Marketing Plan for Products with 10 Detailed Steps

Your company or business has just successfully researched and developed a product, that's great. However, these products won't sell themselves – we need to create a marketing plan to introduce them to potential customers. In this article, DPS will share and guide you on how to create a marketing plan for a new product through detailed steps with illustrative examples; evaluate effectiveness through digital marketing, follow along now!

What is marketing planning for a new product?

A marketing plan for a product is how you bring your product to customers with the highest possible efficiency.
A marketing plan will help you research the market, identify strengths, find potential customers, and develop key marketing messages. In addition, the plan helps you always keep track of your work progress and evaluate what should or should not be done.
What is a product marketing plan
Each product needs a specific, unique marketing plan.

Steps to create a marketing plan for a product

Step 1: Understand the product thoroughly

To know where your product will stand in the market, we need to start with research by answering the following questions:
  • What needs does your product meet?
  • What makes it different and outstanding?
  • Why should customers buy them?
Once you have answered those core questions, you can conduct advanced analysis to find the unique points of the product:
  • Where should you sell your product?
  • Is the market price reasonable and does it meet cost-profit requirements?
  • What environment should the product be used/stored in?

Step 2: Conduct market research for the product that needs a marketing plan

This is the step to research how attractive your product is. When performing step 2, there are three issues you need to pay attention to: dmarket capacity, market trends and seasonality.
DPS suggest a few tools for this activity.
1. Google Trends
This is an effective tool to search for keywords from Google. Which keywords are searched the most during a certain period that you are looking for. From there, it partly helps to assess the potential of the market.
2. Google Keyword Planner
With this tool, you can look up the number of searches for a keyword, which will help you clearly understand which keywords are searched the most and also determine seasonality.

Step 3: Identify the target customer group

Once you have a clear understanding of the internal and external environment of the product, which segment will be good to penetrate?
Your customers will be divided by age, gender, location, income level, interests, etc. You need to collect complete information about buyers and determine which customer group is most likely to buy from you.
Identify the target customer segment you are aiming for
Target customers are groups of people who share characteristics, personalities, or consumer behaviors, etc.
Then, build a specific potential customer profile that the product is targeting.
Customer profile is all the information about the ideal target customer that you build from the above research. It includes descriptions of their interests, purchasing decisions, habits, etc.

Step 4: Analyze competitors

Understanding your competitors is extremely important when planning marketing for your product. Analyzing their distribution strategies, promotions, and target customers will be very helpful for you.

An easy way to categorize competitors into 3 groups is

  • Primary competitors:  These are the companies you are directly competing with. They are selling similar products to similar audiences as you. (Example: BMW and Volvo) .
  • Secondary competitors:  These are companies selling similar products as you but to a different audience (example: a branded clothing store versus a general store that also sells clothes but at different quality and price levels) .
  • Tertiary competitors:  These are companies that do not sell similar products as you, but they market to similar audiences.

Step 5: Set objectives when creating a marketing plan for the product

Your marketing goals will set the tone for your marketing message, strategy, and budget. The most common method for setting marketing goals is to use the SMART system.

Objectives when creating a product marketing plan
Building SMART marketing goals

For example, when planning marketing for a hand sanitizer product. Instead of setting a broad goal, you can give a specific number as follows:

  • We want to increase monthly sales revenue by __%
  • We want to rank 3rd on Google for the keyword “best hand sanitizer”, which will bring us about 1500 new visitors each month
  • We want to increase website traffic by 100 customers per month

Step 6: Develop the core marketing message

Now that you have set your goals, identify the core marketing message you will use in your marketing strategies.
The core marketing message helps set the framework for your strategies, whether it's social media advertising, Google Ads, video marketing, etc. Every piece of content you produce must align with the core message you are aiming for.

Illustrative example: Omo is a detergent brand that is familiar to everyone. Although there are many different product lines, all are positioned with a single philosophy: ”Dirt is good.” This “dirt” value has caused OMO's revenue to skyrocket 10 times in Asia in 2020.

Step 7: Build a marketing strategy

With a pre-drafted plan, we need to come up with solutions to bring the product into circulation and reach potential customers.

There are many ways for you to achieve your goals. You can list your ideas such as:

  • Participate in various local events;
  • Create pop-up store in shopping malls or places with high foot traffic;
  • Write press releases, content marketing.
  • List your products on Amazon or e-commerce sites
  • Run digital marketing campaigns to sell your products. (Facebook ADS, Google ADS)

Step 8: Budgeting when creating a marketing plan for the product

Determine the budget for the product marketing plan
The marketing plan budget needs to be evaluated in harmony with the benefits gained

With all the above steps, an important thing is that you need to estimate the budget for your marketing plan. The relationship between the costs spent and the profits earned will help assess the feasibility of the campaign.

At the same time, with many strategies, immediate profits may not be apparent but you will gain benefits over a long process such as building a brand, company image, etc. This is also something that helps you consider your plan more carefully.

Step 9: Monitor and evaluate effectiveness

Digital marketing has made this activity much easier because we have all the statistics on website visits, buyers, and even cost allocation per order, etc.
Evaluate effectiveness through Digital Marketing
Digital tools make sales analysis easier
Unlike traditional marketing, we usually only evaluate results by comparing costs with business profits. Digital marketing helps solve many more problems (how long it takes customers to decide to buy, measuring satisfaction through product reviews, etc.)

Step 10: Set a timeline

Finally, set a timeline for each task. What will be the roadmap you want for achieving your goals, implementing strategies, or conducting evaluations.

Remember, marketing is all about experimenting and finding the right combinations for your new product. DPS is confident to be a professional partner implementing marketing solution projects including website design, overall SEO, Fanpage management, etc. to help your business effectively execute any marketing plan.

Contact us for immediate consultation!

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