REWIRING YOUR MARKETING PLAN – HOW TO STAND STRONGER DURING AN EARTHQUAKE?

In recent years, business owners and entrepreneurs, whether large or small, have not only had to steer their boats upwind and battle the biggest storms. At the same time, they had to learn new fighting styles and new skills that would ensure their existence even in stormy wind and rain. But despite all this, they cannot sit back in 2022, furthermore, they must play on more challenging playing fields and find a way to stay on their feet and stand strong even during earthquakes.

These times teach all of us several lessons and one thing is sure, if you want to make your business keep on flourishing, you have to invest in your marketing planning processes strategically while focusing on your core strengths and your resilience.

We have seen many businesses and entrepreneurs fail because they created their Marketing Plan at some point in the past and stored the document on their computer but never reviewed or rewired it over the years. If you put together a detailed Marketing Plan before the global pandemic, how can you assume it to still be relevant and deliver results today? In the time since then, have you checked whether things went according to plan and whether you have achieved the desired results based on the previously defined KPIs?

If your answer is "NO", then it's time to sound the alarm!

In the previous issue of the Strategyscope newsletter, we took a closer look at the “Core Objectives of the Marketing Planning” and gave insights on the “Scope and Buildup” of it. (You can read the article here: "Your Marketing Plan Keeps Your Business on The Path to Success! ")

While your Marketing Strategy provides the actionable framework for how you sell your products or services and how you grow your business, the Marketing Plan is created to organize, orchestrate, and execute your marketing activities and then measure their success. It’s your blueprint for your marketing activities including different specific marketing plans and tactics for your advertising, Social Media, content, email marketing, SEO or Influencer Marketing, etc.

So, if you have a Marketing Plan that’s fine but is it good enough to yield huge results? When you know how to avoid the most common mistakes, you will be able to optimize your marketing activities and tactics and fine-tune the plan.

?? MISTAKES TO AVOID WITH MARKETING PLANNING

?? LACK OF MARKETING STRATEGY – The biggest mistake you can make is to start advertising, distributing different digital content or flooding your target audience with emails before you have created your overall Marketing Strategy combined with written marketing plans!

?? MARKETING PLANNING IS NOT EQUAL TO CAMPAIGN PLANNING! Marketing Campaigns are specific plans for executing certain tactics such as a featured product, introduction of a new service or promotion of an event with all the details about who, what, where, when and how the given tactic will be promoted.

?? POOR VALUE PROPOSITION that doesn’t appeal to your ideal customers and clients makes the successful implementation of the Marketing Plan impossible. If you don’t articulate clearly and in a persuasive way why customers should buy from you or use your services, your different marketing plans will fail!

?? GOING BIG TOO SOON AND COPYING ICONIC BRANDS is not the best choice either and you shouldn’t jump on the bandwagon without understanding your realistic capabilities and resources. So, being an SMB owner, Entrepreneur or Solopreneur don’t make the mistake to turn the trendiest and most expensive marketing channels or running an ad campaign you can’t afford in reality.

?? NOT IMPLEMENTING TESTING AND ANALYSIS METHODOLOGIES is another critical point where many SMBs and Entrepreneurs fail. Collecting data on traffic on your website from Google Analytics is as essential as using the insights you gain from Social Media analytics for evaluating the performance of your advertising campaigns.

?? NOT USING THE PROPER MARKETING CHANNELS – If you want to optimize the effectiveness of your Marketing Plan and achieve the best results, it’s not always enough to use the most well know marketing channels that can work in any industry such as a website, Social Media channels, emails, or paid and organic marketing channels. If you don’t make your research on which channels work the best in your industry to reach your potential customers, meaning those used widely and are the most popular among your ideal customers and clients, your plan will fail again.

??BY NOT KNOWING THE SPECIFIC DETAILS ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE makes not only your campaigns easily messed up but the whole Marketing Plan will be shaky. Make sure that you go deeper in terms of understanding them and fine-tuning the different Buyer Personas by identifying their buying habits and what factors influence their loyalty, etc. before starting to execute your campaigns and allocating a heavy amount of money to them.

