For every business, building a marketing communication plan is a crucial step in the marketing strategy. A well-structured marketing communication plan can bring numerous benefits to a business, from reaching potential customers to enhancing brand awareness. How to build a marketing communication plan? Follow this article by Optimal Agency now!
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What is a marketing communication plan?
It is a strategic document that provides information about the target audience, customers, goals,… for each specific stage. This plan is used to promote the business’s products and services to potential customers. It includes identifying the target audience, analyzing the market and competitors, and determining the appropriate content and timing to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the communication campaign.
When building a communication plan, it is crucial to understand the implementation objectives and ensure that the execution figures are feasible and reasonable. Additionally, you need to have contingency plans for unexpected risks. Therefore, a marketing communication plan is always dynamic and adaptable, with different plans and execution methods for each stage.
To build a marketing communication plan, you need to learn and understand the SMCRFN model. Businesses nowadays use this method widely. When starting to plan effective communications, you need to understand this model. Understanding the nature of the model helps you create a marketing communication plan easily.
Why should you build a marketing communication plan?
In every business’s marketing strategy, building a marketing communication plan plays a vital role:
Provides clear direction for the communication campaign
By developing a marketing communication plan, managers can better direct activities and manage them more efficiently. When deploying a clear direction for the tasks, businesses can save time, effort, and costs during execution. A communication plan combines multiple campaigns and includes activities related to research, analysis, implementation, monitoring, and measurement.
Enhances brand awareness
If a business executes small, inconsistent communication campaigns in terms of image or message, it will be challenging to leave a lasting impression on customers. However, a clear marketing communication plan with specific objectives supports the business in delivering a consistent message. This helps to build strong and long-lasting brand awareness in customers’ minds.
Easily measure and evaluate the effectiveness
Through the marketing communication plan, marketers can assess the effectiveness of the communication campaign based on predefined metrics. By evaluating the strengths and weaknesses, businesses can develop effective remedial solutions. Moreover, when creating a communication plan, businesses always have contingency plans to quickly address unforeseen situations.
Optimizes communication effectiveness
Not only does it help marketers measure and evaluate the effectiveness of communication campaigns, but it also provides critical data for managers to make informed decisions. For example, focusing on which channels to achieve the highest efficiency or reducing costs for certain activities. This allows businesses to allocate resources appropriately, enhancing the effectiveness of the marketing campaign to achieve the best results. This is also the way to optimize marketing strategy to bring high efficiency.
How to build a marketing communication plan?
Planning is a crucial part of the process of implementing a business’s marketing campaign. These are the steps to build a communication plan:
Analyze the business using the SWOT model
Before creating a marketing communication plan, a business needs to use the SWOT model to analyze its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Based on the collected data, you can create an effective communication plan.
Strengths are distinctive factors of products and services that provide a competitive advantage for the business.
Weaknesses are internal factors that can hinder the business in executing communication activities, such as limited budget, low market share,…
Opportunities are external factors that can bring competitive advantages, like increased customer demand, advanced production technology,…
Threats are challenges and difficulties that hinder the business’s success, such as high competition levels.
To build a SWOT model that supports the marketing communication plan, the business needs to conduct market research, analyze competitors, industry sectors, and internal factors. The business must study both internal information and external factors to develop an appropriate plan.
Define communication goals
Communication goals are the objectives and outcomes that the business aims to achieve after implementing the communication campaign. In the planning process, defining goals is always the most critical factor. To set suitable and feasible goals, use the SMART criteria. The more specific the goals, the clearer the direction for implementing effective communication and marketing activities.
Identify the target audience
After setting appropriate goals, the next step in building a marketing communication plan is to identify the target audience. The target audience could be potential or current customers, distributors, or other stakeholders. Identifying the target audience helps marketers direct the message to the right people and determine the appropriate approach to reach the target group.
Develop the message to convey
In a communication campaign, the message plays a very important role as it attracts and impresses the target customers. The next step in the planning process is to identify the core message to convey to the target audience. The communication message should reflect the values and key benefits of the products and services, as well as the brand. It must also be engaging, creative, and clear.
Create a communication design set
Building a communication design kit involves activities related to brand expansion and how to convey the message to the target audience. A perfect communication design kit includes communication strategies, creative form strategies, and message delivery resources.
Choose appropriate media channels
Depending on the goals and public audiences identified in the marketing communication plan, marketers can choose the appropriate means of conveying the message. With different communication goals, the chosen message transmission channel will be different. Promoting sales will prioritize email marketing, personal selling,… This is one of the ways to build a marketing communication plan.
To choose the right media channels, the business needs to research and analyze the characteristics and behaviors of the target audience. Additionally, the business must consider the budget and human resources available for each media type. This analysis helps select the channels to be used in the marketing communication plan.
Create a detailed timeline for the plan
Once the media channels and types of marketing are chosen, the business needs to schedule each activity. Reasonable timing ensures that communication activities are coordinated closely and consistently. Establishing a detailed and appropriate timeline ensures that the marketing communication plan is implemented on schedule and achieves the best results.
Budget forecasting and contingency planning
The business can calculate the necessary budget for the marketing communication plan based on the analysis and identification of marketing strategies, media channels, and implementation timelines. The communication budget is often calculated as a percentage of revenue or the overall marketing costs of the business. Marketers should set aside a contingency fund to handle unexpected issues.
Implementation, Measurement, and Reporting
To collect the necessary data and accurately evaluate the performance of the communication campaign, the business needs a detailed measurement plan. Measuring campaign effectiveness involves identifying KPI metrics based on goals, collecting data to measure the effectiveness of communication activities through reports and analytics tools.
Additionally, analyze the data and report the results to managers and stakeholders. Campaign effectiveness measurement should be updated continuously to monitor the situation and make appropriate adjustments.
With these guidelines on how to build a marketing communication plan, you can create a successful and professional plan. An effective marketing communication plan allows you to implement marketing campaigns that achieve the best results, increasing sales and optimizing costs.
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FAQ
Marketing communication planning is entirely different from media buying. Specifically, media buying occurs after the communication plan has been completed. Although these two stages are different, they always go hand in hand.
Media buying involves evaluating advertising options within the available budget to determine the target audience, type of ads, and the combination of media channels.
A complete marketing communications plan includes two parts: analysis and planning.
In the analysis part, businesses can grasp the basic and necessary information for planning. In this part, you should analyze the factors: the situation taking place, research the overview of external factors, and related parties.
After analyzing and obtaining important data, make a plan with the following sections: goals, target customer portrait analysis, implementation strategy, conveyed messages, risk estimates, and forecasts. Budgeting, measurement and evaluation.
