Do you struggle to achieve your marketing goals?
It’s that time of year when you need to make a plan to plan your marketing initiatives. Wait a second. We can hear your groans. If you are a diligent marketing pro or business owner who has created marketing plans every year, but struggle to achieve your marketing goals, here are some tricks from several experts for setting marketing goals that you will actually achieve.
We know how quickly digital marketing changes, so it can be very tempting to fly by the seat of your pants and go with the flow. However, if you are not intentional with your business goals or fail to commit to strategically achieve those goals, we predict you won’t like the flow of revenue that passes you right into the bank accounts of your competitors.
Why do You Need a Marketing Plan?
Do you really, truly need a plan? Yes you do! A plan is a roadmap to drive success no matter what your endeavor and is particularly important when you have multiple employees driving toward the same business objective. If there’s not a method to communicate where you are going and how you’re going to get there, chances of your success are pretty slim.
Here are the items that you need to plan for as you begin planning your initiatives.
- Specific goals you wish to (will) achieve
Your goals should be specific and measurable so that you know it when you achieve them.
- Your market positioning
What you do, why you do it and why your customers should care.
- Competitive landscape and your key differentiators
Understand who your competitors are and how you can set yourself apart. Critical to this is cultural adoption and internalization from your team. If you market your services one way and then your team doesn’t follow through when working with your customers, it’s a deal breaker (or at least challenges the integrity of your message).
- Content marketing strategy and the channels you will use to get your message to your target audience
This includes video, white papers, blogs, social media and more!
Execute and Evolve Marketing Strategies
It’s also not enough to build a plan. A marketing plan sitting on a server untouched won’t get you to your goals. You must effectively execute your marketing strategy and evolve it throughout the year as the digital marketing landscape changes. At minimum, you should critically evaluate and make adjustments quarterly, but at Webolutions, we prefer to evaluate monthly.
Create your Marketing Plan Today!
Unfortunately, most people underestimate the time needed to draft a comprehensive marketing strategy each year. Not only do you have to spend time evaluating how you performed this year, you need to acquire budget approval and executive buy-in for new initiatives. It’s not too early to start drafting your marketing plan today so that you will have plenty of time to polish it into its final form to launch aggressively! The digital marketing experts at Webolutions are available to help you develop a marketing strategy that will help you achieve your goals. You can contact us at 303-300-2640 or online.
What month have you historically started drafting your marketing strategy?
