Your product may be the best in the market, but if you don’t get the word out there about it, it won’t matter. People need to know about your product (or service) to buy it, and without a comprehensive marketing plan, you’re wasting precious time and effort.

When you’re building a business, it’s important to look at all the aspects that make up your marketing mix. This includes the digital and the traditional avenues through which you’ll spread the word about your business.

While social media and search engines make up the backbone of your digital marketing, your regular old phone calls, face-to-face conversations, and personal selling all contribute to your overall marketing plan. So do your research, target audience identification, and market share analysis before developing your strategy. With this strategy in mind, we’ve compiled a simple guide to help you effectively coordinate your online and offline marketing efforts.

Create a plan

If you’ve never done so, now may be the right time to develop a plan for your product’s marketing. To start, make a note of your objectives and the metrics you’ll use to measure your success. It’s also important to note here that you’re not limited to these exact figures. You may choose your own benchmarks to suit your needs. For example, if you’re looking to secure new customer acquisition, you may want to set a target of 300 new monthly active users for your social media platforms.

You should also set a goal for your plan. This may be as simple as getting the word out there about your product or service. Or, it could be as complex as increasing your market share. Whatever your goals are, create a plan to help you reach them. Then, break down the different tasks you’ll need to complete to achieve them. Finally, add any relevant strategic thinking or analysis that could be helpful to your marketing plan.

Determine the platforms

Your product may be groundbreaking, but if your marketing strategy isn’t set up to reach your target audience, you’re just wasting your time. Identify the platforms your audience uses and choose the ones you’ll use to spread the word about your business.

Decide what type of content you’ll create and share on these platforms. For example, if you’re developing a luxury brand, you may want to create a blog post announcing the launch of your new line. Or, if you’re an established business with an interest in attracting investors, you may decide to create a video pitching your business to potential investors.

Once you have your blog post or video idea, it’s time to decide which platforms to use to publish it. You may decide to use several platforms, but only a few will serve your purpose. For example, if your goal is to create awareness about your product, you may want to use a blog rather than a social media platform.

If you’d like, you can also use the same metrics to determine the success of your content. For example, if you ran a competition on social media and you noticed that many of your competitors’ followers engaged with the content, you may decide to do the same. This could translate to increased brand awareness and traction for your product.

Determine your target audience

If you’re not sure who your target audience is, it may be time to do some homework. Take some time to explore your audience’s demographics, psychographics, and digital behaviour. Do this by creating buyer personas. You can also use your target audience’s demographics to determine the platforms they’re most likely to use.

You may decide that younger audiences benefit most from your product’s unique offerings. In this case, you may decide to create content for YouTube or Instagram.

Once you have your platforms and content ideas, it’s time to determine your target audience. Start by looking at your demographics. Are you targeting men or women? Students or adults?

Explore the different types of people you intend to reach. Which ones do you think will be most interested in your product?

Remember: not every person is an audience member. Only the people you intend to reach are your audience members. You may also want to consider the psychographics of your audience. For example, if you’re creating content for millennials, you may want to consider their digital behaviour.

Once you have your target audience nailed down, it’s time to create the other elements that make up your marketing plan.

Create content

Your product may be amazing, but if you don’t tell the world about it, it won’t matter. You need content to do that.

With your target audience in mind, create content that will engage them. This content may be in the form of a blog post, a social media post, an email marketing piece, or a video.

Each of these pieces of content will serve a different purpose. A blog post, for example, may be used to build brand awareness. A video may be used to encourage customers to act now or to keep up with latest news about your product.

In general, content should be engaging enough to make the reader or viewer want more. Ideally, you want to create content that is useful while also being entertaining. Think of the content you’ve come across on social media that was truly valuable. Chances are, it was something that made you laugh or cry.

When developing your plan, you should also consider what type of content you’ll need to create in order to achieve your goals. If you’re looking to secure new customers, for example, you may want to create content that encourages people to subscribe to your email list. Or, if you’re looking to raise money, create content that appeals to investors.

Set up automation

Anyone can write a good blog post. It takes real skill to craft content that consistently draws in quality readers and encourages them to engage with your content on a regular basis.

If you’re serious about blogging, you may want to set up automated daily posts to ensure you always have content to publish. You can also use automation to help you spread the word about your product. If you have a travel blog, you might want to write a guide to the best spots for visitors to see. Or, if you have a fashion blog, you may want to write a monthly review of the season’s trends.

You could also use automation to create emails to send to your target audience or to publish on your social media accounts. The possibilities are endless!

Measure the results of your plan

Now that you have a plan in place, it’s time to evaluate its results. The first step is to examine the metrics available to you.

The more you measure, the more you’ll learn. And, learning is essential if you want to improve your results. In the beginning, it’s important to note that you’re not necessarily looking for perfection. As long as you’re making progress, you can continue to develop and improve your marketing strategy.

Once you have your metrics in place, you can determine the success of your plan. If you’re not sure where to start, begin with the easy ones first. For example, if you’re looking to raise money, create a metric that measures the amount of investors you’ve reached. Or, if you’re looking to secure new customers, create a metric that measures the amount of people you’ve reached.

As you measure more and more, you’ll see a clear pattern emerge. Once you do, it’s time to determine which parts of your plan worked well and which ones you may want to tweak. For example, if you noticed that your video content performed better than your other types of content, you may decide to create more videos. Or, if you notice that your blog posts perform much better when published on certain platforms, you may decide to create content for those platforms only.

By continuing to develop, measure, and tweak your plan, you’ll eventually reach the perfect marketing strategy for your product. And, when that happens, you’ll know just how close you came to achieving your desired results.