Create a successful marketing plan for 2022

Believe it or not, 2022 is fast approaching. We’re officially in the fourth quarter of 2021, so if you haven’t thought about your marketing strategies for next year, you have a few months to come up with a plan together.

2021 has been a crazy year for brands so far: supply chain issues, remote working and low consumer confidence have made it difficult for a business to grow. Leveraging what you’ve learned so far about marketing your business during a pandemic can help you approach 2022 with a solid marketing strategy.

Not sure how to create your marketing plan for 2022? Follow these seven steps to develop a marketing plan that will help you achieve your goals quickly.

1. Review your 2021 plan first

Have you written a marketing plan for 2021? Dust it off and examine it as a team. Although we’re not out of 2021 yet, you should have enough data from T1, T2, and T3 to make informed decisions.

What did you do well? Which tactic gave you the most bang for your buck? What didn’t work so well? Did you achieve your goals or did you fail?

It is important to review what you have already tried in marketing. This way, you can stop wasting time and money on campaigns that don’t work and channel your resources into more effective channels.

2. Define (or redefine) your audience

Marketing should revolve around the needs of your audience. If you haven’t already, define your audience with buyer personas. Even if you already have buyer personas, take the opportunity to revise them if necessary (you may even need to add a new personality to the mix).

Be sure to pay close attention to each person’s customer journey. Where do most of your paying customers find you? Stick to the most effective channels to optimize your marketing tactics based on what works. It’s good to try something new, but be sure to base it on facts. For example, if you really want to market on TikTok but your audience isn’t on the platform, that wouldn’t make sense.

If you want to get more in-depth audience insights, you can always do paid interviews with your most loyal customers. You never know what information you’ll glean when speaking directly to your audience.

3. Perform a SWOT analysis

Your SWOT analysis will certainly change from year to year, or even month to month. Be sure to include an up-to-date SWOT analysis in your 2022 marketing plan. This will help you identify internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats.

4. Set SMART goals and KPIs

After reviewing your 2021 plan, learning more about your audience, and performing a SWOT analysis, it’s time to set goals for 2022 marketing.

Instead of choosing a vague goal like “I want to attract more customers,” set SMART goals. This will make it much easier to understand if your marketing team has actually been successful.

You should also define key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of these goals on a per-team or per-individual basis. KPIs are metrics that serve your SMART goals and they will hold your team accountable through 2022.

5. Choose your tactics

What marketing tactics will support your SMART goals? For example, if you need to increase your brand awareness by 20% by February 2022, what tactic will allow you to achieve this most effectively?

Only you can choose the tactics that will work for your brand. But to give you an idea of ​​where to start, you can choose tactics such as:

• Organic social media.

• Paid social media.

• Public relations.

• Search engine optimization.

• Content Marketing.

• Video Marketing.

• Experiential marketing.

• E-mail.

• Google Ads.

• Influencers.

6. Create a budget

You can’t measure your return on investment (ROI) unless you know how much money you’ve spent marketing yourself. This is why it is so important to create a budget by year as well as by channel or by tactic.

You should have an overall marketing budget for 2022, but you need to channel that budget into predetermined buckets to understand where your money is going. If you have an annual budget of $45,000, for example, that might mean allocating $20,000 to social media and another $25,000 to public relations.

7. Hold yourself accountable with project management tools

By this point, you’ve probably documented your marketing plan on paper. That’s all well and good, but a Google Doc isn’t as usable as project management software.

If you really want to implement your marketing plan, plug it into PM software like Asana, Monday, or Trello. It’s the best way to make sure your team is actually taking action on the marketing front.

The essential

As we’ve seen with 2020 and 2021, your marketing plans can change overnight. Know that you can update the plan as the world changes. If you follow these seven steps, you’ll lay the foundation for a solid marketing plan for 2022 so you’re not starting from scratch.