The main reason why your company should have a marketing plan is because it helps in the execution of the company's general objectives, which are related to the market, such as: attracting new customers, brand building, customer loyalty, increasing turnover and market share.

The Marketing Plan is a document where the objectives are stated, the strategy is planned and the action plan that your company must execute in order to maintain current customers and generate new business opportunities for the company is detailed. In addition, having a clear marketing plan is fundamental, since it is the precise way to classify strategies, action plan and measure results. It also creates real commitments on the part of the marketing and sales department, as well as helping to motivate the team for its correct fulfillment.

A well-executed marketing plan will fundamentally give you vision and control over the business. A big challenge for companies is to assertively define what strategies to use to attract new customers and position your brand in the digital world. In this way, you can achieve a roadmap to the goals you have with your gas station.

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What is a marketing plan?

The marketing plan is a document that analyzes the situation of the company or business, establishes the marketing actions plan that contemplates the objectives and goals in the short, medium and long term. It can be done for the company in general or for a product and/or individual services.

Every business needs a marketing plan to achieve goals, grow and win new customers. The marketing plan, done effectively, will help you understand the market in which you operate, who your competitors are and what differentiates them from you.

For example: your gas station is now starting to offer its products digitally and has decided to invest in content marketing to reach organic traffic.

The first step will be to produce optimized content, of course, but this will not be enough, there has to be a whole strategy behind it. For this, it is key to know your business in depth in order to get the results you are looking for. The content strategy will gain more shape within the marketing plan and will be more precise. You will know aspects such as who your buyer persona is, what stage of the buying journey they are in, the keywords of the content or what media to use, among other important details.

This is the goal of a good marketing plan: to offer in rich detail every action the company needs to take to stand out in its market.

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What is Growth Marketing and why is it important in my marketing plan?

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a long-term strategic methodology that helps companies achieve sustainable and measurable growth. It is a data-driven approach that leverages end-to-end funnel optimization to find, attract, convert and retain buyers into loyal brand advocates.

It's an approach to attracting, engaging and retaining customers that focuses on continuous experimentation and paying special attention to your customers' unique motives and preferences. By creating and sending highly personalized and individualized messages that respond to your customers' needs, you can quickly optimize your organization's growth across multiple channels, especially the ones that matter most to your customers. For example, by using Waddi you can keep track of your customers and their gas refill orders, as well as how often they order gas. How can you use this information to your advantage? Taking into account growth marketing strategies, you could send customers a message through the medium of your choice, reminding them that their gas refueling day is approaching. In this way, you will achieve a personalized approach and a sense of closeness with your customers.

While traditional marketing generally focuses on the broad end of the funnel, growth marketing meets consumers at every stage of an extended sales funnel. Growth marketing focuses on building customer relationships and fostering loyalty; it is a long-term strategy in which authenticity and engagement generate brand ambassadors and cultivate customer lifetime value in an organized way.

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Examples of Grwoth marketing campaigns.

Growth marketing strategies can be used effectively to support a variety of objectives, including incentivizing existing customers to participate in referral programs, interacting with new customers, and fostering the engagement that businesses seek. You can achieve this with the following strategies:

Fidelity.

Customer retention ensures that your hard-earned customers keep buying and choosing your service. Your customers have more choice than ever when it comes to deciding what to buy or who to buy it from, which forces brands to continually earn customer trust. The idea is to show your customers that they are more than just a name and profit for your company, this can increase the feeling of belonging to the brand.

Loyalty campaigns are a great way to keep your committed customers coming back. For example, if your gas station has a membership program, look for ways to incentivize their experience as a recognition of their trust. You can use campaigns that promote offers such as exclusive access, advances or rewards based on customer status to encourage continued loyalty to your brand. If your most loyal users feel that this loyalty gives them recognition from your company, they will undoubtedly choose your service again.

Observing the conversion patterns of past customers and reinforcing these desirable behaviors with targeted loyalty campaigns can preserve your customers' affection for your brand.

Referral programs.

Every company's marketing team is constantly testing and optimizing offers to help attract new users through its most loyal source of advertising: existing customers. A study by Nielsen, a pioneer in user experience, found that 83% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other advertising source, so a strong referral campaign can act as powerful social proof to attract new users.

To test referral offers, you can segment audience groups and offer one type of incentive to one group and a different one to the other group: the goal is to find the sweet spot where you maximize conversions per referral.

For example, your gas company offers a two-sided referral program, where both the existing and referred user have a discount benefit on their next gas refill through Waddi when the referred user signs up. This could drastically reduce your advertising spend to acquire new users, and even increase your subscriptions by up to 50%.

Onboarding.

Once a new customer has subscribed to your product or website, you have an ideal opportunity to foster their engagement with your brand and collect more data that can help you create better experiences. Remember that your goal is to improve the customer journey of your new users, so implementing a multichannel onboarding sequence where they are likely to interact with meaningful content can help.

For example, your first message could be a simple welcome message, followed shortly after by a message asking users what type of service they are most interested in. Other messages may ask if they prefer to receive notifications by email or cell phone. You can then continue the sequence based on the user's expressed preferences and optimize future offers to maximize engagement.

