Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
Javier Ramirez
Liberty University
BUSI 520: Strategic Marketing Management
Muriel Wilson
January 16, 2022
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or
mission. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software they'll
use to execute that mission and track its success.
For example, while a greater plan or department might handle social media
marketing, you might consider your work on Facebook as an individual marketing
strategy.
A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It is the framework from
which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each strategy back
to a larger marketing operation and business goal.
For example, your company is launching a new software product, and it wants
customers to sign up. These calls for the marketing department to develop a marketing plan
that'll help introduce this product to the industry and drive the desired signups.
The department decides to launch a blog dedicated to this industry, a new YouTube
video series to establish expertise, and an account on Twitter to join the conversation
around this subject. All of this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into
software users.
To summarize, the business's marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software
product to the marketplace and driving signups to that product. The business will execute
that plan with three marketing strategies: a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and
a Twitter account. Of course, the business might consider these three things one giant
marketing strategy, each with its specific content strategies. How granular you want your
marketing plan to get is up to you. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a
particular set of steps in its creation. State your business's mission.
Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission
is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business's main mission
statement. Be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing
plan to elaborate on how you'll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission. For
example, if your business's mission is "to make booking travel a delightful experience," your
marketing mission might be "to attract an audience of travelers, educate them on the
tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform."
Determine the KPIs for this mission.
Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission's
progress. To do so, you'll need to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are
individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units
help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to
business leaders.
Let's take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our
mission is "to attract an audience of travelers," we might track website visits using organic
page views. In this case, "organic page views" is one KPI, and we can see our number of
page views grow over time.
Identify your buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex,
location, family size, and job title. Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business's
current and potential customers. Therefore, all business leaders must agree on your buyer
personas.
Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
Here's where you'll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy.
Because there is a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, you
must choose wisely and explain how you'll use your content and channels in this section of
your marketing plan.
A content strategy should stipulate:
Which types of content you’ll create? These can include blog posts, YouTube videos,
infographics, and ebooks.
How much of it you'll create. You can describe content volume in daily, weekly,
monthly, or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on your workflow and the short-term
goals you set for your content.
The goals (and KPIs) you'll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic,
social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which
pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
The channels on which you'll distribute this content. Popular channels at your
disposal include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.
Clearly define your plan's omissions.
A marketing plan explains the marketing team’s focus. It also explains what the
marketing team will not focus on.
If there are other aspects of your business that you aren't serving in this particular plan,
include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas,
KPIs, and content. You can't please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your
team isn't on the hook for something, you need to make it known.
Define your marketing budget.
Your content strategy might leverage many free channels and platforms, but there are
several hidden expenses a marketing team needs to account for. Whether its freelance fees,
sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing
budget and outline each expense in this section o Identify your competition.
Part of marketing knows whom you're marketing against. Research the key players in
your industry and consider profiling each one. Keep in mind not every competitor will pose
the same challenges to your business. For example, while one competitor might be ranking
highly on search engines for keywords you want your website to rank for, another
competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an
account.
