So you’ve got a Marketing Plan, now what? Do you know how to get all of your ideas down on paper and make sure all of the time and effort doesn’t go to waste?
One of the most common things to happen is for companies to write a Marketing Plan, use it once, and then forget about it! So how do you avoid this common scenario?
It is very easy to take days and multiple resources to write a Marketing Plan, so it is essential that you schedule meetings to update your Marketing plan at regular intervals. After each Marketing Meeting, we recommend that you book the next meeting immediately so that you have time to plan and prepare ahead of time. This also makes your team regularly use and update your plan.
To ensure everyone is on the same page, you can create a mission statement that continually drives your marketing plan. Is a short statement that outlines why your organization exists, what its overall goal is and it identifies the goal of its operations, e.g. what kind of product or service it provides, its primary customers or market, and its geographical region of operation and target audience.
Given most companies sink a lot of money into marketing, it’s important to know if your strategy as outlined in your Marketing Plan is working for you.
So now you have set your goals and you know how to track your performance, what’s next? For most businesses it’s important to identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your perfect customer. Most people do this by using Situational Analysis (SWOT) and Marketing Analysis.
A SWOT analysis helps identify your companies’ Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You can see some examples in the below diagram.
A buyer persona is, according to HubSpot, a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It's based on market research, actual data about your existing customers, and a few (educated) assumptions. It helps you to understand and relate to an audience that you want to market your products and services to.
With a clearly defined target audience, it is much easier to determine where and how to market your company. Here are some tips to help you define your target market.
The 4 C’s of marketing can be broken down into Consumer wants and needs, Cost, Convenience, and Communication. They focus not only on marketing and selling a product but also on communication with the target audience from the beginning of the process to the very end.
Marketing efforts are the resources you dedicate to promoting your products and services. Through marketing activities, like posting on social media, or paying for advertising, a company can create demand and interest in its items and gain greater visibility with potential customers.
There are so many ways to spend you Marketing Budget these days that it's tempting to do a lot ofdifferent things and spread your budget quite thin across many platforms. In our experience, our budget has always been better spent by picking a few things and then doing them really well. For example, we know that for us, Twitter is great for branding, but not as great at selling our Events or Services. So counter this, we do great free social media posts on Twitter and occasionally spend on targeted ads (to expand our brand), but spend more money on Facebook Ads to advertise our Training Events, because we know that our audience uses this platform the most for purchases.
We suggest you follow up and update your metrics and results on a monthly basis to help you understand if your strategy and your marketing efforts are working.