Engagement from the top of the funnel.

When you're trying to attract new customers, pushing too hard for an immediate sale can cause the user to back out immediately. What you need to do is develop a long-term strategy that helps them become familiar with your brand so they can take the next step on their own terms.

In this case, a strategy focused on content marketing can help your brand demonstrate expertise in thought leadership and interact with new customers who may want to buy from you in the future. Create specific buyer personas to find out who your potential customers are and develop content designed to appeal to each of them. Your call to action can be to subscribe to your email newsletter or receive a free offer, such as an e-book or checklist. You can engage your target audience through social media channels, organic, as well as social ads and paid retargeting, using A/B testing to optimize your social posts, ads and content headlines to maximize engagement and conversions from forms.

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Objectives of a good marketing plan.

In order for your marketing plan to have a good basis and give good results, you must formulate your objectives by answering three basic questions. This will help you to orient your objectives, and make sure they are the right ones for your company.

Profile your buyer persona.

The marketing strategy must start from a deep knowledge of the target audience. It is not enough to segment according to age, gender and socioeconomic level, you must go deeper to understand their needs, desires, preferences, values and buying habits. Create your buyer persona or different profiles that allow you to design customized offers aimed at satisfying different needs.

Make an analysis of the market.

The first step in designing your SME's marketing plan is to assess the market, in this case it would be to thoroughly understand the gas market in Latin America. Analyze the competition to discover neglected niches and new business opportunities. With all the data collected, perform a SWOT analysis where you summarize the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities of the company. This will give you a broader and more objective view of your SME's position in the sector.

Analysis of your competition.

Undoubtedly, knowing your competition can give you valuable tools for your company. Knowing, for example, what your competitors' differential is, how they serve their customers, what their marketing campaigns are like, among other things, can tell you what are the things that customers prefer and what could be improved. Information of this type will help you understand the path you should take, whether you become an alternative or the choice par excellence.

Establish where your company is located.

This requires an analysis of where your company is at the moment: who are your most loyal customers, how your audience is behaving, what are the most popular products and the needs they best satisfy. You will also need to recognize the opportunities you have not taken advantage of, the challenges you have not yet overcome and where you need to invest resources to strengthen yourself.

Set your objectives.

What are the marketing goals you set out to achieve in the short and long term? These objectives will guide you along the way, so that you can know where you are and how far you have to go. It is essential that they are SMART objectives, i.e. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

It is advisable to think in an ideal scenario. However, this is not the time to build castles in the air, but to adopt a realistic point of view based on what you discovered when you found out where your company was. In this way, you will be able to aspire to goals with your company that you can achieve and that will allow you to maintain the continuity of your offer and the growth of your customers.

Segmentation and target market.

When you understand your audience, the ones who are really interested in your offer, it is easy to do the market segmentation to know where to target your marketing strategy.

This is a key element, since it covers everything from demographic data to the behaviors, interests and lifestyle of your users. This way, you won't lose money with poorly segmented campaigns or campaigns targeted to users who have no interest in your service.

Value proposition.

Based on the market analysis and the marketing objectives you have set, you must generate a unique selling proposition that differentiates your SME from the competition. What makes your business special? Why should customers choose you? This unique selling proposition can be anything from a special product or service to a story, but it must reflect your corporate identity and, above all, it must be valuable and appealing to your buyer persona. Federal Express, better known as FedEx for example, succeeded with a clear value proposition: overnight deliveries.

You must have a star feature that puts you under the spotlight, depending on your service. For example, the price of your gas station is better than the others, the quality of service is superior, you have to select what you want to choose as a differential of your service. If you recognize it, you will be able to take advantage of it in your strategy and in the creation of the marketing plan you will apply.

Design marketing strategies.

Your SME's marketing plan should contain the necessary steps to achieve your objectives. Ideally, you should go from general actions to more specific tasks. Do you need to strengthen branding or include complementary services? Do you need to improve customer service? In addition to determining the marketing strategies, you must choose the communication channels you will use to transmit your message. Remember that the best advertising campaign transmitted through the wrong channels can turn into a fiasco, since it will not reach your target audience.

Budget.

If you do not know how much money you have to invest in marketing for your company, you will not be able to discern in which channels or actions it is worth directing your resources. Although some tools are free, especially when it comes to social networks or digital analytics, if you do not have clear financial resources to carry out campaigns, you will not be able to plan a clear marketing strategy.

Establish KPI's and evaluate results.

Many companies' marketing plans skip this step, but if you do not evaluate the results, you will not be able to correct the course, optimize the budget or refocus your advertising campaigns. Before starting any action you should establish key performance indicators (KPI's) which will help you to check if you are achieving the expected results. It is also important that you review the accounting to see the income and expenses you are facing and to know if the campaigns are really being profitable.

Define the KPIs that will be measured, so that everything that is done in marketing revolves around them and their objectives. Make sure that the efforts are directed to achieve the proposed goals. There may be evidence of increasing numbers in other metrics that are visible to the naked eye, but if the objectives are not achieved, then you can't claim victory.

Now you know how important it is to have a marketing plan in your company and the key points to follow in order to see results in your efforts.

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