What is the difference between a marketing plan and a business plan?

What Is a Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of their products or services.

• value proposition
• key brand messaging
• ideal customers

Historically, marketings strategies have included “4 P’s”

1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion

Product (Or Service):

What do you have to offer? What value are you providing to the market? Before moving on, make sure you know what your product/service is.

Price:

How much are you asking for your product/service? What is the price point that will work best for your business and its goals? Will your customers pay that price to purchase your product?

Place:

Where does your product or service fit in the market? How will you reach your target market?

Promotion:

How will you show people your product/service exists, how will you convince them to use your product over the alternatives in the market, and how much will you need to spend in order to acquire new customers.

Quick Summary:

• A marketing strategy is a company’s plan for attracting new consumers and converting them into customers.
• A company’s value proposition should be the focus of marketing initiatives.
• The aim of a marketing campaign is to gain and communicate a durable competitive advantage over rivals.

Understanding Marketing Strategies

Your marketing strategy needs to directly align with your company’s values, messaging, budget, and vision. By building an authentic plan that fits with the above items, your should be able to attract the right people for what you’re offering.

A key piece of building a marketing strategy once you know what you’re selling is to define who you’re selling to. If you know who you’re selling to, you can then move on when that person would be looking to buy. Are they making purchases frequently? Is it a one-time thing? Is it a subscription?

Once you map out the buying cycle of your ideal customer you can then start to think about how that individual makes their decision to buy. What is their intention?

Do they have an immediate need? Ie. My tooth hurts, I need to go to the dentist. Or is it more awareness-driven? If someone saw an ad that showed they could have whiter teeth, would that trigger them to look for more information?

Once you understand the time and place your customers would be buying your product you can start to plan out the best areas you can reach these customers. This could be Google PPC(Pay Per Click) campaigns. Typically this channel will work when you’re targetting users who are looking specifically to solve a ‘pain-point’. I have a need, I go to google to search my need, and choose the service that looks like it will best solve my need.

After you have a clear idea of what your high-level marketing strategy is to start getting your business in front of the right people at the right time, you can start building out the Plan (Marketing Plan) to define the tactics and day-to-day operations to execute on your strategy.

In short, a marketing plan is a document that organizes your marketing strategy into tangible action items in order to achieve your business goals. The plan should be set up with clear timelines and those who are accountable for completing the action items Finally the plan needs to have clear goals to know whether the plan was successful. Try not to overcomplicate the plan, the most important factor in your plan is to have the team aligned in the objectives & work required to accomplish the plan. Make it simple, make it measurable, make it happen.

• Start with your business goals and objectives.
• Understand who you want to sell to.
• From there decide where that person would potentially find your business. Identify how much that will cost to get in front of them.
• Estimate how many customers would have to see your advertisement in order to purchase.
• Calculate how much you’ll make once that sale comes through.
• Identity whether that channel is affordable for you to acquire your customers
• Define what tasks need to be completed in order to operate that campaign
• Set clear measurements of whether the campaign was successful
• Once the campaign is over, update and revisit your plan

The biggest thing to keep in mind when you are trying to execute is clearly defining what you want to be done:

• Identify who is responsible for it
• break out the laser-specific steps that need to be completed
• Communicate expectations with the relevant team members/contractors
• Give space for questions
• Follow up and confirm once the deliverables are completed
• Review what went well, what didn’t go well, and what can be done next time
• Use the learnings for future marketing plans/strategies

A marketing plan is an element of your business plan. Your marketing plan should break out how you want to reach your customers, what message you’re going to hit them with, and how are you going to profitably grow your business with affordable marketing strategies. Your business plan should be the all-encompassing document that outlines all areas to successfully operate your business.

Web design is a term that is loosely used to describe all areas of building a website. Technically speaking, the design side of websites should focus on user experience, styling, formatting, and how the site looks/is structured. Usually, this is not the only thing that people are meaning when they say web design. When you look at the actual creation of a website, this is Web Development. Which is more of the technical side of creating the database, using the software /tools available to create the site.

When most people think about web design, they think about the act of creating a website including all relevant areas.

There is no one-size-fits-all for web designers. There are web designers that just do front-end design in tools such as Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop etc. They “design” the style or look of the website.

