Six tips for developing an effective marketing plan
As a marketer, you may be responsible for creating a marketing plan for your business or your client. While there are many ways to develop such a strategy, knowing how to make it effective for the brand is key to successfully implementing it.
From personalizing your message to staying in touch with what your competitors are doing, there are several aspects to consider when developing a marketing plan that can deliver the results you are looking to. to reach. To help you discover what it takes to create a marketing strategy that will thrive, six members of the Forbes Agency Council share their top tips below.
Photos courtesy of individual members
1. Personalize your email
When creating a marketing plan, customers often struggle to think about their product from the perspective of their customers. In order to develop a successful marketing strategy, whether business-to-business or business-to-consumer, it is essential to tailor messaging, ad copy, ad creative, and ad placements so that the campaign resonates with the target audience. – Seth Geoffrion, Vrrb Interactive
2. Be flexible in your approach
Marketing plans are just that, plans. Once put into practice, you will quickly know what is not working. It is important to be flexible in your approach. Don’t be afraid to change as needed. It’s imperative to A/B test, see what works, and build on those successes. More often than not, what we think is our core strategy is adjusted by the response we get from the consumer. -Ryan Sprance, Kaihatsu Media
3. Don’t neglect the competition
When a marketing plan is being developed, don’t make the mistake of neglecting your competitors. I see too many marketers checking stats and response rate averages, but not blindly buying into the competition to see what they offer or how aggressively they market and follow up. Going blind on marketing “best practices” without having a clue what your competitors are doing is a disaster in waiting. – Joy Gendusa, PostcardMania
4. Stay true to the goals
It’s a simple thing, but crystallizing on program goals and charting a course to achieve those goals often gets lost in the pursuit of a creative idea, target budget, or deadline. Being faithful to knowing what behavior you want to change and when you need to change it takes discipline and sometimes courage! – Daniel O’Connell, brand definition
5. Focus on customer preferences
Putting the needs of your business or products ahead of customer preferences can cause problems for marketers. While it’s essential to identify business goals as the first step in creating a strategy, it’s wise to turn the mirror around and review your plans from the customer’s perspective. If you don’t like what you see, the customer probably won’t like it either. – Bill Hanifin, Hanifin Loyalty LLC
Read more in How can brands leverage technology to better connect with customers?
6. Identify high priorities
Marketing plans are usually too ambitious. Virtually every business wants to accomplish more with their marketing than is realistic. It’s fine to create a marketing “wish list”, but it’s essential to generate an actionable strategy of high priorities so you don’t set your team (or yourself) in check. Also, by focusing on too many activities, even the most important ones will suffer. – Bill Gadless, imagine
