Create a one-year marketing plan #MarketingPlan

The following excerpt is from Robert W. Bly’s The Marketing Plan Handbook. Buy it now at Amazon | Barnes & Noble | itunes

When planning your business marketing strategies, remember that a lot can change in a few years, so start with a one-year marketing plan. Create a plan on paper or in a spreadsheet that includes the following:

You’ve already set a goal for what you want to accomplish in the next year, created strategies for successfully achieving that goal, and identified the top three to five tactics you’ll use to implement the strategies. Now it’s time to detail the actions you are going to take.

• Goal: what you want to accomplish in the next year
• Strategies: how you will achieve the goal
• The tactic: the three to five things you need to do to implement each strategy
• Do’s: The steps to implement each tactic
• The timeline: an overview of how long it will take to complete the series of steps
• Resources: who is responsible for carrying out the actions

Next, you will need to define your annual marketing budget. This is often determined as a percentage of your total annual sales revenue, ranging from 0.01% to almost 10%. If your business is a startup, which usually means your current revenue is limited and you desperately need to make sales and add customers, you may need to allocate more funds initially to generate more revenue. business.

Once you have a marketing budget, you need to break it down by month or season and by marketing medium. The marketing materials you are considering may include:

• Newspapers
• Consumer magazines
• Commercial Publications
• AM/FM radio
• satellite radio
• Television
• direct mail
• Point of sale
• Cooperative
• Content Marketing
• Social networks

It is important to first trace your main campaigns. Big campaigns require more resources and time to get things done than the typical marketing actions you take, so plan those first. Use a major campaign timeline that includes month headers, campaign, expected cost, actual cost, resources you will need, expected results, and actual results to help you think about the resources you will have need to complete your actions. This way you won’t be delayed because you didn’t anticipate something you need until the last minute.

Once you’ve created your plan, it may seem at first glance that there’s a lot to do. The best way to approach your plan is to break it down into manageable segments. That’s why you started planning the big things, the big campaigns, first. This gives you time to think about what each campaign will require: the actions to complete it, the resources needed, when it needs to start being ready on time, and a tracking system to assess if it did what it was supposed to. make.

Here is a simple way to approach this challenge:

• Remember that you have set a one-year goal and created strategies to achieve that goal. It makes sense to ask yourself what you need to accomplish halfway through to stay on track and meet the annual goal. So start with your six-month goals.
• The halfway between six months and a year is nine months. Ask yourself what you will need to complete in nine months to reach the one-year goal.
• Now the halfway mark between your start date and six months is three months. Ask yourself what you will need to accomplish in the first three months of your plan to stay on track and reach your six-month goal. Three months come and go quickly with no progress unless you take regular action to reach your goals. It is easy to understand the need to perform specific actions in the next month. So ask yourself what you need to accomplish in the next month to stay on track and hit your three-month goals. Towards the end of that month, do the same for the following month, knowing that you only have two months left to reach your three-month markers.

A word of warning: marketing activities and spending are generally not consistent throughout the year. Your business may have busy seasons and slow seasons, and you will need to plan your marketing activities accordingly. Accounting and tax preparation companies, for example, are extremely busy from January 1 to April 15, might want to do more marketing during the downtime to help attract business. But some companies have constant work all year round, such as electrical contractors. These companies could use a more regular pattern and spread their marketing efforts evenly over the 12 months.

Whatever plan you create, just be sure to follow through and stay on track and keep measuring your results so you can plan ahead year after year.