Marketing Plan
The Implementation Of Your Strategy.Your Marketing Plan takes your Marketing Strategy and details how to turn it into actionable items, activities, and events.
Following this logic means that the first (marketing-related) step for any company should be to define their marketing strategy. You cannot develop a feasible marketing plan without a solid marketing strategy at the foundation of your plan.
Your marketing plan is all about the execution of your marketing strategy. Your plan should detail what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, how much you expect to spend on it, and what you expect the results to be. The advantage of having a marketing plan in place is that it eliminates ad hoc decision-making. Once a budget has been defined, the plan will make use of that budget over the next 12 months.
“ The Lack Of A Marketing Plan Typically Results In Wasting Lots Of Your Marketing Dollars Through Ad Hoc, Gut-Reaction Decision Making. ”
Your marketing plan should consider all your core messaging, target customer demographics, and preferred marketing tactics, that were all determined by your executive team and are all detailed within your marketing strategy.
One of the more successful strategies that we employ is to create a very detailed marketing plan. BUT, that plan needs to be simple enough that an admin-level person can execute the plan without any assistance from an executive-level person. We do this because the small executives tend to be overloaded with tasks. Therefore it's very likely that if we require any involvement from an executive-level, the execution of the plan is often delayed or postponed, and your marketing efforts suffer.
“ Inconsistent marketing execution is one of the Top 5 Reasons For Ineffective Marketing Results. ”
At a minimum, any worthwhile marketing plan should contain:
- Core messaging utilization.
- Brand/Logo usage guidelines
- All marketing activities to be executed.
- Target customer demographics
- Steps for executing each activity.
- Cost of each marketing activity.
- Expected results of each activity.
While this may sound like a lot of details, you should realize that the difficult and time-consuming parts of these requirements were already figured out by your executive team when they created your marketing strategy.
Breaking your plan down this way allows you to minimize the requirements for the executive team's time to just the strategic items
while making use of the admin-level people to do the day to day tasks.
It's common for companies to confuse a marketing plan with a marketing strategy because the lines can get blurred.
We consider the plan to be the details of who is going to execute what, and when they are going to do it. The strategy of why we are going to do this, who it is targeted at, and our expected results all come directly from the marketing strategy, which was created by your executive team.
Curious about how we can help you with your rolling out a Marketing Plan, or need help creating a Marketing Strategy? Why not give us a call to discuss your situation, and how we might be able to help?
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