By 
Many brands need help with defining a marketing plan. This is because there are usually many initiatives and multiple people who own them. Many of the biggest and most successful brands have been seen to need to be more organized across marketing channels, business products, and services.
Disorganization is the problem. If you keep your team organized around a central schedule, you could avoid missing deadlines, making errors, miscommunicating, and wasting creative time. This leads to happy clients and satisfied marketing.
This blog post will walk you through the five steps necessary to align your marketing initiatives. Creating a roadmap for a strategy around which everyone can rally, implement, and evaluate is also essential. Let’s start with the basics.
What does a marketing plan consist of
Have you seen the stock photos with a group of marketers huddled around a large whiteboard covered in colored sticky notes, charts, and graphs? We’re talking about something similar. Digital templates are just as good — or better yet, a combination of both. Your schedule should include the following:
Due dates that are clearly defined
The tasks that will help you reach your goal, and the team members assigned to them
Task status (in progress, delayed, completed, etc.)
It is essential to create a schedule that is tailored to your business and its processes.
Why Use a Schedule for Marketing
A schedule is beneficial to your business as well as your clients. Here are a few of the main advantages:
Efficiency – Instead of starting each day with a general perspective, your team could focus on a specific part of the project. Instead of planning, each day is spent working. Imagine how much time would be saved if a train didn’t need to stop at every station.
Stress reduction – A clear goal will increase motivation and boost morale. When there is a high confidence level, the stress associated with a lack of direction is reduced. It is best to schedule a series of short and recognizable micro-goals to combat the stress of deadlines in a fast-paced marketing environment.
Transparency and accountability: When everyone can see each other’s progress, miscommunications are reduced. The ability to see the progress of others also helps people stay accountable. Each individual is part of a machine that needs to function.
Throw everything on the wall
This step involves organizing all of the current initiatives your company is undertaking into different buckets.
Prioritizing these initiatives and finding overlaps between them is vital. Suppose you have a solid content marketing strategy. In that case, it can provide a great way to increase organic traffic via SEO and fantastic content for your advertising campaigns in email. Profit from opportunities such as these to maximize your return on investment. Venn diagrams overlapped areas are not to be underestimated.
You’ll discover many opportunities to be filled where key strategy elements are lacking. This can be done by dividing the tasks between each department and its members. You’ll see how common elements are when you break each task down.
Map out the customer journey
Even if the elements you identified in step one are correct, that doesn’t necessarily mean your customers will evaluate your brand and make a purchase decision.
It is important to have a clear understanding of the specifics of your customer. You should know who they are, their interests, what motivates them to buy, what makes them afraid, and what you can do to solve their problems.
This step can be comprehensive but also simple. It comes down to brands better recognizing their customer’s different demographics. All marketing materials customers come into contact with during their purchasing journey should be tailored to their needs.
How does this fit in with the marketing plan? Your team and you must create a detailed journey for your typical client. Do not limit yourself to a single customer profile. There are many companies with diverse demographics. Each cohort can take a drastically different path.
Analyze your competitors and yourself
This data-driven step is crucial to identifying what is currently working, what low-hanging fruits are, and what the competition is doing.
Each company’s goals are different, but it is important to establish KPIs in your marketing plan. Set goals, measure them, and keep measuring. If you aim to increase leads by email signups, then you should set monthly quantifiable goals. Therefore, each marketing department involved in email signups must always keep an eye on KPIs.
Keep your learning hat in place when gaining insights into your competitors. The successes and failures in the industry can teach you a lot. You can exploit the gaps in the market by identifying areas where your competitors aren’t protecting themselves. Know their positioning, new trends, and ideas you can improve.
Your marketing plan should include analytics and competition. It’s important to revisit this element with your team regularly. This will help you to avoid mistakes and stay on top of current trends.
Draw circles on the whiteboard to indicate core initiatives
Venn diagrams were mentioned earlier. Venn diagrams are just as helpful today as they were when you were in middle school. These circles can help you find overlaps between marketing campaigns and audiences. You can then focus your efforts on a few projects and create synergy. Do one thing well, then leverage this marketing asset in multiple parts of your sales funnel.
Alignment is your goal. What is alignment? It is an age-old juggling game to balance marketing and sales. Both sides of a business must work together. The two departments are different by nature and have different goals. However, if they can be aligned, dollars and resources go further.
Leads are a great example of where two worlds meet. This is a great place to start collaborating between your marketing and sales departments. They should define a strategy for lead generation that combines both departments’ resources and still meets the goal.
Comments