Ep1 Creating an effective Marketing Plan

In the inaugural edition of The Marketing Strategy Show, Kym Heffernan of the Marketing Strategy Co details the 10 key elements of an effective integrated marketing plan that is critical to getting more leads, clients and sales.

The 10 elements of the TMSC Marketing Map are as follows;

1. Current Situation
   • The basic of a great Marketing Plan is thoroughly assessing your current situation including
     • Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT Analysis)
     • Dissecting our sales using a customer sales analysis,
     • Reviewing/Defining your Buyer personas or customer profiles,
     • Understanding the keywords customers use to find your product or service
     • Doing some research on some focus keywords
     • Investigating your key  competitors 

2. Sales Plan
   • Looking at your sales strategy. In particular?
     • Who are your Key Markets?
     • Who are your Key Target accounts?
     • Who are the key decision makers within those key accounts?
     • What Referral Strategies and Alliances do you have in place?
     • How often do you service and talk to existing clients?
     • What are your Sales Processes for managing new leads and sales opportunities?
     • How do you track and measure new leads and opportunities?

3. Brand Strategy
   • Brand strategy is a long-term plan for the development of a successful brand in order to achieve specific goals. A good brand strategy features;
     • What does your Brand represent?
     • What’s your brand story?
     • What visuals are you going to use to describe your brand?
     • What tone and style?
     • What are your current messages and do they align?
     • Making sure to spread your brand across all possible channels (offline, online and social media)

4. Lead Generation Strategy
   • When considering your lead generation strategy, there are several important questions you need to consider such as:
     • How many leads do you actually need?
     • What is the strategy?
     • Are you going to use:
       – Inbound Marketing (where the enquiries are coming to you.
     • – Outbound Marketing where you reach out to prospects or
     • Both Outbound and Inbound Marketing

5. Content Strategy
   • These days having a variety of content (from printed resources, to videos and audio content) for your marketing are essential. Some things to consider are;
     • Where is your content going to be (focus on where your customers are mostly at)
     • What format are you going to make your content? (Photos, info-graphics, diagrams, blogs, e-books, articles, guides or videos)
     • Different people prefer different content (for example certain people feel comfortable on camera, some don’t) the same can be said for audio content and written content. Decide which of the three will work best for you but note it doesn’t mean to completely abandon the others

6. Digital Marketing Strategy
   • Digital Marketing is anything that’s online. So that includes websites, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Online Ads and email marketing
   • Email is still the most effective way to reach out to people and get them to come back to your website and content
   • You may want to look at online ads like Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, YouTube Advertising and re-marketing.
7. Social Media Strategy
   • When looking at social media you need to think about what platforms you want to be on.
   • Think about what your customers are using
   • If your customers are on SnapChat you don’t necessarily have to use SnapChat also, the same could be said for Linkedin. You need to think about what platforms you will get the best engagement and response from
   • Another thing to consider with Social Media is promoting yourself vs the Business
   • Look at paid social media vs organic social media. For example, only 4-6% of people will see your “free” Facebook Posts but you can reach thousands oi prospects in a very targeted way with Facebook Ads.
8. Offline Marketing Strategy
   • Offline marketing can involve of Networking, Direct mail, Phone call follow ups, brochures and catalogues and Sales Presentations
   • All the marketing in the world you do to get people to visit your site or give you a call will all fall down if you don’t have some offline resources to back it up when you meet with prospects
   • This marketing material also needs to be consistent with your digital marketing material and your social media material
9. Marketing Tools
   • When thinking about marketing tools it is important to consider a few things;
     • What tools are you going to use for your website?
     • Are you going to use WordPress, Joomla or some other website platform?
     • What Sales CRM system are you going to use to manage your sales leads? (It is very important to use a CRM system to track what you are doing and remind you who to call when) like Hubspot, Zoho, Pipedrive CRM for example.
     • What marketing automation should you consider? Are you going to use Hubspot or Infusiosoft or Mailchimp for example?
     • What event management system are you going to use if you hold a seminar, talk or workshop?
     • If you are doing video content where are you going to host a video? YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia are all viable options
     • You also need to look at what content creation tools you use.

10. Implementation
    • You need to have an activity schedule list. What are you going to do weekly, monthly and annually?
    • You need a team in place. Are you going to outsource any activities?
    • You need to put a budget in place to cover things like staffing, design, production and media cost.
    • Finally you need to report on activity regularly including:
      • What activity are you doing?
      • What leads have you got?
      • What appointments have you made?
      • What sales have you achieved
      • What is the return on investment for all your marketing and sales?

You can grab a free copy of our TMSC Marketing Roadmap. This resource will help guide you through the 10 steps of an Integrated Marketing Plan.