As a marketer, you may be tasked with the creation of a marketing plan for your company or client. While there are many ways to go about developing such a strategy, knowing how to make it effective for the brand is essential to being successful with its implementation.
From customizing your message to staying in-touch with what your competition is doing, there are several aspects to take into consideration when building a marketing plan that can provide the results you are looking to achieve. To help you uncover what it takes to create a marketing strategy that will thrive, six members of Forbes Agency Council share their best tips, below.
1. Tailor Your Messaging
When creating a marketing plan, clients often have a hard time thinking about their product from their customers’ point of view. In order to develop a successful marketing strategy, whether business-to-business or business-to-consumer, it’s essential to tailor the 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 shift as needed. It is imperative to A/B test, see what works and lean into those successes. More often than not, what we think will be our core strategy is adjusted by the response we get from the consumer. – Ryan Sprance, Kaihatsu Media
3. Don’t Overlook The Competition
When a marketing plan is in development, don’t make the mistake of overlooking your competition. I see too many marketers checking stats and response rate averages, yet failing to blind-shop the competition to see what they offer or how aggressively they market themselves and follow up. Going in blind on marketing “best practices” without a clue about what your competition is doing is a disaster in waiting. – Joy Gendusa, PostcardMania
4. Stay Faithful To The Goals
It’s a simple thing, but crystallizing on the goals of the program and mapping a route to achieve those goals often gets lost in the pursuit of a creative idea, a target budget or a deadline. Being faithful to knowing whose behavior you want to change and when you need to change it requires discipline—and sometimes courage! – Daniel O’Connell, Brand Definition
5. Focus On Customer Preferences
Putting your company or product needs ahead of customer preferences can get marketers into trouble. Although it is essential to identify corporate objectives as a first step to strategy creation, it’s wise to flip the mirror around and review your plans from the customer’s point of view. If you don’t like what you see, the customer probably won’t either. – Bill Hanifin, Hanifin Loyalty LLC
Read more in How Can Brands Leverage Technology To Better Connect With Customers?
6. Identify The High Priorities
Marketing plans are typically overly aspirational. Practically all businesses wish to accomplish more with their marketing than is realistic. It’s fine to create a marketing “wishlist,” but critical to generate a feasible strategy of high priorities as to not set your team (or yourself) up for failure. Additionally, by focusing on too many activities, even the important ones will suffer. – Bill Gadless, emagine