Main errors when designing a marketing plan

At present, designing a good marketing plan will make the difference between the success and failure of a company, since through it the roadmap to follow can be traced based on market studies, planning, strategies, and business goals.

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However, it is common that even with correct planning, errors occur when designing a marketing plan. Faced with this reality, being able to detect them on time is a competitive advantage for companies that can help them improve the results of their campaigns, allowing the commercial area to obtain more potential customers with opportunities to close sales.

Often, these errors can be generated by ignorance of the elements that make it up, but other times it can simply be due to poorly designed planning, where the information gathered from abroad is insufficient to develop a powerful strategy through a marketing plan that operates almost blindly seeking to achieve results more random than anticipated.

In this article, we will focus on identifying the top 5 errors when designing a marketing plan that could help you plan better in the future.

How is a marketing plan made?

Executing a proper marketing plan includes incorporating a series of steps to take to carry it out. These steps can be summarized as follows:

• Identify your target audience.
• Research the strategies of your competitors.
• Define your brand position.
• Set marketing goals. These can include conversion rates, organic traffic to your website, and brand awareness.
• Schedule your blog and social media content. Here all the content that is generated in your company must respond to a temporary programming structure to be published at certain times.
• Develop direct and indirect marketing strategies.
• Run campaigns based on that planning.
• Measure the results of those actions generated through your marketing plan.

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Errors when designing a marketing plan

Next, we explain the 5 most frequent mistakes that you can make without realizing it when preparing a marketing plan.

1. Develop ineffective communication strategies.

It may seem strange in these times, but some companies fail to communicate the objectives properly. You may be wondering how they could fear communication failures with the wide variety of communication channels that exist and are adapted to the needs of each company, but it is a reality that still happens to some companies that are resistant to change.

As we live in a highly connected world, there are more and more alternatives around communication tools with people wherever they are. Most of these messaging applications are in the cloud, so they are designed so that no message data is lost. End-to-end encryption allows people to keep their conversations private without compromising security.

2. Not conducting market research.

Market studies are important since they help companies to know the preferences of consumers from different geographical points, since otherwise they may be tempted to think that a market segment aimed at young people will respond to the same stimuli everywhere in the world when this rarely happens because cultures are different.

Carrying out market research will allow you to work with surveys, talk to other people, and redirect your marketing efforts to avoid speculation about the public to which you are going to sell your marketing campaigns. In addition, it will allow you to focus on the specific needs of each market segment, that is, to personalize your products or services, instead of targeting your business to a generic audience.

3. Not quantifying goals.

One of the most common mistakes when designing a marketing plan is writing objectives in general terms. In the same way that targeting the same audience can mislead your campaign strategy, by making invisible the sectors that also expect to be taken into account by the brand, also paying little attention to the elaboration of more specific objectives will reduce the opportunities to obtain metrics of the achievement of those objectives and how good results it generates.

To achieve this quantifiable status in the preparation of objectives, resorting to SMART objectives will help you establish the characteristics that they must have for their execution to be viable. These characteristics integrated into the SMART acronym are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Temporary.

4. Take unrealistic actions.

At this point, you should be aware of your limits, opportunities, advantages, and risks when designing a marketing plan. Returning to the previous point will help you better understand the meaning of realistic and achievable goals to know where to aim with your products or services by knowing your financial resources, the skills of your team, and the details of your market segment.

It is very important to have defined who your regular buyer is, where they are, what their most frequent preferences and demands are, and what other value alternatives you could offer that would catch their attention.

5. Not defining roles and responsibilities to carry out the plan.

Without the presence of a leader who is responsible for the plan, having a document will be useless to delegate functions. Only by choosing someone responsible for the implementation of the plan, you will be able to better monitor it, since planning cannot be done without delegating roles. It is a collaborative activity that requires several views and stages of execution, which will be carried out by the indicated people.

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In summary, these may not be all the errors when designing a marketing plan that we can identify, but they are the most important. Understanding the different stages that include it will help to define it more precisely, avoiding more of these errors that do not discriminate the size of a company, but determine the level of perception that they manifest due to new market trends, about supply and demand.