If you’re reading this, I assume you’re pretty familiar with the world of online marketing and e-commerce. You probably know the basics – creating a small business website, getting content shared on social media, and driving traffic to your site, to learn more about your products.

What you may not know is that there’s a whole other side to marketing – called “agri-marketing” – that focuses on attracting customers to your products through online tools like marketing automation and CRM (customer relationship management).

While creating and growing your business, you’ll inevitably have to interact with lots of customers, vendors, and other stakeholders. In this scenario, your marketing efforts online (and offline) serve as a sort of sales funnel, funneling potential customers into purchasing your products or services.

If you want to see your business succeed, you need to develop the habit of marketing as a business owner, not just as a marketer. This article will help you do just that.

1. Define your ultimate goal

The first step in any marketing plan is to clarify what you hope to achieve with your efforts. What metrics do you want to see improve as a result of your efforts?

Consider defining measurable goals, such as increasing web traffic or getting inbound leads. Perhaps you’d like to see an increase in product sales, or you might just want to learn how to market yourself more effectively, and raise your profile as a thought leader in your industry.

2. Determining your target audience

Now that you know what you want to achieve, you can determine who your target audience is. Your marketing plan revolves around a few basic questions:

Who are you making the decision to market your products and services to?

What is your target audience’s demographic, psychographics, and digital behavior?

You’ll use your marketing analytics tool to determine the answers to these questions. For example, if you’re creating a website for a B2B company, you might want to target IT decision makers in your area. That’s a key audience segment.

3. Identify existing competitors

You don’t need to have competing products to have competitors. Simply having competitors is already a good enough reason to market your product. In addition to being a source of inspiration, competitors can also serve as a benchmark for your product. Consider competitor analysis a critical step in your marketing plan. You can use free tools like Google Trends to easily find the popularity of any niche or market segment.

4. Identify possible marketing channels

Your marketing plan should include all of the channels through which you expect to achieve your goals. To get started, simply think about the places that your ideal customer might be, and the people who could become valuable brand ambassadors. Consider social media, search engines, and other types of websites.’

Once you’ve got a rough idea of the channels through which you’ll promote your product, you can begin researching which ones will be most effective for your business.

5. Create buyer personas

Your marketing plan should always include at least a couple of examples of buyer personas. In other words, ‘representative’ individuals who will be using your product, or a service, and why you think they’ll be ideal customers. You can use user personas for a variety of things, including customer segmentation, determining how you’ll sell your product, and crafting copy for online stores.

6. Identify keywords & phrases

If you’re searching for something online, you’ll most likely enter keywords or phrases into the search bar. When a customer enters these keywords or phrases into the search bar of their browser, your product or service might pop up, suggesting it as an option. To get the most out of SEO (search engine optimization), you need to incorporate keywords and phrases into your content, as well as your web design and digital marketing.

7. Identify sales pages & marketing materials

Every product or service has a place online where they can be offered for sale. For some, this might simply be a website, but it could be a landing page, or even an e-commerce store. To guide your decision-making process, you can create a digital sales page, or ask your marketing department to prepare an information sheet, which will function as a mini-sales pitch. Remember, once you’ve done all of this prepwork, you’ll be able to easily pull up a sales page for a product, or a landing page for a service – without all of the hassles of actually setting up an e-commerce store.

8. Match your keywords to content types

This is where you put keywords in the right context, so that they’re not just a catch-all phrase. Your marketing plan should include all of the content types that you’ll use, from blogs to case studies, from videos to e-books. The more content types you can incorporate into your plan, the better. When a customer enters a search term into their browser, they want to land on content that’s highly relevant. Incorporating several content types onto a single page, or using similar phrases and words throughout will help achieve this.

9. Create a content calendar

Your content calendar is a good way to plan out all of your content and marketing activity, and to ensure you don’t fall off the wagon with regard to content creation.

The content calendar can be as customized or simple as you want it to be. You can use it to identify key content creation dates, and to plan out all of the articles, videos, and other types of content that you’ll create, over the next couple of months.

10. Set marketing objectives & targets

The final step in any marketing plan is to set measurable objectives and targets, which you’ll track through metrics.

Your marketing objectives should be specific, measurable, and time-bound. For example, you might want to increase your website traffic by 10% this year, or you might set a sales goal of $500,000 for 2020. In either case, you can track these numbers, and determine if you’ve reached your goal, or are close to it.

Setting marketing targets is more subjective, but it doesn’t mean that you won’t have specific goals, either. For example, you might want to create more awareness about your product, or you might want to engage with your target audience, to create a buzz about your brand.

What’s Next?

Congratulations! You’ve just finished creating a marketing plan for your business. Now it’s time to execute. You should roll out your plan, monitoring its progress, and making mid-course corrections, as necessary.

In addition to ensuring that all of your marketing activities are working in sync, you can also use analytics to track the success of your plan, and identify key performance indicators (KPIs). From there, you can make informed decisions about what to change, and when.