Download the free marketing strategy planning template
How to use this template?
This template is used to help you better plan your strategy especially when you need to create a marketing plan for your business plan. In addition to formal business and marketing plan development, successful businesses reevaluate their plans and strategies on a regular basis.
The template is organized in five areas as follows:
- Target market
- Customer needs
- Value proposition
- Channels
- Metrics
Target Market
Your target market represents a certain segment of customers at which your business is focused to promote and sell your products and services.
Your target customers tend to be those people who are more than likely to purchase from your business. Avoid to become too general with the desire of having a bigger share of the current market. That is just like shooting many times at random rather than targeting only one target. Make sure to explain your target market in more details depending on your understanding of your respective products and services.
Customer Needs
Customer needs are issues, pains or desires that your customers want to fix, achieve or satisfy when buying a product or service from your company. This category includes customer desires, preferences and currently unmet needs. The actual success of each and every business will depend on the capability to develop services and products which address the actual customer needs.
Customer needs and requirements must drive advertising and marketing choices and absolutely no marketing strategy need to be followed until it is based on customer analysis. Determine the way customers satisfy their needs and requirements from your marketing point of view.
Value Proposition
A good value proposition can be described as guarantee of value to be provided to the customer. It really is the main motive any potential customer should purchase your product or service. In other words, value proposition is a statement which describes exactly how your product or service handles customers’ issues and also improves their particular condition, provides certain benefits, informs the perfect target customer with the reason why he or she should purchase from your company rather than from any other competitor.
Marketing Channels
Selecting the most appropriate marketing channels for your business is a strategic decision. This area is critical for the success of your marketing. Many businesses achieve tremendous success by simply perfecting certain marketing channels. Think about the success of Amazon which basically based on the exceptional capabilities to sell online. Instead of just thinking through your existing channels try to come up with ideas to expand your current channels.
Marketing Metrics
The marketing planning template helps you break down your marketing metrics into 3 categories: growth, innovation and profit. Try to come up with the most appropriate metrics in each of these 3 categories.
Growth metrics should focus on your sales growth and customer base growth.
The innovation category should cover and measure the growth coming from new services, new products, new customer segments, new markets, etc.
Finally, the profit metrics should measure the marketing ROI and profitability of your business.
Download the free marketing strategy planning template and brainstorm new ideas with your team before you finalize your business strategy.
To better track your metrics and results from your marketing strategy you can use your excel dashboard templates