There are an overwhelming amount of options when it comes to creating your Marketing plan. Aside from the all-important statistics and research, you’ll likely want to develop these into a plan that fits your company’s long-term vision to help boost your visibility and credibility.
Your plan can even include everything from Press Releases to TV advertising to designing your own app! As times progress and algorithms change, there is a constant need for not only staying up to date, but evaluating the needs of your customer.
This includes regular auditing of what your marketing is actively pursuing, what the results are, and whether it does in fact need updating or not.
If you’re looking for a Marketing Plan/Strategy example, guide, or outline, here are a few great options:
With so much to choose from when creating your plan, I have listed some key things for you to consider adding or tweaking in your Marketing Strategy and its implementation:
Building your list can sound daunting, but as long as you’re patient you’ll find the rewards will multiply from your efforts. Just be sure not to neglect this piece because email is not dead! The good news is, you have quite a few different ways to do it such as webinars, e-books, and white papers for starters.
You’ll find that your efforts to expand your list will flourish when you do things like segment your list. You can do this based on things like where people are in their buying journey (learning, ready to buy, etc), what they’re interested in (ie. similar items they’ve purchased), or simply just to re-engage them to check out your website again.
Personalize emails as much as possible (without being unethical or non-compliant of course). I’m always extremely impressed with companies who personalize my emails with “you recently viewed X and may also be interested in Y” types of messages. It shows me that they’re trying to appeal to me personally rather than selling their newest, most expensive items in stock.
After all of the tutorials, special cameras, and memes, the selfie had quite the run. Today’s world, however, expects to no longer see that arm sticking out but someone having taken the photo – or at least appear to have.
They also expect that you are posting more than stock photos, patterns or flowers. They want to see the real you and your team doing real life things. The perfect image isn’t always the perfect image…meaning the flaws, failures and authentic you is becoming more and more of what people want.
Consider your brand to determine what, where, and how you’ll be posting. If your brand voice is professional, you may not want to be on Snapchat posting party pictures.
On that note…
When developing and/or reviewing your social media, enlist the mindset that you should only be on (and market) the ones that matter for your audience. This is especially important when you are a small business.
You only have so much time in the day and money to invest, make sure it’s spent wisely when it comes to getting the word out about your company.
Develop your Marketing Plan to have multiple components describing what platforms you’ll use and why as well as when. Spreading out your release can allow you to funnel people better to one place and/or discover better what people want to use when interacting with your company.
Here are some Social Media platform-specific tips to use and consider when developing your plan and launching it:
Create the content strategy within the Marketing one.
With updates to places like Instagram and its removal of showing “like” numbers, there needs to be a new focus on more meaningful metrics. Despite the bot factor, I still believe follower numbers are important to watch, but how many of them are actually liking or commenting in comparison to the entire group?
Is what you’re posting (whether social media, blogs, emails, or otherwise) engaging your audience? Are you speaking to what their needs or challenges are? Are you considering and incorporating all of the audience research you have?
Technology is allowing increasingly more ways to develop a more interactive relationship with your followers. Find what fits yours best and try it out! Bring these ideas into a special place in your Marketing Plan if you’d like, but write it down so you and your team can always go back to it when the time is right.
Whatever you decide it to be, launch it!
Now is not the time to hide what you’ve worked so hard toward. Put it out in the world (with the right plan now in place) and let people join in the fun.
If you’re looking for help with creating your plan, feel free to contact me!
