Once you have your marketing strategy in place, it’s time to start implementing your marketing! As an aside, if you still don’t have a marketing strategy, check out our post about why a marketing strategy is important. It’s at this stage that we often find people wondering how to create an effective marketing plan.
While your marketing strategy is like a roadmap of what route you’re going to take to reach your end destination, your marketing plan is more the nuts and bolts of what actions you’re going to take to follow the route.
So you can get really specific when it comes to your marketing plan. In this post, we’re sharing 5 key steps to help you create a marketing plan that’s going to be effective for your business.
Step 1: Review your customer personas
You should already have customer personas or avatars as part of your marketing strategy. Make sure you review these carefully before ploughing on with any marketing planning. Your marketing plan should be tailored to the people you’re trying to reach so it’s always worth refreshing your memory!
Step 2: Write down what you want to do on each channel
Take each key channel from your marketing strategy and write down everything you want to do with each channel.
This might include optimising bios on social media, creating blog posts more regularly or setting up a new mailing list (to name a few examples). This is like a to-do list of everything you want to achieve on your channels.
Step 3: Create a content calendar
We find that creating a content calendar for all your key channels is the best way to get organised and to feel more relaxed (and less stressed!) about your marketing.
You don’t need to write all the copy for individual social media posts, blogs and emails at this stage, but it is worth including some content pillars or themes and an idea of what topics you want to write or talk about. You can break this down into months, weeks and then days. Colour-coding each content theme helps too!
Step 4: Decide who will be responsible for what
Once you have an idea of all your marketing tasks, it’s time to think about who is going to be responsible for what tasks. You might be delivering everything yourself or maybe you’re planning to get help from your team or external suppliers.
Either way, it’s important to make these decisions at this stage because it will affect your timeline of implementing activities.
Step 5: Create a timeline for implementing activities
Finally, make sure you create a timeline for when you’re going to implement each marketing activity. It’s worth thinking about a schedule for your regular content that’s realistic for you to stick to. This is going to help you avoid feeling overwhelmed and enable you to plan your time effectively.
If you follow these steps, you’ll be able to consistently implement your marketing strategy and plan, which in turn will enable you to reach your ideal customers and raise awareness about your brand. If you ever find yourself wondering how to create a marketing plan again, you know where to look!
About us
We’re Freshbat – a strategic communications agency providing integrated marketing services to business leaders who embrace change and value marketing in a proactive and trustworthy environment.
Our goal is to give you more headspace, help you to make stuff happen and build better relationships by taking a fresh approach to marketing. We know you’re the kind of person who wants to be considered an inspiring and empowering leader for your business.
In order to be that way, you need to be in control of your marketing. The problem is you feel your marketing isn’t good enough, which in turn makes you feel confused and frustrated that you don’t have the resources, creativity or expertise to solve the issue.
We believe it’s just plain wrong that business leaders are tasked with keeping up with the rapidly changing marketing landscape on their own. That’s why we provide integrated marketing solutions through our worry-free marketing process.
Here’s how it works: we have an initial call to find out the things holding you back, we then create a bespoke strategy to reach your ideal clients and finally we implement your marketing plan for you so you can worry less and achieve more. We create tailored and integrated marketing solutions that bring order, strategy and results while having fun in the process (yes, it’s possible!).
Our core services include: 📈 Content marketing strategy 📱 Social media management 📧 Email marketing 👩💻 Blogging and web content
Contact us to see how we can help you take a fresh approach to marketing. Email hello@freshbat.com to book your discovery call 📧
