Do You Need a Marketing Plan or Marketing Strategies?

Marketing Plans vs. Marketing Strategies

What are the differences between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?

As someone who has worked with hundreds of businesses around the world for well over twenty five years now, it’s important to realize that a marketing plan is a general plan for how a business can achieve a final objective (or plural for multiple objectives across a broad spectrum over time).

In most cases, business owners will want to make more money and grow their business, for example. The catch is that building revenue can take time and dedication, which most people frankly don’t have.

Here’s what you need to know to market more efficiently whether with a marketing plan or strategy….

Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategies are parts of that larger marketing plan, such as an individual act or behavior. It could be something like, “go to more local networking groups and ask other business owners about their challenges.”

Focusing on marketing strategies is like looking at a tree and not the forest around it; and unfortunately is what most business owners do. They run around putting out fires rather than solving the larger problems that created the issues in the first place.

Marketing Plans

As it relates to digital marketing, most business owners will first gravitate toward seemingly-free DIY template builders (due to price) and then wonder why their phones aren’t ringing. It’s usually only until they’re about to go under or realize there’s a problem with immediate personal ramifications that they’re finally willing to invest money in order to make more. This is something I’ve seen with literally thousands of businesses, most of which are long since gone. People fixate on what they believe will be the easiest “fix” without looking at solving issues long-term.

If you want to build a business and make more money with it, you may first wish to a) create a multi-level, multi-strategy marketing plan. The marketing strategies will then be ways or methods for achieving parts of the larger plan.

One analogy I use when helping clients with their marketing plans, is to compare what we’re trying to do to winning a war since I grew up in a military family. In the military, you have land, air, and sea divisions. You also have psychological warfare which is waged through dropping propaganda leaflets on cities, showing certain types of ads, imposing financial sanctions, and so on.

To wage a war and then say we can use only one “strategy,” which would be land, air, sea, or psychological, would be the approach that most new business owners take. You’re severely limiting your chances for success by limiting what you have available to use.

An example relevant to digital marketing in this instance would be going with a “free” DIY template expecting to attract new customers with it. If we continue with the military campaign comparison we probably would not win any large-scale war using only an army, or only a navy, or only sanctions, since the other side would be likely to use everything available to them.

A marketing plan is the war “battle plan.” Those usually have different sections or “divisions.” Each “division” will be tasked with executing on their area. When a course of action is performed in an ongoing, long-term fashion, and being executed on multiple levels at the same time, it’s extremely likely that some if not all stated objectives will be accomplished. Efforts taken are reinforced because we’re pursuing the same end-goal on multiple levels.

Let’s say for the sake of illustration that we have a divorce lawyer who wants to attract more clients. In most instances, that lawyer will visit Wix or Weebly or some other template builder service, create a very basic site and then sit back and expect the calls to start flowing in. After a few months, they may wonder what’s happened to their brilliant idea for using digital marketing.

Obviously, they’ve only implemented one strategy, and then only partially, with no larger sense of branding, SEO, content marketing or all the other parts that impact digital marketing’s effectiveness.

On the other hand, if they were to work out a plan that includes

• Branded content creation
• How design and logos will work together with branding to form a cohesive, sleek “feel”
• SEO (local and / or national / global)
• Content marketing
• Content repurposing & automated scheduled distribution and redistribution
• Social media marketing channels to use and why
• PPC
• Video
• Podcasting

And then overlap those efforts with “boots on the ground” offline marketing efforts such as hosting weekly singles group meetings for divorced business professionals, improved and brighter office signage, more focused networking, and more speaking engagements, there’s really no way that lawyer would not attract at least some new clients.

Larger companies and businesses that seek growth should have larger marketing plans. Small businesses often lack the motivation, organization, budget, and resources to put into marketing, so will typically focus on strategies or symptoms rather than the larger whole effecting business, so efforts seem scattered and random.

Certainly, it’s easier to impliment a single strategy than spend more time and resources creating a structured plan that then features multiple tiers of execution, and that’s probably why so many people perform isolated strategies rather than first develop thought-out plans. Yet the strategy, no matter how smart it is or how brilliantly put into motion is still only one type of action while a plan is dedicating oneself toward valuing specific outcomes more. That takes more care, more time, more resources, but delivers far greater results playing “the long game.”

But you don’t have to be a big business in order to build a successful marketing plan that will bring in results without any doubt. You just have to plan big, be committed and disciplined…and willing to ask for help if you need it.