Marketing plans are daunting. They mean you need to think about what you’re doing and (as suggested by their name) plan in advance. No more putting out fires, or reacting by following instinct. Actually committing to do something and then doing it.
Whoa there, I hear you say. I don’t have time for planning, I’m busy and if I take weeks out of my life to plan I’ll never get anything done. I hear you. But actually, arming yourself with a well thought out marketing plan could make life easier in the long run. You’ll have pencilled in what you’re going to do when, and planned what to spend, so decisions on opportunities that come out of the blue will be easier. You’ll have a timeline of activities to follow – a laid out to do list. And you’ll know where you’ve been (un)successful previously and why. It’s time well-invested. But where to start?
First of all, think of planning your marketing like planning a journey. You need to know two things:
- Where are you starting from?
- Where are you going?
So if you are planning to leave from your house to go to Grandma’s, you need those two facts.
Now in ye olde times (i.e. ten years ago) you would need a map. Nowadays we have the internet, so we swizz onto Google maps or Mapquest or similar and type the addresses in and when we hit ‘get directions’ it plots us out a series of steps to follow to get us from A to B. Your marketing plan is exactly the same. You still need to know the same two things:
- Where are you now?
- Where do you want to be at the end?
We might call them something slightly fancier though, because we don’t want everyone to know that this is as simple as that, so we’ll say:
- Marketing Audit
- Goals
But they mean exactly the same thing. The Marketing Audit simply consists of dragging all your files, collateral pieces, documents or anything else marketing-related out of your cupboard/computer and taking a good hard look at them. This step is much easier if you don’t do any marketing currently because you don’t have anything to analyse, but if you have been actively marketing you need to be objective and critical. Is this what we want to look like? Are these the messages we want to convey? Have we been talking to the right people? Scribble all these notes down in whatever format you like and you have step 1 complete.
For step 2 you need to decide where you want to be. This is dependent on your results from step 1, but generally you will have some goals you would like to achieve. Remember the best goals are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. “I want to be rich” is a goal, but “I want to earn £100k per year by the time I’m 40” is SMART (depending on your circumstances it might not actually be R for realistic but you get the idea).
In fact, you’ll probably want a series of goals. You might want to increase your customer database by 15%. You might want to make £25,000 more in sales. You might want your organisation to be more attractive to a certain audience, e.g. silver surfers. Whatever the goals are, list them out.
So now half the battle is won. You know where you are, and you know where you want to be. Now we have to figure out how to get there. Remember the analogy about getting directions from the internet? It’s exactly like that again – we have to figure out a series of steps to get us from audit (our house) to goals (Grandma’s). Breaking everything down into small chunks (turn right at the traffic lights, then first left) makes it easier to track where we are in the process, and allow us to set timescales and allocate responsibilities. Provided that your goals are SMART, even if you encounter a problem on the way (roadworks) means you can change your strategy so that you still achieve what you wanted.
Some other areas you might want to include in your plan:
- Once you’ve established goals and broken them down into steps, why not use a Gantt chart to create a timescale?
- Allocating responsibilities within the team for certain jobs keeps everyone involved and allows those with certain skills or experience to do what they do best
- Evaluation – Set yourself the task of looking back at the plan once its timescale has elapsed and analyse what worked and what didn’t – not only within the plan but within the process. Then you can look at fixing those issues (or at least planning for them) next time around.
Now, get planning!
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