Developing and executing the perfect marketing strategy for your company is difficult. We are happy to give you a helping hand.
A close-knit group of people who breathe the Tilburg atmosphere and have the ambition to always go a step further.
As a marketer, your job is to respond to market needs. And those needs are constantly changing; especially in these stormy times. With a marketing plan, you have a foothold and can respond to changes. With this blog post, we will give you tips that will help you write the marketing plan for 2022.
In a marketing plan, you describe the market and needs of your potential customer. You describe how your product or service responds to those needs and how you will achieve revenue goals. This is how you work toward a strategy and then a plan with concrete action items.
If you already have a marketing plan, it’s understandable to think: Why do I need to write a 2022 marketing plan? The answer is simple: the world looks very different now than it did, say, two years ago. Even the expectations we had last year, during this year’s pandemic, may have been quite different from reality. So to arrive at your desired destination, you have to change your course from time to time. By the way, you don’t have to start over at all. Updating your current marketing plan is also possible, of course.
A marketing plan is a framework by which you introduce specific actions. Sometimes you can prepare actions for the new year with minimal changes to your marketing plan. The events of recent years have made that a little more difficult. You may need to completely revise your master plan. The components below should not be missing from your marketing plan.
You start with a dream, a long-term vision. This gives you direction and allows you to make shorter-term goals. This could include sales, a certain number of new customers or a percentage of market share. As long as they are measurable goals. The SMART method gives you guidance in this regard:
An example of a marketing objective might be to increase sales from the target group “women between the ages of 30 and 40” by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2022.
Once you know what your goals are, it’s time to look at where you stand. A SWOT analysis is a classic tool for this purpose:
For the first two from this list, the strengths and weaknesses, look at your own organization. What are you doing well and what could be better?
The last two items focus on forces outside the organization: market developments, trends and future expectations.
The better you know your customer, the better your marketing strategy will work. You can sketch the target audience in broad outlines, but it’s good to create a number of personas in addition: stereotypical customers whom you describe in great detail: name, age, family situation, education, work, leisure activities and buying behavior. Tailoring your services, products and communications to those personas will maximize your chances of success.
To achieve your marketing goals, there are certain tools available. Often these are divided into the 4 Ps:
In this section of your 2022 marketing plan, you describe how you will achieve the goals. Such strategies are primarily aimed at gaining competitive advantage. You achieve such an advantage, for example, by choosing the right audiences and marketing tools (see above).
To implement the marketing strategy, budget is needed. You can determine the amount of your marketing budget in various ways, such as by making a percentage of your sales available or by spending just a little more than the competition. The best is the task-setting method: you determine what budget you need to achieve a certain level of revenue. With that, your sales become a consequence of your marketing activities.
Once you have the above items in place, it’s time to create an operational marketing plan. Often you focus on one year in doing so; in this case, 2022. This plan states very specifically what marketing activities you will undertake in the coming year.
Writing a marketing plan is a lot of work; you really have to sit down and do it. Fortunately, you are not alone. The experienced marketing professionals at 2manydots are happy to help you, both in creating your marketing strategy and in implementing it. The proven Resultsmatter® approach enables you to achieve ambitious goals.