Then there are web designers that just take what was drawn up in a wire-frame/mockup and actually build it. This can be built from scratch, this can be using a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress, SquareSpace, Shopify, etc.

Then there are web designers that do both areas from start to finish. At Loop, we have a team that supports in all areas of web design from strategy, to analysis, design, development, and maintenance.

In short yes, there is the creative element of web design, but there is also is a systematic and researched-backed way to build websites that work. The balance in web design is bringing together the left & right brains to have a creative, beautiful site, that also is goal-oriented and leads to your intended business goals.

It has never been easier to create a website on your own. There are so many tools that exist that offer plug-and-play/drag-and-drop editors for people to build their own sites. GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Shopify etc. The options are endless.

The choice you have to make for whether you want to build a website yourself is:

1. Time – do you have the time to learn?
2. Knowledge – do you have the technical knowledge to build a site that is engineered to accomplish what you intend?
3. Ongoing Resources – do you have the future time/energy to commit to maintaining and keeping the website current/effective

Building websites in-house can be the right starting point for many businesses. Once your business picks up some momentum, at that point it usually makes sense to offload to a professional, unless you have a team that is trained, experienced, and does have more pressing tasks on their list for the business.

“PPC” is Pay-Per-Click advertising. This is a marketing tactic that involves paying for traffic from various advertisers (primarily Facebook and Google). You pay for each time your ad is clicked. This can be very expensive if not done correctly, but when done effectively it can be the fastest ways to scaling a business as you can easily “ramp-up” the spend in a profitable way to grow your business month over month, instead of waiting for things to happen “organically”

Google Ads is an Internet advertising service provided by Google that allows advertisers to bid advertisements, services, product listings, and videos(Youtube) to web visitors. It can also run ads on non-search websites, mobile applications, and videos using this platform.

Google Ads are a type of online advertising that may be used to advertise and promote your items and services when people search for relevant keywords or are doing specific activities online. It has the ability to turbo-charge leads and sales if done correctly.

This all comes down to the product/service you’re selling, what the lifetime value of that won customer is, and the strategy you deploy to acquire those customers. If you can spend $50 on a customer through Google Ads, and they are worth $250 to your bottom line, then Google Ads are worth it. If your market is too competitive and you have to spend $500 on a customer that is worth $250 to your bottom line, then Google Ads may not be worth it for you. If you want to do an evaluation of whether Google Ads is worth it for your business, send us a message and we can do a complimentary evaluation.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising can be extremely effective when done right. If your campaigns have the proper research & strategy, and are being managed by professionals, and have the proper tracking mechanisms in place to know whether the strategy is working is one of the fastest ways to grow a business through online advertising.

This depends on the goals of the business. If your business has growth goals that aren’t being reached organically, PPC is usually worth it. PPC is a great way to acquire new customers quickly and affordably in order to expedite growth.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of improving your website/online credibility so Google (and other search engines) decide to show your website to more people looking for services like yours.

SEO on a website typically refers to “On-Page” optimizations. This is the act of putting the right content on the site that resonates with your ideal customer. There are hundreds of strategies to optimize the quality of a website’s organic rank. If you’re interested to learn how you can improve your website’s organic rank let us know.

Absolutely! SEO can be done by anyone. It’s not rocket science. It just takes time, energy, and expertise. We love when clients want to support their Organic Strategy. This can involve writing quality content, researching competitors, doing videos etc. There are many different categories with the term “SEO”. If you’d like to learn about all the areas in that you could support your website’s organic rank, let us know.

This can range significantly based on the work that needs to be done. SEO is a very broad term and there are several techniques and strategies to successfully improve a website’s organic rank. When a site is more established and has thousands of users using the page on a regular basis, the strategy gets to be a little more complex so it can cost more. If you’d like an assessment of your current website, and potential strategies to improve its SEO let us know.

Branding is the all-inclusive term that incorporates elements that make up a company’s brand. These are the unique elements that create the look, feel, and experience your company gives off. Many elements of a brand include logo, tagline, colours, fonts, but the brand is much bigger than that. It’s how your customer thinks of you, it’s how the market talks about you when you’re not controlling the conversation. In short, Branding is the elements that make up the business’s brand.