Great Marketing Plans Start With A Solid Foundation
Does your list of business-related New Year’s resolutions include improving your company’s marketing plan? If so, here are a few basics to nail down before you start running any ads or posting any content.
I find it helpful to approach building a marketing plan like a contractor approaches building a house: before any of the fancy stuff goes in, a solid foundation goes down. As you pull together your marketing plan blueprint for 2012, here are four key elements that you should include:
1) Objectives. Everything in your marketing plan should tie back to fundamental business objectives. If not, you’re wasting time and money. Business objectives are simple and straightforward: they might be about building brand awareness (measurable though things like surveys) or simply increasing sales by X percent. Your marketing plan can’t be deemed successful if there’s nothing that the strategies and tactics focus on. Note that we’re talking about bottom-line business objectives here. A Facebook campaign will have its own goals, such as doubling fan page likes or adding prospects to an email list. These are important, but they’re not what drives the plan overall. Business objectives: know yours, and make sure your marketing plan relates back to them.
2) Audience. This one may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many well-meaning marketers make ad-buy decisions based on elements like reach or cost-per-impression without first thinking about the audience on the receiving end. A thousand bucks’ worth of carefully targeted Facebook ads running over many months may seem like a great deal compared to the $1,000 one-time, four-color ad in your local small-circulation publication. But if your audience is more likely to read that pub than linger in front of a Facebook newsfeed (it’s a stretch, but last we heard, print’s not dead yet…) then you may be wasting your money. A simple breakdown of who your target audiences are, which ones you want more of, and where you’re likely to find them will go a long way in maximizing your marketing dollars. Where can you get these all-important demographics and psychographics and insight on how to reach them? Individual print pubs and ad-supported websites should have media kits. Yeah, they’re a bit biased, but it’s a start. Pew Internet has great stats for online usage and tendencies, too.
3) Schedule. Not sure where to start with your marketing plan? Consult your business schedule. Odds are you know when major events are happening–an open house, a major sale, or a market-driven rush on your product or service, like New Year’s resolutioners signing up for that long-overdue gym membership. Jot those down, and start there. If your business doesn’t have such an obvious event-driven schedule, think about internal activities–such as your annual fund drive or volunteer effort for the local charity of choice–and count those as events worth marketing, or marketing around.
4) Measurement. This element 
is more like a home warranty, in that–unlike the rest of the foundation–it’s not put into action until after the project is finished. Still, it’s fundamental to your plan’s overall success. For every chosen strategy, come up with a way to track results. Inbound marketing strategies, like blogging or SEO/SEM, offer myriad ways to measure effectiveness. Social networks have their insights and ad-campaign stats and, from your website’s end, inbound link-tracking capabilities. For traditional strategies like print ads or TV, use landing pages, QR codes or (at the very least) simple lead-tracking by hand and month-over-month comparisons to render some sort of verdict. Study your results, and–much like you do with a warranty–fix what’s broken.
Lots of factors go into making a marketing plan successful. Setting it up for success is the first step. If your plan has the four core elements above, you’re well on your way.
Working on your 2012 marketing plan? Have a question about a seemingly daunting element? Shoot us an email with a brief description of your challenge and the best way to reach you. Someone from our team will be happy to offer 15 or so minutes of no-cost, no-obligation time to see if we can get you a bit closer to meeting those all-important objectives.