A marketing plan acts as your treasure map, showing you the path to connecting your products with the people who need them. Every marketing campaign that springs from this plan has a clear goal: making sure you’re reaching the right destination with your target audience.

Knowing the outcome you want for a campaign gives you a guide to work backward from and decide which deliverables are needed to achieve it. With this information, you can arm your creative team of graphic designers so they understand precisely what the job needs to be done to meet your marketing objectives.

With a solid plan, you can avoid confusion and wasted time that could be spent perfecting the campaign’s design.

But remember, your marketing plan is different from what a campaign’s design looks like.

They are two very different things.

We’ll guide you through what to think about when planning your marketing so you can figure out which assets are necessary for future campaigns. Once you know what you need, collaborating with your creative team becomes more streamlined, turning those loose ideas into tangible outcomes.

Defining your marketing plan and strategy

Your marketing plan is the “when” and “what.” It’s a roadmap detailing the steps and actions your business takes to execute its marketing strategy, including tracking these activities over time. As the results of your efforts come in, it’s common to reevaluate and adjust the marketing plan and course correct.

Since we’ve mentioned it, let’s get into what a marketing strategy is. It’s your short- and long-term business vision and the “why” behind every single campaign produced, the assets (or designs) created, and which channels they’ll appear in to promote your company’s products.

This strategy is based on market research about your target audience and helps you and your team determine where to engage with them. Strategic marketing plans shape the direction of your campaigns and help define the key visuals your designers will create.

Notice that the visuals or deliverables your designers produce are part of the marketing plan but don’t guide it.

By aligning your marketing strategy with your business goals, you can effectively tailor your campaign’s messaging and designs to resonate with your target market, maximize brand awareness, and foster meaningful connections with customers, leading to more sales.

Planning out deliverables based on your marketing plan

The difference between a good ad and a great ad can mean earning between $4 to $10 for each dollar spent on the promotional campaign. Those great ads, the ones that are memorable, inspiring, or make a potential customer think, are often the result of creative minds prioritizing the campaign’s objectives above all else.

With a well-defined marketing plan and strategy, it’s easier to:

• Provide your creative team with clear, coherent direction to produce strategic designs.
• Ensure there’s consistency and cohesiveness between the different campaigns.
• Reduce the cost and time associated with producing each deliverable.

With a strategic marketing plan, you don’t have to decide what assets should be in your campaign because the path from point A to point B is already laid out.

Making a plan
For example, let’s say you’ve just launched a health app that tracks and monitors foods for those on a low-FODMAP diet. It’s for people who already experience digestive issues such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Those who suffer from these illnesses would benefit from knowing which foods exacerbate their symptoms.

The app includes multiple free and paid user features, such as in-depth reporting for patients to share with their physicians.

As part of your strategy to make people aware of this app and encourage them to use its paid features, you decide the best channels to use would be a combination of social media, paid ads, and videos to lead users to an informational landing page. The paid ads would run once per quarter, while the social media posts and video content would be ongoing.

Determining the deliverables
Now that you have your plan, it’s time to define the deliverables needed for each campaign.

Social Media
Purpose:
Highlight app features and common problems the target audience faces.

Deliverables:
Static, branded in-app images.
Branded animated images of the app in use

Paid Ads
Purpose:
Retarget people who have downloaded the app but haven’t upgraded to paid services.

Deliverables:
Branded, static, and animated images of the app used by the target audience.

Video Content
Purpose:
Show users the app’s benefits and how it can be used to monitor symptoms and prevent their condition from worsening.

Deliverables:
Three 10-15-second clips showing how the app works and how it helps.

Landing Page
Purpose:
Explains how the app aids IBS and SIBO sufferers and breaks down how it can help improve their lives.

Deliverables:
Two sign-up landing pages: one targeting people with IBS and a second for those with SIBO.

These are the assets your designer will produce. By going through the strategy and planning process first before jumping right into design, you can provide your designer with clearer direction and ensure that every deliverable they create serves its intended audience and purpose.

Pairing design expertise with your marketing plan

When collaborating with designers, think of them as the creative force that infuses your strategy into what your audience sees. While they aren’t responsible for creating your entire marketing plan and strategy, good designers certainly enhance them.

With graphic designers, you get the creative expertise that makes marketing funnels successful, emails convert, and logos famous. They understand exactly how to efficiently take a design from an idea to reality so you get the ROI you’re looking for.