The final post in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get their plan ready to kick off a successful year.
So far in this series we have:
- Identified whether our ideal client has changed over the last year;
- Set our goals for our business;
- Tweaked our product and service offerings to align with our ideal client;
- Determined our differentiator and reviewed our messages to ensure we are communicating it effectively;
- Reviewed our marketing content for consistency and accuracy;
- Evaluated our marketing results to determine what’s worked and what hasn’t;
- Assessed our online reputation to see what is really out there.
Armed with this information, we can now put a marketing action plan in place that will grow your business and achieve the goals that you set for yourself. I want to emphasize the word action because a marketing plan that sits in a drawer will not help grow your business. The marketing action plan sets priorities and dates on all your marketing activities to ensure they get done.
Where Do We Start?
In a previous post, I talked about the strategy / goal / tactic hierarchy where you take each goal you want to achieve and map the marketing strategies you will use, the tactics within each strategy and the associated materials needed. By laying out your plan this way, you can see where strategies and tactics may benefit multiple goals and what resources you may need before you can execute the strategy. To get started, download my marketing plan template at Masterful Marketing or on my Facebook Business Page and use that to help you decide what to put into motion. Start with what has been working and include that. Then look to define new activities that may have an impact on increasing your visibility and attracting your ideal client.
You also need to add the who, when, why and how much information for each activity:
- Who is going to do it? You or can you outsource?
- When does it need to get done?
- Why are you doing this activity? Is this activity relevant?
- How much does it cost in both money and time?
Make Your Plan Actionable
In order to make sure the when happens, lay the activities out in your calendar. If one of your activities is to begin blogging to develop credibility and awareness, decide how often you will write, when you will actually do the writing and create a list of topics that you can draw on when you need get writer’s block. Then schedule your time to accomplish this task. If you are giving a talk, not only schedule the actual time of the event, but also schedule time for you to prepare. If you really need help getting the tasks done, add the tasks to your to do list with a completion dates. I would schedule no more than 3 months at a time as you may need to adjust your activity level based on how your marketing is working. And remember to treat your appointments to market your business as seriously as you would treat a client appointment.
Laying out a calendar has several benefits:
- Seeing the time blocked off will make it easy to see whether you have over committed your time.
- Scheduling the activities in your calendar raises their level of importance.
- Having a schedule makes it far more likely that marketing will become a habit.
The key is to get started now. Remember that it takes time for marketing to work so the longer you wait, the longer it will be before you see any tangible results. Be realistic, be ready to adapt and create a marketing system that works for you so you can consistently market your business for the best results. Remember that your plan doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to happen.
What marketing activities are you putting into action in the next 30 days?
© Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved. Marketing Action Plan is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing LLC. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn.
