The Marketing Plan Mistakes We See All The Time
If you want to experience consistent, repeatable results with your marketing, then having a plan is essential. Today I'm going to share some of the common marketing planning mistakes we see so you can avoid them and get where you want to go faster.
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The Marketing Plan Mistakes We See All The Time
If you want to see consistent, repeatable results with your marketing, then having a plan is essential. Today I'm going to share some of the common marketing plan mistakes we see so you can avoid them and and get to where you want to go faster. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. So we're jumping into marketing planning mistakes today.
I think having a plan, whether it's marketing, any aspect of your business or your life, having a plan is essential because if we don't have a plan, we're shooting at the hip. We're throwing stuff up against a wall, seeing what sticks, and that is no way to get results. So I'm going to share with you the ten common mistakes, ten common mistakes that we see people making with marketing planning. And I dig into each one of them a little bit.
So the first one is having no plan. Like I just touched on we don't have a plan. We're throwing stuff up against a wall hoping something's going to stick. If something does stick, we don't know why it stuck. Why did it work? We were much more susceptible to all the noise and the distractions out there and just have the start stop hits and you're never going to get results that way. So having no plan is the first big mistake that we see.
Second one is making your plan too complicated. It's very easy to make things complex today. I think it's much harder to boil things down to their simplest form where they're going to be most effective. But when we make our plans complex, it gets in the way of results. Right? There's a quote. I can't remember who I heard this from, but it's always stuck with me. Complexity is the enemy of results. We have got to make things simple. So do not over complicate your plan. If you do, it is going to be very difficult to execute effectively and in most cases it just gets in the way of your ability to see results from it.
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Third mistake is trying to create the perfect plan. Quite a long time ago I read a book from an author by the name of Jeff Olsen called The Slate Edge. And in the Slate Edge he talks about there is no perfect plan, right? There is no perfect plan. The plan we start with is not the same plan that is going to get us to our eventual destination. But we have to start somewhere. So forget the perfect plan. It doesn't exist. Put a plan together and start taking action. It's from the actions that we take. That's how we learn. That's how we learn what's working, what's not. And we continually update our plan. That's why the plan we start with is not the plan that's going to get us there. Our plan is evolving and changing and being updated and improving over time. So forget about the perfect plan. It does not exist.
Fourth one not sticking to the plan, right? You've got a plan, and then guess what? Marketing plans in place. You start taking action, and then you see somebody telling you or some email or something online saying, oh my gosh, you've got to do this with your marketing. This is where it's at. And rather than having the discipline to say, these are our priorities right now. And until we're done with these, we are not going to get distracted. That's how you're going to get results. If you don't stick to the plan again, you're going back into those start stop fits. And it's so easy to just get distracted. You've got to have the discipline to stick to the plan for a period of time. You've got to commit to the plan for a period of time. If you don't, then you're not going to get the results that you're looking for.
Number five. Fifth common mistake is not evaluating or tracking the results. What I'm talking about here are the metrics. The metrics that we choose to track are the ones that we choose to track, and they should help inform our decisions. Are the actions that we're taking working or are they not? The reason people don't know whether their marketing is working or not is because they're either not tracking the right metrics or they're not tracking any metrics at all. So as part of our plan, we need to have an idea of what metrics we're going to track. And as we track those, those are going to help inform the decisions that we make so that we make strong and better decisions. We've got to evaluate and track the results. And that all comes down to the metrics. Super important.
6th thing. 6th mistake. Creating a long term Plan So when we look at marketing planning, we look at 90 day sprints. 90 day sprints. It is a long enough period of time to start seeing whether things are gaining traction, but it's short enough where we can make course corrections. What ends up happening when you create a one year marketing plan inevitably goes back to one of the other mistakes I just touched on. They become too complex. There's too many moving parts. The other issue is one year, how many people have ever implemented a one year plan and not changed it like 60 to 90 days in or 120 days in? Like nobody. So forget it. Do not put out a plan for a year. I think you need to have an idea of where you want to get at the end of a year. But I think it's much easier to create a 90 day plan that's going to help you get one step closer to where you want to be in a year. But if you plan out too long, you end up changing the vast majority of the plan 90 to 120 days in. So why waste the time, plan in sprints, in my opinion, I think it works best.
