Kickstart your marketing with a plan

February 2019

Was your new year's resolution to put more focus on your marketing? Maybe you want to refine your marketing efforts or expand into new areas?

Either way, you’ll need a solid foundation to build from, and a marketing plan can help you achieve just that. According to Printbox, having a pre-defined marketing plan increases your chances of success by 538%?

If you haven’t put a marketing plan together before, or you have but aren’t sure if you’re including the right things, here are a few ideas to consider.

Our marketing plan consideration list:

Set your goals/objectives

Did you know that those who set marketing goals are 429% more likely to see success (Printbox, 2018)?

As Stephen Covey says, start with the end in mind. What do you want to achieve? What does success look like? Only once you’ve determined this will you be able to map out what you’ll need to do to achieve your desired result.

Start with your business objective(s) and find a marketing goal(s) which aligns. Then set out a series of KPI’s which can help you identify whether your goal is being achieved.

For example, if your marketing goal is to increase brand awareness, a growth in social following is a good indicator that this is being achieved.

As always, your goals must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely).

Download our 2019 Marketing Metrics pack

Define your audience

You’ll struggle to get your marketing off the ground if you’re not sure who you’re talking to. Your product or service might be marketable to multiple audiences, but their needs and wants will be vastly different and therefore how you present the product or service to each must vary too.

Consider age, gender, education, job title, hobbies and the type of lifestyle your audience might lead. Then give them a name and assign a photograph to help you visualise your audience. It’ll also make it so much easier when referring to each persona during team discussions and meetings.

Mapping out audience personas is one of the key things we focus on in our Marketing Discovery & Planning Workshop. We’ve found, as have our clients, that persona identification is the crux of a great marketing plan. Find out more about our Marketing Discovery & Planning Workshop here.

Build your own audience persona

Know your platforms

Now you know who your audiences are, you can identify where they hang out. While persona one might be an avid user of Facebook, persona two might not use social platforms at all. Identifying this will help you determine where to put your efforts to ensure maximum exposure of your marketing messages.

Establish a consistent messaging strategy

Before you dive in, it’s important to consider your messaging strategy. What are you trying to convey to your customers and how can that be put across in your campaigns?

At KPC, we create message houses for each of our clients to ensure everything we put out, whether on social or on an exhibition stand, is conveying the same thing. We’ll consider what your audience is telling you they want (stated need), and what they want but perhaps aren’t telling you (unstated need) and create a series of emotional and logical messages to appeal to these.

If you’d like help putting your message house together, get in touch with the team here.

KPC's Message House Template

Document your plan

Now you’ve done the groundwork, it’s time to draw everything together and map out a plan. Here, you’ll detail exactly what you’re going to do to get in front of your target audience.

It might be helpful to plan what tasks you are going to complete weekly, monthly and yearly. It’s also helpful to create an activity plan for the whole year documenting to the highest level how your content will pan out throughout the next 12 months. You can also use the activity plan to keep note of important events and other important times of the year for your industry to ensure nothing gets missed.

Consider your measurement tools and techniques

To round off your plan, it’s important to consider how you are going to measure the success of your efforts. Whether you’ll use analytics, tools like SEMrush, or have to invest in other third-party software to measure your success, it is important to do so to ensure you’re investing in the right areas.

Getting started

If this year, you know you need to better focus your marketing efforts but are unsure how or don’t have time to put a plan together, why not consider our Marketing Discovery & Planning Workshop? During the half-day workshop and alongside you and your team, we’ll identify your current customers’ needs (stated and unstated), identify where new business will come from, examine the competition (based on pre-research by KPC), match thinking to existing data (customer information/feedback, website analytics etc), identify measurement and success factors and as a result of this work, put together a focused and solid marketing plan with a series of prioritised actions.

To find out more about the workshop, click here or get in touch with our team today.

Marketing plan