagram and Tiktok, for instance. Many young people follow influencers on those platforms, so it makes sense to work with those people to advertise your products. View here for more information about influencer marketing.

Create a Marketing Budget

A budget is the next thing you need for your marketing plan. Not all advertising methods are costly. SEO only needs content and SEO optimization for when you’re engaging in marketing, while PPC ads need constant ad spending to keep traffic coming in.

If you don’t have a large budget, you may not be able to start with a more costly ad approach. You’ll need to keep costs minimal with methods like SEO and influencer marketing. However, some of those methods may take longer to ramp up.

You will probably lose money at first with something like PPC, so you must be careful with your ad spending. However, you can get as many customers as possible when you find an ad campaign that works. If you have a larger budget, this is a great way to increase brand awareness and grow your customer base.

Identify Competitors

Seeing what your competition is doing is a great way to get intelligence for your ad campaigns. If you notice companies engaging in a marketing method for some time, it’s a sign that it’s getting results. You can use that to your advantage and use those ad campaigns as inspirations for your own.

That means you can jumpstart your ad campaigns instead of starting from scratch. It can drastically reduce the time it takes to see results and your overall ad spend.

Keep doing this throughout the process, even if you’re currently getting results. You never know when you’ll find a new ad strategy you can use in your campaign.

Test Everything

Even if you’re running low-cost marketing campaigns, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it easy with testing. Yes, you probably have larger profit margins. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything possible to increase your profit.

Testing will help you do this. Testing software will let you see where you’re getting traffic, the pages producing the best results, and the campaigns sending the highest converting traffic.

Once you have this information, you can double down on what works best and optimize from there. Do this with all your winning campaigns, and your conversion rates will grow.

Start Your New Marketing Business Plan Today

It’s not easy to get new customers these days. Even if you can quickly sign up to a paid ads platform and pay for traffic, that doesn’t mean you’ll reach the right people and convince them to buy your products.

You need a robust business marketing campaign to convince people that your business is trustworthy and sells excellent products. Follow the advice above to build a marketing business plan that works.

Check out the blog to find more advice that will help you create a successful marketing campaign.