An online marketing strategy should be at the core of your online marketing and social media marketing activities. Guerrilla Consulting’s 7 Sentence Marketing Plan is an easy and effective method that focuses your strategy.
A 7-Sentence Marketing Plan answers the following questions:
- Sentence 1: What is the purpose of your marketing?
- Sentence 2: How will you accomplish your purpose?
- Sentence 3: Who is your target market?
- Sentence 4: What is your niche in the marketplace?
- Sentence 5: What tools and tactics will you use to carry out your marketing?
- Sentence 6: What is your business identity?
- Sentence 7: How will you measure success and allocate time and budget?
Here’s the 7-Sentence Marketing Plan in further detail. You can use this template to create your own marketing strategy.
1. The purpose of our marketing is:
a. What are your goals? (Check those that apply OR add your own goals)
- Reach a new audience
- Promote an event
- Build excitement prior to event
- Get people to take a particular action (contest entries, voting, download file, buy, sign-up)
- Draw traffic to a particular URL
- Build your email list
- Build a community around an event/topic
- Get press coverage
- Get sales
b. Identify the top 3 goals. Tailor them to be specific to your client/project. Be as specific as possible (i.e, Drive people to FB page who will enter the contest and Like the page.)
2. How will you accomplish your goals?
- What are you going to do? (i.e, set up a Facebook page to host the contest, execute an outreach campaign by contacting bloggers and influencers…)
3. Client’s target audience (or audiences) is:
- Who are the people you want to reach?
- Create personas for them: what kind of people are they, characteristics, what social media channels do they use, how do they engage online? (see Forrester’s engagement ladder for how people participate online).
4. Client’s niche in the marketplace is:
Use S.P.H.E.R.E. acronym: (for more on S.P.H.E.R.E. read What Takes It Run a Successful Contest)
- So What: Why does your client’s product/service matter? What makes your client different from its competitors? (list competitors – name, URL) Why do consumers choose your client over someone else?
- Personality: What are the adjectives that describe your client’s brand?
- Hook: What’s your client’s story angle? Use phrases that are easy to remember to helps to spread your client’s story via word of mouth.
- Ego: Who does your client need to engage with? Who can benefit from promoting the brand amongst their friends? Why do people want to engage with the brand?
- Relevancy: What is the relevancy between the audiences’ motivations and what your client is trying to do?
- Effort: What does your client need to do in order to keep the audience engaged throughout the campaign as well as after the campaign is finished?
5. Marketing tools we plan to employ are:
- List all the possible marketing tools or tactics that could be used to meet your desired goals. Use a variety.
- Pick the ones that align with #1 – your business goals, marketing purpose.
6. The client’s business identity is:
- Describe in as few sentences or words as possible the feelings, voice and tone the company/brand evokes, and the brand attributes you want it to convey. (i.e. warmth, friendliness, reassurance, comfort, excitement, caring, honesty, humor, professionalism, intelligence, sophistication, reliability, and trustworthiness).
7. We plan to measure success and allocate time and budget by:
- Align this sentence with #1 and #5 – looking at your goals how will you measure the effectiveness of your tactics? List the key performance indicators (KPIs)
- How much time and money will your client devote specifically to social media?
