13 Essential Elements of a Marketing Plan that Make it Outstanding & Their Impact

Crafting an outstanding marketing plan is an art that requires critical elements of a marketing plan to ensure success. We’ve gathered insights from CEOs and marketing directors on the essential components of a marketing strategy. From highlighting your unique selling proposition to utilizing behavioral email targeting, explore the diverse perspectives of thirteen experts on what makes a marketing plan truly exceptional.

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Elements of a Marketing Plan: Highlight Your Unique Selling Proposition

A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is an essential elements of a marketing plan because it helps to differentiate your product or service from the competition. Your USP should clearly communicate what makes your offering better than others in the market and why customers should choose you over your competitors. 

Having a strong USP not only sets you apart from the competition but also helps to attract and retain customers. It gives your brand a distinct identity and creates a lasting impression on consumers, making them more likely to remember you when they are ready to make a purchase. 

Moreover, a well-defined USP can also help in creating effective marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience and drive sales. By highlighting your unique features or benefits, you can effectively showcase your value proposition and convince customers to choose your product or service.

Shaun Martin, Founder and CEO, Sell My House Fast

Adapt to Consumer Trends

Not just a strategy but also a necessity. Yes, for creating outstanding elements of a marketing plan, “adaptability to trends” is not just a choice but a compulsion. It helps in retaining existing customers and attracting new ones. In a competitive market, you cannot opt for outdated elements of a marketing plan if you aim to ensure long-term success. 

As a strategic marketer, I consistently find it to be the most effective way to connect with the dynamic consumer base. Without an understanding of current consumer preferences and expectations, businesses cannot even survive.

Varun Mukhi, Co-Founder, Scoop Global

Set Clear Marketing KPIs

The best elements of a marketing plan are the ones with the clearest KPIs. The single biggest challenge in marketing is getting clear feedback on how effective your spending is, and campaigns with vague or poorly chosen KPIs can often turn into money pits, especially if they’re giving positive—but inaccurate—feedback. 

Whenever we can boil a marketing plan down to conversions per dollar spent, I’m confident that we’re on firm ground. Even if that campaign doesn’t work out, we’ll figure it out quickly and be able to pivot.

Nick Valentino, VP of Market Operations, Bellhop

Conduct In-Depth Competitor Analysis

When kicking off their elements of a marketing plan, marketers need to include in-depth competitor analysis. This lets them get the lay of the land in terms of competition, figure out what they’re good at and not so good at, and come up with a way to make their products or services stand out.

There are a bunch of ways to look at your competition, but a really solid one is using the SWOT framework—that’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This helps identify what sets your company apart and plans for how to take on the competition. Doing a SWOT analysis on your competitors means looking at both their online game and their real-world presence. Startups should see how their competitors are getting the word out online and the kind of stuff they’re posting. Plus, they shouldn’t ignore any actual physical stores or offices their competitors have.

After getting the scoop on your competitors’ strong and weak points, you can start shaping your own strategy for positioning. This should be all about how you can make your product or service pop in a way that your ideal customers will love. Remember, your strategy needs to be your own thing, not just a repeat of what your competitors are doing.

Amy Tribe, Director, OGLF (Our Good Living Formula)

Understand Your Market Size

Get a fully outlined look at your market size, especially if you’re a small business operating locally. You should know the approximate market size for your product or service—how many people can buy your product, and what is the minimum base income to be considered? How often is a new copy of your item or service purchased? What competition do you have to account for? 

The more in-depth this market analysis becomes, the more accurately you can calculate spending for each set of activities in your plan. You don’t want to pour thousands of dollars into a marketing campaign before realizing the area you are targeting has only three potential prospects.

Kate Kandefer, CEO, SEOwind

Include a Contingency Plan

I think every elements of a marketing plan should come with a contingency plan as well. In the dynamic business environment, unexpected challenges can arise, so having contingency plans in place allows businesses to respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Contingency plans help safeguard the reputation and equity of a brand. By addressing challenges proactively, businesses can minimize the negative impact on brand perception. They simply provide a structured approach for handling uncertainties and challenges, helping businesses navigate unexpected situations with resilience and agility.

Melissa Ng, Business Development and Operations Manager, AppSalon

Create a Detailed Marketing Timeline

Establishing a firm and concrete timeline for your marketing efforts is essential, one that includes a full RACI and budget for each step. I highly encourage anyone trying to craft a great elements of a marketing plan to make sure this timeline includes every scheduled promotion and a complete breakdown of the associated costs—even for things that aren’t fully set in stone yet. 

