How To Create A Marketing Plan For Vape Shops

An often overlooked but essential part of any vape shop marketing program is a marketing plan that looks at yearly, quarterly, and monthly goals. But how do you go about creating a marketing plan that will set you up for success? 

In today's blog, we scoured the internet to give you all the must-have information of a solid marketing plan. In this blog, you'll find what we believe is the must-haves for any successful marketing plan. From what elements to include to what tools to use, we give you everything you need to make your very own vape shop marketing plan. So, if you're ready, let's begin. 

Table of Contents

1. What is a Marketing Plan?
2. Why Should You Have a Marketing Plan for Your Vape Shop?
3. What To Include in a Marketing Plan
4. How to Write a Marketing Plan
5. Identify Your Challenges and Advantages
6. Determine Who Your Customers are
7. Setting up Your Objectives
8. Choose the Marketing Tools and Channels You Will Use
9. Establish a Follow up Plan to Track Performance
10. Conclusion

What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a plan you use to lead your marketing team and the map you will use to guide your vape shop’s endeavors toward specific goals. In essence, it is a high-level overview of your marketing efforts for the quarter, year, or month and dictates the tactics you will use to meet the vape shop’s goals, objectives, and overall growth. 

Why Should You Have a Marketing Plan for Your Vape Shop?

You have to think of your marketing plan as a map or a blueprint. Without a map, you can’t get to your destination. In the same way, you can’t build a house without a blueprint. In marketing, you can’t meet your vape shop’s goals or objectives without using a marketing plan. 

Without a marketing plan that outlines goals and objectives and the tools and channels you will use to carry out your marketing plan, you won’t be able to come up with a budget to carry out your objectives and goals for the year, quarter, or month. 

What To Include in a Marketing Plan

There are many ways to create a marketing plan, and when looking and researching for the various forms, you’ll realize that the options of what to include are almost endless. However, here are some of the “must-have” things we believe you must have in your vape shop’s marketing plan in the following order:

• Business Summary
• Customer Analysis
• Competitor Analysis
• SWOT Analysis
• Market Strategy
• Marketing Channels
• Marketing Budget
• Key Performance Indicators

All of these are elements that should be included in your vape shop’s marketing plan. However, to write your marketing plan, you need to address five things that we will cover in the following section. 

How to Write a Marketing Plan

In order to write your marketing plan you’ll need to address the following five things:

1. Identify Your Challenges and Advantages: This will include the business summary and the SWOT analysis and competitor analysis. These three sections will help you realize your business's challenges and advantages. 
2. Determine Who Your Customers Are: Once you understand how your vape shop is positioned in the market and its unique challenges and advantages, you can determine who your customers are and how you can cater to them by creating a customer analysis. 
3. Setting up Your Objectives: Now that you know who your customers are and your challenges and advantages, it's time to set up goals for your vape shop. For this, you'll need to create a marketing strategy. 
4. Choose the Marketing Tools and Channels You Will Use: After you figure out your objectives, you'll need to choose the marketing tools and channels you will use to achieve these goals. For this, you'll create the marketing channels section. 
5. Establish a Follow-up Plan to Track Performance: You'll next want to have a section where performance can be tracked. For these, you'll use a marketing budget and a separate area where key performance indicators can be tracked and measured. 

So now that you know the five things your marketing plan should address let’s explore how to create each section. It’s important to note that the sections will be written in no particular order, and in fact, you’ll find yourself skipping and jumping around sections to finish writing your marketing plan. 

Identify Your Challenges and Advantages

As previously stated, to identify your challenges and advantages, first create a business summary, a competitor analysis, and a SWOT analysis. Let’s begin with the business summary since this is the first element you should start with when writing your marketing plan. 

Business Summary

This element is easy to create. Here you will include the vape shop’s name, the mission statement of your vape shop, and where it is located. The most important thing here is the mission statement. The mission statement is what leads everyone in the company. In essence, the mission statement is the reason why your vape shop exists. An excellent example of a mission statement could be:

“XYZ vape shop was created to bring the most variety of vape juices to vapers online” 

Here the mission of the vape shop is clearly stated. They will focus on having the most variety of vape juices on the market, which will mean they might focus more on vape juices than vape devices. Think about what your vape shop’s purpose is and write it as a mission statement. 

Competitor Analysis

A competitor analysis is how you compare to your competitors. You can go in-depth when conducting market research to find out how your competitors conduct business. But some of the critical things you’ll want to find out about your vape shop competitors include:

• Pricing
• Products
• Sales Tactics
• Shipping Costs
• Their content strategy
• What tools, channels, and technology do they use
• How often do they send emails

These are just some of the things you should look out for when investigating your competition. Visit their websites as customers, see what products they offer, what savings they have, and sign up to their communication channels to see how they promote their products. After performing a competitor analysis, you should know how to position your vape shop and what gaps it should fill that your competitors have left wide open. 

 SWOT Analysis

A SWOT Analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. There are many templates online that you can use to create a SWOT analysis, but in essence, they all look like a document with four quadrants that list out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your vape shop. 

