Effective Marketing Planning Concepts

Do you have and used a marketing plan? Do you find marketing planning difficult? Today, I am going to share four high-level marketing planning concepts that will help your planning become more effective. They are simple, but they're often overlooked.

Join Tim Fitzpatrick ?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

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Effective Marketing Planning Concepts

Do you have and used a marketing plan? Do you find marketing planning difficult? Today, I am going to share four high-level marketing planning concepts that will help your planning become more effective. They are simple, but they're often overlooked.

Hi, I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate growth. And marketing shouldn't be difficult.

So here's the thing about planning. If you want to reduce mistakes, you want to save time, you want to increase your focus, having a marketing plan is an absolute must. But the common thing that I see is most people overcomplicate plans by making them for too long of a time horizon and stuffing them full of a bunch of things. So I want to share four concepts with you today that that I think you can use immediately that will make your marketing planning more effective.

4 Marketing Planning Concepts

So the first thing, and you're going to say this is super obvious, Tim, but we got to take action. I've seen far too many people put plans in place, but then they never do anything with it. Great ideas, great plans are absolutely worthless unless we jump in to action and we implement and we execute on those plans. Super obvious, but it happens all the time. We've got to take action.

Second thing, we need to evaluate. Evaluate what we're doing, why we're doing it, If we accomplish those things, where is it going to take us? If we don't have the answers to those things, we need to stop and take a step back. Because without knowing the answers to those questions, we may actually have a plan in place that's not going to get us to where we want to go. Might help us accomplish something, but it's not going to help us accomplish the goals we really want to accomplish and get where we want to go. So we've got to evaluate the plan to make sure that we're doing the right things, that why are we doing those things, and that if we actually accomplish those things, it's going to help us get where we want to go. Again, this may seem obvious, but it's not uncommon for people to put plans together and go, oh, my gosh, why are we actually doing these things? We thought these were the right things to do, but they really weren't. So make sure that from the outset, you've evaluated why you're doing things, what you're doing, and that those things are going to help you get where you want to go.

The third thing I want to share with you is about breakdowns. Because there are two types of breakdowns that can actually happen with plans. One, we can have a breakdown in the actual contents of the plans. The things that we're doing in our plan are not effective. Second breakdown we can have is actually in the execution, the implementation and execution of it when we fail to actually fully implement on all the things that we had in the plan. Those are the two types of breakdowns that we can have in plans. Now, if you're fully executing on what's in the plan, you're taking the actions, but they're not producing what you expected, well, then you need to make adjustments in the planned content, right? But we should rarely be changing what's in the plan unless we've effectively executed on on that plan first. So if you're failing to actually execute on the plan, you should not be adjusting the plan content. You need to successfully implement on the plan tactics and actions first and foremost before you actually adjust what's in the plan. Because until you've executed on it, you don't know whether it's going to work or not. So it's really important to understand those two types of breakdowns, because that's going dictate what you actually need to do moving forward. So again, we can have breakdowns in the actual content of the plan. I'm failing to implement it. And then the second thing is we can fail to implement and execute on the plan. So if we're failing to implement and execute on the plan, we need to actually do that successfully. If we're successfully implementing and executing on the plan, but it's not getting the desired results, then we need to look at what we need to change from a tactics and an action standpoint within the plan. Super, super important.

And the fourth thing is we need to keep it simple. When I think about keeping marketing planning simple, there are two overarching things, two really important things, I think, to keep in mind. One, don't plan for long periods of time. I highly recommend that you look at marketing planning in 90 days at a time. 90 day sprints. 90 days is long enough to start seeing traction, but it's short enough where you can make course corrections and wash, rinse, repeat. The other thing that 90 days does is it almost forces you to keep your plans simple so that you don't overcomplicate them. Because complexity is the enemy of results. It is going to get in your way. We need to keep things simple to effectively implement and execute, in my opinion. The second thing that's going to help you keep things simple, outside of focusing on 90 days at a time, is to focus on fewer tactics, but go deeper. It is so easy for us to fall into this trap because there's so many different marketing channels today. I've got to be everywhere. I've got to have a website. I got to be on all the social channels. I got to have a podcast. I got to be creating videos I got to do email marketing. No, you don't. What ends up happening a lot of times when people focus on I've got to be everywhere is they just don't do a good job at any of them. So I would much rather see you focus on fewer tactics, do those tactics better before you start to expand into other ones. Most businesses need to focus on fewer marketing tactics, not more. And they need to go deeper and execute better on those fewer tactics. So keep it simple.

Conclusion

So just to highlight those, again, how to effectively plan your marketing. One, you need to take action. Two, we need to evaluate what we're doing, why we're doing it, and is it going to help us get where we want to go? The two types of breakdowns that happen in plans, you need to know which breakdown is actually occurring when a breakdown happens because that's going to dictate the changes you need to make. And four, we need to keep planning simple by focusing on shorter periods of time planning for 90 days at a time, and focusing on fewer tactics for going deeper.

So I hope you found this helpful. If you did, please reach out. Let me know. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com . Book a free consultation. I'd be happy to jump on a call with you and help highlight where you should be focusing right now with your marketing based on where you are and where you want to go. The other tool that is always out there for you is that RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com . When we work with clients, we help them remove the nine revenue roadblocks that exist within marketing. If you want to find out which of the nine are slowing down your growth, you can do that in less than five minutes at RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com . It's a customized report, tons of detail and value in there, so go check it out. Thank you so much for watching, listening. I appreciate you. Until next time, take care.