Review your marketing plan to make sure it’s working #MarketingPlan

The following excerpt is from Robert W. Bly’s book The marketing plan handbook. Buy it now at Amazon | Barnes & Noble | itunes

Robert W. Bly explains how you can develop comprehensive marketing plans for pennies on the dollar with his 12-step marketing plan. In this edited excerpt, Bly explains why you need to review your marketing plan regularly and what you should be looking for.

Despite the wisdom and many benefits of creating a rock-solid marketing plan, virtually all marketing plans contain the same flaw: they are written to cover a one-year period, but inevitably circumstances change, sometimes dramatically, in those 12 months. . And many of these changes are significant enough to render all or part of your beautifully crafted plan incorrect or obsolete.

Therefore, it is extremely common to modify the plan, or at least a number of its tactics, to adjust along the way based on current market conditions and the results of the tactics implemented to date. According to CPA and financial planner James Lange, “All good plans need to be modified and adjusted due to changing circumstances.”

No plan is perfect. No matter how strong your assumptions are and how carefully you craft your plan, expect to make adjustments as you learn more. Regular review of your plan is so critical to your success that you need to schedule review dates.

Before reviewing it, however, decide exactly what you’ll review, how you’ll approach troubleshooting, and what you’ll do when things don’t go as planned. Once you’ve made the necessary adjustments, it’s time to start all over again.

Two major signals indicate that it is time to rethink and revise your marketing plan. The first is when you launch one or more campaigns based on your stated core value proposition – promoting your new or flagship product – and those promotions start to explode.

You test emails or postcards, and the results are terrible. Time to change the market plan? Not quite yet. Instead, rework the copy and design. Test different formats, offers, prices, lists and mediums. If these tests begin to show positive results, the crisis will be averted. On the other hand, if test after test produces few or no sales, you know your plan – or one or more of its key assumptions – is fundamentally wrong. It’s time to gather in the boardroom and rethink strategy, approach and messaging.

So it’s a growing stream of failed promotions that’s the first sign that your marketing plan may need to be revamped. The second signal that the marketing plan may need adjusting is a sudden and unexpected change in conditions – changes in the market, competitive landscape, technology, and any other factors affecting your business. For a publisher of a stock market newsletter, for example, a market shift from bearish to bullish can render the marketing plan drafted just a few months ago ineffective or even obsolete.

How often should you stop and review the progress of your plan? How often you need to assess your progress and make corrections to your sales and marketing depends on your business. In my writing business, for example, my assignments typically last two to four weeks. My cash flow can therefore be uneven. Therefore, I look at my monthly and yearly gross sales at the end of each month to see if I’m on the right track. I also check on a weekly basis the number of active jobs and pending jobs, for which I maintain two separate lists.

On the other hand, in my internet marketing business, where I sell products instead of services, every sale is made in a minute online. So I look at a one-week sales report that tells me, among other things, my income for the week. I watch this twice a week: once at the end of the week to see if I’ve done well, and once in the middle to see if I’m on track to hit my weekly sales goal. I also check my sales earnings daily, again to see if each day I earned the average dollar amount needed to meet my weekly and annual revenue goal.

Troubleshooting your plan

How should you approach troubleshooting your plan? Start with the data you have defined as references. If you see significant discrepancies, dig deeper and ask yourself some basic questions:

• Is the recession affecting your business?
• Are you getting fewer leads and new business opportunities than usual?
• Are your sales up, down or stable?
• Has the dollar value of your average order decreased?
• Do sales take longer to close?
• Are customers looking for concessions on prices and terms?
• What marketing activities seem to be working well?
• Which marketing activities have seen their results drop recently?
• Can I trace new customers or sales increases to specific sources or actions?
• Are my actions generating the expected income? Or do they cost more than they bring in?
• What actions have been the most successful?
• Which actions were the least productive in terms of generating sales and customers?
• Has anything been a disaster?
• Are there any tactics or actions that fell completely flat?
• Are there any significant changes in my industry or market that affect my business?
• Which of my services generates the most revenue?
• Which generates the least? Why?
• Should I replace a tactic that isn’t working with another tactic or action now? Next year? Why?
• What more should I do?
• Are my reimbursement rates stable or increasing?

Identify the elements of your strategy that are not working by looking at the numbers:

• Are you getting the new customers you wanted?
• Are you increasing your retention rate the way you wanted?
• Are you getting the recommendations you expected?
• Are they converted into new sales?

Examine each element of your strategy to try to determine what is falling short of your goals. Is your competition more successful than expected? Why? What are they doing that you can learn from?