Master Plan To Achieve Brand Salience For Your Business Through Marketing And Branding

“A goal without a plan is just a wish,” and a business cannot rely on wishes. Planning is the heart and soul of any business as it plots your organization’s course of action leading to the achievement of set goals. A marketing plan portrays your target audience, their interests, and the ways of reaching them. Below are some of the significant steps to be kept in mind before choosing or forming a marketing plan.

Market Research

Market Research plays the most dominant role in planning as an action without knowledge is not an action, but merely some futile efforts. It involves collecting information that provides insight into the customer’s preferences, shopping patterns, and location. It also helps you keep an eye on your competitors and ongoing market trends.

Profiling of Target Markets

One needs to do segmentation of the market as promoting your products or services to everyone can cost you a bomb along with being ineffective. Segmentation can be based on various characteristics like location, demographics (like age, gender, income level, occupation, etc.), behavior (like loyalty, readiness to use, etc.) and lifestyle (social class, personality, etc).

Identifying Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

A USP is a reason that attracts your customers and persuades them to buy from you rather than your competitors. For example, none of the noodle brands was able to capture the market share of Maggi as its USP lies in its taste maker or masala. One can develop their USP by identifying their area of competence and the benefits provided to customers.

Selection of Marketing Avenues

It is essential to decide in advance which promoting, territories you will concentrate on, along with the most suitable marketing avenue. Some of the effective and commonly used marketing platforms are social media, business websites, blogging, print media, cold calling and mails.

Deciding on Goals and Budget

A plan is always underpinned by the desired goals and objectives, which take the business towards success. Business goals should be defined in a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based) way.

Finance is one of the most critical parts of any plan as it is hard to monitor all the expenses. As opposed to paging through many spreadsheets, make budgets part of your marketing plan. As work advances, you will have the option to track actual results against projections. This way, you can measure the return on investment (ROI) and make informed decisions.

Strengthening of Customer Base

Customers are key to success for any business, thus it’s important to satisfy them and encourage loyalty. There is no marketing plan better than word of mouth marketing, which can be achieved by nurturing your loyal customers. Providing exceptional services, taking criticism positively, and constantly evolving can help strengthen your customer base.

Monitor and Review

It is important to monitor and review your marketing activities to ensure that everything is going in the right direction. Reviewing can also enable you to take corrective measures, as even the best plans need to be adjusted based on the performance of your projects and campaigns.

LAVA Brands is one such Dubai-based company that caters to the planning and execution of marketing strategies.