As a marketer, your job is to respond to market needs, which you highlight in your Marketing Plan 2025. Market needs are constantly changing. With a marketing plan, you have a foothold and can respond to changes. With this blog post, we give you tips that will help you write a strategic marketing plan for 2025.
What is a marketing plan?
In a marketing plan, you describe the market and the needs of your potential customers. 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.
Why create your marketing plan 2025?
If you already have a good marketing plan, it is understandable that you are thinking: why do I need to create a marketing plan for 2025? The answer is simple: the world looks very different now than it did a few years ago, which causes the external factors to have changed, demographic factors as well as economic factors and environmental factors. Technological developments also play a role in this. So to arrive at the desired destination, you need to change your course from time to time (and with that, your marketing plan). By the way, you don’t have to start over at all. Updating your current marketing plan is also possible, of course.
What’s in a marketing plan?
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. You may need to completely revise your master plan and adjust your marketing plan based on internal analysis and external analysis. The components below should not be missing from your marketing plan.
Marketing Goals
Your marketing plan begins 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:
- Specifically,
- Measurable
- Acceptable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
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 2025.
SWOT analysis
Once you know what the goals are for your marketing plan, it’s time to look at where you stand and do an external analysis and internal analysis. A SWOT analysis is a classic tool for this, which you use to identify strengths and weaknesses, market developments, trends and future expectations:
- Strenghts
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
For the first two from this list, the strengths and weaknesses, do an internal analysis of your own organization. What are you doing well and what could be better?
The last two items are part of the external analysis and focus on external factors: market developments, trends and future expectations.
Target
The better you know your customer, the better your marketing strategy will work. You can outline the target audience in your marketing plan, but it is good to create a number of personas in addition: potential customers whose demographic characteristics 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.
Marketing tools
To achieve the goals of your marketing plan, there are certain tools available. Often these are divided into the 4 Ps within your marketing plan:
- Product: How attractive is the actual product or service you offer? What added value does it bring to the customer?
- Price: What price are you asking for the product? How did you arrive at that price? How does this price compare to the prices charged by competitors? What market segment are you in with this price?
- Location: Where are your existing products or service for sale? Only through you or also through outside vendors? Do you have the ambition to broaden this distribution?
- Promotion: How do you communicate the advantages and disadvantages of your existing products or services? Through which channels are you reaching your target audience?
Marketing Strategy
In this section of your 2025 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 target groups and marketing tools in your marketing plan (see above).
Marketing budget
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.
Operational marketing plan (2025)
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, 2025. This marketing plan states very specifically what marketing activities you will undertake in the coming year.
Need help? 2manydots is your marketing partner
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 the creation of your marketing plan and in its implementation. The proven Resultsmatter® approach enables you to achieve ambitious goals you have set in your marketing plan.
