You are looking ahead to a great marketing year in 2020. With so many tools at your disposal—new direct mail formats, easier than ever personalized email, and exciting new print-to-mobile tool sets—what’s the most important thing you can do to get off on the right foot? Did you say, “Create a marketing plan”? If you did, you’re right!
Just like an explorer setting off on a new adventure or a football team looking for the win, you will get much better results if you have a plan. A marketing plan will help you achieve five critical goals for your business:
- Better target your audience
- Decrease your costs
- Increase conversions
- Increase short-term sales
- Grow long-term revenues
Here are five actionable steps you can take to create an effective marketing plan right now.
- Write a business summary. This might seem boring, but it’s one of the most important steps you can take. Why? Your business summary includes your mission statement, which will drive your audience targeting and messaging, and a SWOT analysis: your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These things will drive the rest of your strategy.
- Identify business initiatives. Identify the different areas of your business. Are there different goals for each? Where can marketing help? You want to make sure that every important area of your business gets addressed.
- Identify your target markets. Who are you selling to? What are their needs? What messaging will be most effective in reaching them?
- Develop a strategy. How are you going to get the message out? Which channels will you use? What is the schedule?
- Adjust your budget. Your budget will drive much of what you are able to execute. Set realistic numbers, prioritize the elements of your marketing plan, then work backwards from most critical to less critical and see how many you can fit in.
Getting started creating a marketing plan is easy. Use one of the many free online templates or contact one of our business development experts to guide you. Whichever route you take, the most important step is just getting started!
