6 Steps to Creating a Winning Annual Marketing Plan

At Pocket Business Coach, we strive to provide you with the best information possible to grow your business. This guide gives you step-by-step instructions on creating a tremendous annual marketing plan to track and grow your business’ marketing.

Marketing is vital to every business. You have your product or service ready to go, but how will you tell people about them? If people can’t see or find your product or service, they can’t give you money for them, and if people can’t give you money, there is no business.

Enter the annual marketing plan.

A marketing plan lets you decide how you will sell your products to your consumers. An annual marketing plan that defines your business’ marketing objectives and the tactics you plan to use to achieve those objectives will ensure your company’s success throughout the year and for years to come. An excellent annual marketing plan should also be solid in its goals but flexible on achieving them and adapting to new opportunities and varying market conditions.

Pocket Business Coach has made a checklist on how to create an annual marketing plan.

1. Establish Your Brand Identity

Many people think the logo for their business is their identity. However, having a logo is only one part of building a business’ identity. The brand identity encompasses several ideas and answers these three questions:

What are your business’ values?
How are you going to communicate your product?
What do you want people to feel when they interact with your product?

The culmination of the answers to these questions (summed in one or two sentences) represents the personality of your business and your brand identity. It is your promise to your customers.

2. Determine Your Target Customer or Audience

After you have identified your brand identity, you have to figure out to whom you will sell your product. Here are the steps to find your target audience:

Analyze your current customers—who are they, and what do they buy from you?
Analyze your competitors—who do your competitors sell to, and what do they buy from them?
Analyze your product or service—make a list of each product and service you offer; next to each one, list the benefits and the people who will benefit from your product.
Decide on specific demographics to target—age, race, income, gender, etc.
Analyze the psychographics of your targets—lifestyles, values, beliefs, etc.
Evaluate your decision—do you have enough customers, can they afford my product, etc.?

3. Decide on Your Budget

A budget is an overview of your business’ expenses and is essential in creating your annual marketing plan. To create a budget, add the following:

Total income sources
Expenses/costs
Variable expenses (as best you can)
One-time fees (startup costs, machinery, computers, etc.)
Add it all up!

This is a simplified example of creating a budget, but it’s an excellent place to start and has everything you’ll need.

4. Select the Best Channels

Next, you have to figure out how to sell your product and on which distribution channels. Some examples are:

Social media
Email marketing
Print marketing
Websites
Word of mouth
Pay-per-click marketing

Don’t use all of these marketing channels. If you choose too many, your business could fail. Decide which ones will be most effective for your business and concentrate on those.

5. Build Your Content Calendar

Most companies want to create and put out as much content as possible. However, time and human resources generally make that impossible. A better idea is to take a balanced approach to distributing content, which means creating a content calendar. Here are the steps to create a content calendar:

Define your goals
Create a template or use one from the web
Choose your channels
Define your timeline, i.e. the calendar year
Add your own content
Have evergreen content ready (or update old content) for when you have writer’s block
Decide on how much and how often to publish your content and set time limits
Update, review, and track—be flexible

6. Measure Your Results

How do you know if your annual marketing plan is working? Answering this question will take some work, so you will have to decide which person or team will be responsible for gathering this information and then plan how to collect and present it. Here are some tips to measure your results:

Analyze if your goals were met
Track and analyze your KPI’s (key performance indicators)
Make measuring goals and the analysis afterwards a business priority
Track your conversions so you can adjust your plan accordingly
Collect all actionable metrics to optimise your plan
Be adaptable with the timeline
Try to automate wherever possible

Creating a solid annual marketing plan can help navigate your business through the year, whether it’s a good year or bad. It makes sales easier for any business owner, reveals where you are now and where you want to be in the future. It defines your priorities for this year and lets you decide what to cut from last year. Most importantly, it lets you and your team get on the same page to navigate your business to success properly.