Reaching your goals is challenging if you don’t have a strategy for achieving them. Like every other part of a business, you must map out your strategic marketing plan to guarantee success. Read 8 Figure Firm’s blog to learn more.
What is a strategic marketing plan?
A strategic marketing plan is a roadmap of how you will organize, execute, and track your advertising strategies. It clearly describes how your firm will generate leads and reach your target audience.
There are several different types of campaigns that could benefit your business. You could craft a campaign that focuses on advertising and pay-per-click expenditures or a social media marketing campaign that concentrates brand awareness across your various channels.
Regardless of your campaign type, it’s critical to think through your objectives and strategies. Once you’ve developed your roadmap, you can inform your team and start to implement your ideas.
Benefits of a strategic marketing plan
Creating a marketing plan provides many benefits for your firm. First, it helps you define your goals. If you don’t have a clear objective, it will be challenging for your firm to achieve your desired success.
A clear roadmap will help you create more alignment within your firm. Because this type of plan includes objectives, timelines, and metrics, it can help everyone stay on the same page. The alignment will help you make quicker decisions, increase employee engagement, and manage resources effectively.
Well-crafted plans can also help you stick to your marketing budget. Rather than pouring money into something that doesn’t work, you can pull resources towards the strategies that yield significant results. It also provides you with a clearer picture of what works.
Parts of a strategic marketing plan
Executive summary
The first part of creating a marketing plan involves writing an executive summary, which provides a broader view of the overall document. Your summary should include your target audience, services, strategies, unique selling proposition, mission, vision, and values.
Marketing goals
Next, you’ll need to define your overall marketing goals. Objectives should be specific and measurable with a clear timeline. Some good examples include:
- Gain 45 new reviews every six months
- Attain 10 new Instagram followers every week
- Add 100 subscribers to your mailing list every quarter
- Increase your open rate by 5% by the end of the year
- Write 5 articles per month to post on your website
- Create 10 YouTube videos each month
Description of current marketing position
In this section, you should focus on your firm’s marketing efforts. You should include an analysis of your firm’s current marketing position, strategies, and results, as this will become the baseline to measure your progress accurately. SWOT analysis may be helpful here.
Competitive research
Your plan should also include competitive research to help you understand your market position. Research your competitors and analyze their size, location, unique selling proposition, strategy, strengths, and weaknesses.
Buyer persona
Here, you should determine a buyer persona representing your ideal client. Effective personas can help you understand your target audience and implement better strategies. Here’s the type of information you should include:
- Age
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Location
- Education
- Income
- Occupation
- Language
- Likes/Dislikes
- Fears/Concerns
- Challenges
- What do they want?
Strategies
This section should include your marketing and content strategies. You’ll need to describe content types, amounts, goals, KPIs, channels, and paid advertising. The information in this section should be easy to communicate and understand.
Key performance indicators
An effective marketing plan includes key performance indicators to track progress and measure success. Some standard marketing KPIs can include website traffic, conversion rate, cost-per-acquisition, number of leads, followers, subscribers, and more.
Budget
It’s crucial to develop a budget. Regarding your overall budget, you should spend around 25% of this year’s expected revenue on your marketing and conduct quarter by quarter analysis of the increase in revenue to match your projected marketing spend.
You should then spend 60% of that budget on brand building and 40% on direct acquisition. Brand building campaigns will focus on growing your firm’s awareness and reputation while direct acquisition campaigns will focus on sales.
After breaking it down to a 60/40 ratio, you will break it down even further to the 70/20/10 rule. You’ll spend 70% of the brand building and direct acquisition budgets on proven strategies, 20% on less-effective channels, and 10% on experimentation.
Roles and responsibilities
Finally, your plan should include the roles and responsibilities of each person on your marketing team. Clearly outline who will be responsible for each facet of the plan and communicate expectations.
Speak to the experts
Mapping out your marketing plan is critical to the success of your firm. With an effective plan in place, you’ll be able to set clear goals, create alignment, and save money.
While it’s a necessary process, creating a marketing plan can quickly become challenging. You can find more information about marketing plans in Luis Scott’s book, The King of Growth.
If you’re ready to take your law firm to the next level, purchase your copy of The King of Growth today. We’ll help you turn your law firm into a law business.
