How to Create a Marketing Plan

13 Lessons Beginner

About this course

Need help making your marketing plan rock?

Developing a marketing plan that gains buy-in, resonates with your audience, and delivers results requires real insight and understanding of what works: what are the key things you need to focus on; how should you approach them; and how do you pull them together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?

Let’s face it, building followers, gaining customers, and growing your business aren’t easy things to achieve. We all need a little help along the way…tips, know-how, and shortcuts to get us going and then be able to scale effectively and efficiently.

Your step-by-step guide to building a focused, concise and actionable marketing plan

This online training course takes you through the building blocks for creating an effective marketing plan. Combining techniques, tools, and templates that have been battle tested and honed across market sectors, geographies, and marketing challenges, it provides a systematic approach for preparing, crafting, and continually improving your plan as you gain more feedback and information.

The output will be a more considered marketing plan that’s geared to delivering meaningful activities that drive above-and-beyond results.

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Course Structure

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INTRODUCTION 2 Lessons

Course Introduction

This video provides an outline of what the course will cover and introduces you to the core principles for how to approach your marketing planning.

A Simple Framework

This video provides an outline of the One Page Marketing Plan template, taking you through how it's made up and what each of the building blocks are.

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AUDIENCE 3 Lessons

Creating a Target Persona

The first pillar of the One Page Marketing Plan is to identify and understand your 'Audience'. This video takes you through how to identify, define, and profile your ideal Target Persona, which is the first building block in understanding your audience.

Mapping Your Customer Journey

Your audience and specific target persona move through a journey as they encounter your brand, look to purchase, and develop an ongoing relationship with you. This tutorial helps you to understand this journey, and how you can leverage it to focus your marketing and customer engagement.

Crafting Your Value Proposition

Defining and then being able to articulate the value that you're delivering to your audience is crucial to the success of your marketing activities. This tutorial gives you a framework for crafting a Value Proposition that will resonate with your audience and stimulate them to action.

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STRATEGY 3 Lessons

Defining Your Marketing Goals

Having defined, profiled, and understood your Audience, the second pillar of the One Page Marketing Plan is to devise 'Strategies' to engage with them, convince them of your offering, and build their trust. Our starting point is to establish the Marketing Goals that we aim to achieve through the execution of the plan. Your Marketing Goals offer the vision of where you want to be.

Outlining Your Key Strategies

Many marketing plans today miss out the crucial aspect of what strategies are to be applied to meet the marketing goals, instead jumping straight into tactical executions. Strategies are the determining factor for great marketing. They are the approaches that you'll take to win. This tutorial dives into what constitutes a strategy, how they relate to tactics, and the thinking process that goes into devising them.

Setting Your Pricing

A key element of your marketing strategy is how to price and position your offering. This tutorial takes you through how your pricing and positioning build upon your defined marketing goals and strategies, and then looks at the methods for setting your pricing and positioning accordingly to maximise the value equation for your customers.

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ACTIVITIES 3 Lessons

Selecting Your Marketing Channels

Having built an understanding of our audience, and then developed the strategies that we're going to use to engage with them and convince them of the value that we're offering, we now have to put it into action by defining our 'Activities'. We start by assessing the places where we're going to do this, i.e. our Marketing Channels. This tutorial helps you to determine which channels to use, and how to approach them.

Determining Your Tactics & Activities

Ultimately your Marketing Plan comes down to what is it that you're actually going to do. This tutorial gives you the tools to determine the specific Tactics & Activities to use to deliver the strategies that you've defined against your identified target audience.

Establishing Your Measures of Success

As you put your Tactics & Activities into play you need to be able to see what's working and what's not. Having a clear picture of how you're going to measure the success of your marketing plan ensures that you're moving in the right direction towards the achievement of your defined goals. This tutorial outlines the key metrics to use, when and how in order to steer, optimize, and improve your marketing plan over time.

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MAKE IT REAL 2 Lessons

Make It Real

The One Page Marketing Plan isn't about creating a document that exists as a piece of paper. It's value is in making it real. This tutorial helps you understand the processes involved in turning the plan into a tool that directs and drives not only your marketing, but your business as a whole.

Case Study: Starbucks One Page Marketing Plan

The previous tutorials explained how to construct your One Page Marketing Plan; in this video we'll look at the One Page Marketing Plan in action using an example of a real-life brand, Starbucks, to illustrate what to include, how to present it, and how the plan comes together.