The making of a marketing strategy - part 2
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If you haven’t already, listen to Part 1 of our Making of a Marketing Strategy series – which is all about researching, goal setting, target marketing analysis and determining your key messages.
The next step is to develop your marketing activity plan – bring on the brainstorming! Using your research and planning foundations from part 1, you are going to identify activities that will suit and align with your brand goals.
1.Get active with marketing
Firstly, look at your current marketing – what activities can be improved? What can be swapped out or stopped? Once you evaluate what you are currently doing, then you can move on to the new activities you are wanting to trial. What are potential activities that will assist in achieving your goals?
2. Marketing baseline
Your baseline is the marketing activities that are in place every day for your company. These activities can include your website, email signature, uniforms, business cards, or a tender document that can easily be updated. Every business’s baseline is different, based on your needs.
3. Take it to the next level
Time to brainstorm some activities that are above your baseline. This is determined by your goals – eg you may need more staff, so running a recruitment campaign that includes radio, TV, Facebook ads, billboards, media releases etc could be on the books for you. These activities are an extra boost to your branding to reach your target audience, and achieve those goals. Some of these extras might become part of your baseline marketing down the line – but for now, they are the outliers.
4. Set a budget
It's time to cost out each activity of your marketing mix. Finalise your activity list by getting quotes for how much each will cost, and create a rough monthly budget. If one activity doesn't fit within your budget, you can always swap it out for another more cost-effective activity that will still help you to reach your goals.
5. The clock is ticking
Use our FREE marketing strategy template to create a 12-month timeline that includes each activity and the steps involved in achieving those activities. For example – if you want to update your website, that might take a few months to do in-house with various steps – such as reviewing your website, writing a list of all the areas you want to change or update, writing up your copy, collating all the images and other content, making and proofing the updates – and celebrating the final website launch. All of those steps can go on your timeline – which will act as an action plan, to ensure you won’t miss any deadlines.
NEXT STEPS: Part 3 will be out on 19 August – so you have a 2-week deadline to work on this next step before we help you implement your plan!