Do you sometimes feel like you’re ziplining in the desert or on a roller coaster when you start your marketing planning ritual every year? I know you may feel out in left field. You have all of these goals and ROIs to meet, budget restrictions, and your boss is coming down on you to “make the numbers” next year but you haven’t a clue how to start the planning process. You’re frustrated, stressed out and don’t know where to begin. What if I told you there was an easier way to accomplish this drudgery. I feel your pain so I’ve put together five easy steps to help you get the marketing planning and execution process started. This year you may even have some fun.
Step No. 1: Create a Customer Persona
If you haven’t already created one or several customer personae, then do it now, immediately. Otherwise, your marketing plan will fall flat. I like to call a customer persona a customer avatar because it really describes what your customer looks like. In Internet vernacular an avatar is an icon or figure representing a particular person. Does your avatar represent what your customer looks like? Besides the usual demographics information like age, gender, job title, etc., really dig deep into your customer persona. What are their likes, their hobbies, their family life? What problems do they have that your product can solve? And I’m not saying just the usual “faster, better, etc.” I mean really really find out what issues they deal with every day in their work from politics on the job, to co-worker issues, to boss issues. How does your product or service enhance their daily work life and in turn makes their personal life better, too. Even draw a picture of what you think your ideal customer looks like. In addition use market segmentation I recently did this exercise for my own customers to help me bring my new website to life. After really delving into detail about who my customers are, I was able to write blog posts, create a new website, and create new service offerings that resonate with this group of people. It was actually an eye-opening experience. Anything I create that is directed to my customer base, I go back and look at my customer avatar for reference and ask myself if what I’m doing will relate to or resolve my customers’ pain.
Step No. 2: Conduct a Situation Analysis
Now that you know the type of customer to which you are targeting your product, you also need to clearly define your company. How do you position your company and products to your desired market? What are your company’s strengths and weaknesses? And be honest here. Of course, every company has weaknesses and every product line has weaknesses. Knowing what they are will allow you to correct those weaknesses or may show you how a weakness can be turned into a positive. If you don’t identify your weaknesses, they could become your competitor’s strengths. And also not only look at your weakness from inside your company, but look at the weaknesses from your customers’ perspective. I know this is more difficult but you can get this information by searching the Internet and social media to see what comments customers are making about your company and products. Also, do informal interviews with a select group of customers, get feedback from your sales reps, or perhaps send out a short survey to some of your key customers. There are many ways to get this information. You may find out some fascinating information through these channels about your company and products that you had never heard before. Look for new opportunities as well as threats. Is there a new niche you may want to target? Is there new regulation that may threaten your product’s life cycle? Ensure you explore and complete a thorough analysis of your current situation.
Step No. 3: Brainstorm Your Marketing Goals
Obviously you want to increase sales and revenue, but look further than that when you brainstorm. What are your overall company goals? Do your marketing plan goals fit with the overall corporate mission? Are your products an outlier from the rest of your products or services? If so, how do they fit in with the company’s goals? Are you seeking new markets? Will new products be launched? The sky is the limit at this point in the brainstorming process. Stretch your goals and make them bigger than you can ever imagine. I find that most of my clients keep their goals small, that is, they make goals they know they can reach. But what if you had no boundaries? What do you really want to achieve? Look more at marketing strategies than just individual tactics. You can, of course, use the usual increased number of units or increased sales from a monetary amount. But I would suggest, you get back to your customer persona when you’re brainstorming. How do you want to serve your customers? Do you want to make their lives better? Do you want to make the world a better place? Get away from the mechanistic sales goals and out of your comfort zone, at least at this point in the planning.
Step No. 4: Think Big When Developing Marketing Tactics
Don’t worry about setting a budget at this point. Most of my clients have a tendency to set a budget and then try to create tactics to fit the budget. It’s like stuffing a small box with everything but the kitchen sink and then wondering why it doesn’t fit. All this does is restrict your thinking. Let your creativity flow. Think about if you had all of the money in the world, what do you think would be the most important tactic(s) that would be the most effective to meet the goals you created in Step No. 3. Money is no object at this point. It is better to create great tactics and get the biggest bang for your buck than to create a lot of little tactics just because they can easily get approved by management and/or fit within a structured budget. Better to sell your ideas to management at this point and then ask for the budget you need to accomplish those goals. I see it all too often that a budget is restrictive. Basically most of my clients take last year’s budget, project sales for the following year and then cut the budget a certain percentage. If you’re dreaming big and your budget is unrestricted, you’ll have much more success in achieving your goals. Otherwise, just go ahead and copy this year’s plan and call it a day and reduce the tactics by about 10% or whatever level your budget numbers have been reduced. I would suggest that you dream so big that you think your tactics are impossible to achieve. That’s when you know you are on the right track.
Step No. 5: Write the Plan But Don’t Set it in Stone
Another common mistake is to write an annual plan and stick with it no matter what happens. A marketing plan should be dynamic and fluid. It should react to competitor’s movements, to a change in the market, to a change with your customers’ personae. But reviewing your marketing plan too often and making weekly changes does no good either. It may take several months for you to see results. I’ve even seen it take a year or more to change perception in the marketplace if you are a new company or launching a new product, especially if you are an unknown entity. Once a year planning is great, but review your plan at least every six months to see if you are on track. Then tweak and make changes as needed. In addition to just thinking about your product lines, also look at how you can streamline and automate your marketing processes. One strategy may be to implement a marketing automation program so that you can more easily nurture your prospects and push them along the sales funnel. That way you can customize content and convert leads into paying customers. You may even want to look at how you can build a better contact database. Having insufficient customer data is a curse especially when you are creating targeted campaigns. And don’t forget to add a social media section to your marketing plan. Social is getting more and more important these days. Most of my technical clients don’t embrace social media. But I find it is crucial to stay in touch with your customer base, generate new prospects, and create a great brand. You can also use it to research what your customers are saying about your products and your company.
I hope you’ve found this article informative. If you need help with next year’s marketing plan, I am offering a FREE 45-minute Marketing Transformation Session. You can find out more about it here.