Number seven in the common marketing plan mistakes that we see is failing to identify why you're doing something. If we don't understand why we're doing something in our plan, we're not going to have any idea what metrics we need to attach to that to determine whether it's actually working. So we have to understand it. It's most basic level why we're doing something. What is the purpose? What's the goal for going into this particular marketing channel or using this particular tactic? And once we understand those things, then we can attach the metrics to it that are going to help determine whether it's worked or it hasn't. We've got to at a fundamental level, we have to understand why we're doing something in our plan.
Number eight, trying to do too much or not doing enough. This comes down to having a clear understanding of what we have to work with to implement and execute our marketing plan. What's our budget, what are the resources? From a staffing standpoint, how much time do they have? What skill sets do they have? We have to understand those things first because that's going to determine how much or how little we can take on in our plan. And if you put too little in your plan and you've got the bandwidth and the budget to do more, well, then you're just slowing your progress. Right? So that doesn't make any sense. And if you bite off too much, what ends up happening there is you just don't implement well because you put too much in the plan and you can't execute on it. You get overwhelmed and the wheels just start coming off. So we've got to understand how much we have to work with so that we bite off exactly how much we can take on.Okay, super important. A lot of people overlook this and don't think about that from a marketing planning standpoint.
Number nine, we got two more here, guys and gals. So number nine, not giving tactics enough time to work. To me, this all comes down to short term versus long term thinking. If you think too short term with your marketing, you're going to be impatient and you're going to give up on tactics and channels before they've had the opportunity to work. I'm just going to be flat out honest with you. There's plenty of marketing people out there that over promise and under deliver. I need to generate these tomorrow. Oh, yeah, we'll get you on the first page of Google in three weeks. No, that's realistically. That just doesn't happen. So we've got to think long term and we need to give tactics enough time to work. Most marketing tactics take an extended period of time to work and they take consistent effort over time. So we need to be realistic about it. With a 90 day plan, you may not know fully whether a specific tactic has worked, but you can start to see if you're tracking the right metrics, whether you're starting to gain traction. Right. And so that's the important part of it. Don't give up on things before you've given them the opportunity to work. Otherwise you're going to have those start and stop fits, which is where people are like, yeah, I did social media, I created a blog. Didn't work. You probably didn't give it enough time. There are also some other elements that can play in there that may have impacted the results you experienced there, but we've got to give things enough time. So be patient and think long term.
Last one is failing to execute. A lot of marketing results, or lack thereof come down to not failing to execute. And if we're going to implement and execute our plan appropriately, what's the biggest driver there? In my opinion, the biggest driver is you have to have somebody who's taking a leadership role and responsibility of implementing your plan, and they have to have the experience and the know how to do that. If you don't have somebody that is dedicated to implementing and executing your plan, managing it on an ongoing basis, and making those consistent updates over time, your marketing is bound to fail. So you've got to have somebody that's in that role, and that doesn't mean it has to be somebody that's full time. But if you as the business owner are trying to implement your plan and you got five other things you're doing and you know you don't have the time that it needs to execute on it, well, you got to bring somebody in at least part time to do that. And those people are out there. We do that all the time, so we can help if you are in that place.
Those are the ten common marketing planning mistakes that we see all the time. I hope you're not making them, but I hope this gives you visibility to it so that if you find yourself going down any one of these paths that you have the selfawareness to see it and to stop it from happening.
Now, if you need help with your marketing plan, I've got a few resources that I want to make available to you, and I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen. I hope you've got a ton of value from this episode, but if you head on over to Growthmarketingplan.com, that's Growthmarketingplan.com, the 90 Day Marketing plan toolkit that we use for our business, our clients is right there, and you can download it right there. There's an instructional video walking you through the 90 Day Plan template. The template that we use is there. Sample plans, all the tools and downloads you need to get started creating your plans so that you can start to see results today are there.
The other place you can find us is at rialtomarketing.com that's R-I-A-L-T-O- marketing.com. I'm always happy to chat with you if you click on the get a free consultation button there, I'll be happy to chat with you. Give you some clarity on where I think you should be focusing what your next step should be based on where you are and where you want to go. Thanks for tuning in.
Appreciate you very much. Till next time. Take care.
About the Host?Tim Fitzpatrick
Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing. At Rialto Marketing, we see many businesses battling information overload with marketing. As a result, they aren't sure what their next marketing steps should be to get where they want to go. We help B2B service-based businesses create, implement, and manage a marketing plan to communicate the right message to the right people so they build results that last. Marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the RIGHT plan.