?? NOT PRIORITIZING WHAT IS REALLY IMPORTANT – This is another typical mistake made by Small and Midsized Businesses because they want to jump into several things parallelly. This often leads to working on what you love to do and not on what is important to engage potential customers or meet their urgent needs, such as embedding live chat support on your website.

?? Marketing planning is a precise process where you can easily fail by listing random steps which have no logical correlation between them.

?? HOW TO SET PRIORITIES TO MAKE YOUR MARKETING PLAN MORE EFFECTIVE?

????????? STEP 1 – List the Marketing Tactics You Want to do.

????????? STEP 2 – Prioritize your Marketing Tasks and Action Steps you have to do based on

a.)???deadlines,

b.)???which ones do have a direct effect on your revenue,

c.)???which ones can be automated, delegated or outsourced,

d.)???for which ones can you allocate the necessary budget and

e.)???which ones can be managed flexibly regardless of deadline or available budget.

??????Creating sub-categories below each tactic can be really useful.

???????? STEP 3 – Assign Realistic Deadlines to Each of the Tasks under these categories.

???????? STEP 4 – Work on Your Deadline-Driven Tasks First.

???????? STEP 5 – Then Work on the tasks Below the Strategically Highly Important Categories and the ones that Have a Direct Effect on your Revenue and Goals.

“The secret of a successful Marketing Plan lies in its FLEXIBILITY and RESILIENCE in order to make it work effectively even euring an earthquake! So, it’s about being able to adjust rapidly to different or changing conditions and setting things back for action-taking mode quickly.” (Strategyscope)

?? HOW TO CHECK IF YOUR MARKETING PLAN IS STILL RELEVANT?

Regularly reviewing your Marketing Plan is non-negotiable, however, it’s hard to determine the frequency as it may differ by the size of your business, the industry or how many tactics and campaigns are planned for a certain time period of the year. If you do it quarterly, you can’t be wrong but if unexpected circumstances such as the current economic crisis occur, you must be more conscious about it!

This way you will be up to date on whether your Marketing Plan is still relevant, and whether you must change any tactics or the elements of the campaigns based on evaluating the performance and results.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself to execute your reality check:

?????????????Have the market and the economic conditions, or other circumstances related to your industry or niche been changed?

?????????????Have the problems, needs, expectations and behaviours of your target audiences changed?

?????????????Are all elements of your marketing plan still working smoothly and efficiently as a cohesive system?

?????????????Do you need to change some of your marketing methods and align them with new ones based on the latest trends?

?????????????Do you need to adjust your Marketing Plan to meet your business goals?

?????????????Do you need to rearrange your assigned budget for different elements of the Marketing Plan?

Conclusions:

Great marketing requires a great plan but outstanding marketing entails a precise and flexible plan designed with an agile mindset. Since you will be investing significant time, money, and resources into executing your Marketing Plan, you can't afford to just build a house of cards!

It cannot be emphasized enough how important it is to regularly review your marketing plan by involving the key internal stakeholders, team members or consultants, furthermore to analyse data and results, and finally adjust it accordingly. More importantly, be patient and stay consistent while focusing on how you can serve your customers and clients better!

??2022 All rights reserved.

Editor’s Note: Marketing Strategy is a huge subject with several various verticals and aspects. Strategyscope will continue to discuss this topic but does not intend to replace Wikipedia or high-quality professional marketing resources. Rather, it aims to provide guidance and share best practices based on real-life experiences and client cases while keeping you up-to-date.        

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??If you want to broaden your knowledge about how to craft your Marketing, Branding and Content Strategy, stay tuned because more details will be described in the upcoming issues of the STRATEGYSCOPE newsletter.

STRATEGYSCOPE is the Marketing, Branding & Content Strategy Compass for your business boost. Each week the newsletter covers various topics within these 3 key areas to guide SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) Entrepreneurs, and Solopreneurs to fine-tune their strategies and utilize the potential of Marketing for their sustainable growth.

?? Got a question or Want to Work with Me? Shoot it over in the comments or DM to me @Ildiko Bujaki