To find the strengths of your vape shop, think back on the competitor analysis. What are you doing that the competition is missing? In what areas do you truly shine? Is your customer service more efficient and more easily reached than your competitors? 

To find your weaknesses look at what your competitors are doing better than you. Do they offer free shipping? Do they post content more frequently than you? Are their prices lower?

To find your opportunities look at the gaps, you can fill. If your competitors, for example, aren’t offering a specific brand of popular vape juices, this is an opportunity for your vape shop to carry this brand. If, for example, your competitors don’t have a chatbot that can take customers' queries 24/7, you could implement a chatbot on your website.

Perhaps the most evident threat in the vaping industry, which affects almost all vape shops, is the constant change in legislation that affects how the vaping industry functions. It’s essential to be aware of the changes in legislation as they happen to find out what you can and can’t do while marketing your vape shop. Besides this common threat, you should look at possible dangers your vape shop can face

Determine Who Your Customers Are

Now that you know how your company is positioned in the market and its unique challenges and advantages, you can move on to determining who your customers are. For this, you’ll need to create a customer analysis. 

Customer Analysis

To create a customer analysis, you’ll need to generate customer personas. Using your customer data and sales data, you should develop a persona of what your customer looks like. This will include essential demographics like age, location, occupations, and psychographics like beliefs, goals, pain points, and many more. You can check out our previous blog on how to create a buyer persona for vape shops here. 

Setting up Your Objectives

Now comes the time to set up the objectives your marketing plan will address. To do this, you’ll need to create your marketing strategy, which will let you know your capabilities as a vape shop. Once that is handled, you can set up SMART goals. 

Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy is how you plan to approach the market now that you know your vape shop’s unique challenges and advantages and now that you have determined who your customers are. All the information created so far should help you in making your marketing strategy. A good marketing strategy, According to Hubspot, will contain the seven Ps of marketing:

• Product: This refers to the product you plan on offering. How will it address the pain points of your customers? Will there be more variety when it comes to vape juices offered? Are you the only vape shop that provides these products?
• Price: What is an ideal price range to remain competitive and at the same time affordable for your ideal customer?
• Place: Will you be a brick-and-mortar vape shop, or will you sell your products online? Take into account the place where you think you will be more profitable.
• Promotion: How do you plan on promoting your vape shop and its products? If you’re an eCommerce vape shop, will you rely on content marketing? Email marketing? Both?
• People: How big will your marketing team be? Who will be responsible for what tasks? What will each of them do to bring your objectives to reality?

• Process: What will be the process that will take place to deliver the products to your customers? How will the payment system work? In essence, explain every process that will take place for the vape shop to run successfully.
• Physical Evidence: This can refer to several things but mainly the physical objects that prove that your business is real. You can create branding, packaging, and even merchandise that prove that you are a legitimate business.

After creating your marketing strategy, you will have a better picture of your capabilities as a vape shop, leading you to determine your SMART goals. 

SMART Goals

SMART Goals stand for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. When setting up your objectives for your marketing plan, make sure they are all of the above. An excellent example of a SMART goal or objective would be:

“Increase vape shop revenue by 30% in two months.”

Depending on your capabilities as a vape shop, this goal could be very feasible. It dictates how much revenue will grow and how long it will take to get there. It is specific (grow revenue), measurable (revenue can be measured month to month), attainable (depending on your vape shop capabilities), relevant (revenue is a significant indicator of your vape shop’s growth), and time-bound (two months). 

Now that you know how to create SMART goals or objectives and understand your vape shop’s capabilities, write a couple of objectives you wish your marketing plan should address. 

Choose the Marketing Tools and Channels You Will Use

Next, you’ll want to choose the marketing tools and channels you will use to reach the objectives you have defined in the last section. If you plan on using email marketing software like Mailchimp or customer relationship management software to use in tandem with your customer service department, now is the time to select the tools and channels you will need. 

Establish a Follow up Plan to Track Performance

The final step in creating your marketing plan is to create a budget and track performance. The funding will be used to account for the marketing team's endeavors. From hiring marketing personnel to paying for software and tools, this is what your budget should have. 

For tracking performance, you'll need to establish three guidelines:

• The objectives you plan to track
• How you will track the objectives
• And how often you will follow them

Ideally, you'll want to track all the key performance indicators that apply to the SMART goals and objectives you set in the previous section. So, if we were to use the same model of increasing revenue by 30% in two months, you'll want to track, for example, the following KPIs:

• Total Revenue
• Weekly Sales
• Number of Total Orders

You can go more in-depth and include all revenue sources, such as email marketing revenue, SEO revenue, promotions revenue, and many more. Remember, it's always up to you how detailed you want to be with your KPIs and how you track your performance but usually, the more thorough you are, the better. 

Conclusion

It’s important to remember that there is no sequential way to create a marketing plan. Although this guide follows a specific order, you will find yourself jumping from section to section to create a well-rounded and well-thought-out marketing plan. So don’t be afraid if you find yourself setting goals first and then making your competitive analysis. However, the marketing plan should have a beginning and end and tell the story of how you plan to achieve the goals your marketing plan has set to perform.