What you really want to avoid is under-planning content because it is always much easier to have something fall off the planner than it is to add something last minute when you’re scrambling to find budget and manpower.

Onno Halsema, CEO, Contentoo

Align with Long-Term Growth Goals

Any good marketing plan needs to look beyond the short term and demonstrate how it will feed into your overall long-term growth goals. The idea is that any elements of a marketing plan you’re putting together needs to clearly demonstrate how the steps taken in that plan will feed into where you want your business to be in the next six months, the next year, or the next five years. 

Even if this isn’t super detailed, it is important to include because it ensures you are thinking about your actions in the right way. You’re not just running a campaign to run a campaign; you’re running that campaign to meet certain tangible business goals.

Dragos Badea, CEO, Yarooms

Develop a Comprehensive Pricing Strategy

Every elements of a marketing plan must have a comprehensive pricing strategy. You’ve got to think about how you’re going to set prices for your products and services. There are lots of different ways to go about this, but here are the big three:

Price skimming, which means setting your prices higher than your competitors at first to recoup what you spent making the product, and then lowering the price later on. With this approach, you’re likely to sell fewer items, but at a higher price.

Competitive pricing, which is all about looking at what your competitors are charging and setting your prices accordingly.

Penetration pricing, where you set your prices lower than your competitors to grab a larger share of the market, attract more customers, and sell more products. With this tactic, you’re aiming to sell a lot at a lower price and then increase the price as time goes on.

Lucas Ochoa, Founder and CEO, Automat

Allocate Resources with a Financial Plan

Effective marketing hinges on a meticulously devised financial plan, as financial allocation ensures the seamless execution of strategic initiatives. The judicious distribution of resources across diverse channels optimizes reach and resonance. A well-considered budget allows for the deployment of targeted campaigns, maximizing exposure to the intended audience. 

By allocating resources based on a comprehensive understanding of market dynamics, organizations can adapt swiftly to changing trends and consumer preferences. This financial discipline not only enhances operational efficiency but also facilitates a data-driven approach, enabling real-time adjustments for optimal performance.

In essence, a thoughtfully constructed budget serves as the linchpin for a marketing strategy’s success, allowing businesses to navigate the competitive landscape with agility and precision.

Kate Cherven, Marketing Specialist, United Site Services

Implement a Robust SEO Strategy

One essential element of an outstanding elements of a marketing plan is a well-executed SEO strategy. With the help of a robust SEO strategy, businesses can rank at the top of Google’s search results, effectively reaching out to customers who are already interested in their products or services.

For example, one of my clients experienced a staggering 278% growth in just 12 months after implementing our SEO strategy. We achieved this by targeting valuable keywords relevant to their industry, consequently seeing their business growth potential skyrocket.

To express this in concrete data, a successful SEO strategy consistently leads to more traffic and higher-quality traffic coming to your site. These are potential customers who are ready to purchase your products or services; the value derived from this is immeasurable. Hence, a well-executed SEO strategy should be a cornerstone of any effective elements of a marketing plan.

Magee Clegg, CEO, Cleartail Marketing

Research Your Target Audience

One essential element of an outstanding elements of a marketing plan is understanding your target audience. This involves creating detailed buyer personas, which represent your ideal customers based on data and insights about your existing customer base and market research. Through analysis of your online store’s metrics and customer segments, you can better understand your audience’s preferences, pain points, and motivations.

In my work, for instance, we frequently use this approach when developing Shopify marketing plans. By understanding the target audience intimately, we can tailor marketing strategies effectively, select the optimal channels for content distribution, and ensure a high level of customer engagement.

A well-analyzed target audience provides the blueprint for creating more relevant and valuable content that resonates with your customer base, ultimately leading to higher conversions and stronger customer relationships. Without this crucial step, even the most creative marketing plan may miss its mark and fail to achieve the desired results.

Steve Pogson, Founder, First Pier

Utilize Behavioral Email Targeting

In the world of marketing plans, there’s this cool thing called “Behavioral Email Targeting.” It’s like sending emails, but smarter. Instead of just doing the usual, it looks at how people behave. 

By understanding what they do, you can send them messages that fit what they like. It’s like talking to them at the right time with just the right stuff. This gets them more interested and makes them more likely to buy your stuff. 

So, if you decide to use Behavioral Email Targeting in your plan, it’s like unlocking a secret power for your emails. Suddenly, they work way better, and people become even more interested in your offering, turning them from potential customers into actual buyers.

Mohit Singh, Marketing Director

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