“We will be perfect in every aspect of the game. You drop a pass, you run a mile. You miss a blocking assignment, you run a mile. You fumble the football, and I will break my foot off in your John Brown hind parts and then you will run a mile. Perfection! Let’s go to work.”
– Remember the Titans
Planning and preparation creates perfection. It makes the difference between unremarkable results and extraordinary ones. Anything extraordinary takes planning.
Do you want 2019 to be extraordinary? Then you must have a plan.
Creating a Successful Marketing Plan
Good marketing is crucial to help you achieve your company objectives. A good marketing plan will help you connect to your target audience, boost your customer base, blunt your competitive threats and ultimately, increase your bottom line.
Consumers have all the power these days. They are actively looking for points of distinction before making buying decisions, and they’re not afraid to shift their loyalty. So it’s up to you to keep your unique features right out front to ensure that your product/service is there when the customer is ready to buy.
Now is the Time
As we approach the end of the year, now is a good time to reflect on this current year’s efforts. How successful were your campaigns? What worked? What didn’t? What should you do differently next time? You need to gather concrete data and use it for future planning.
Do you have any objective data to consider such as email tracking, promotional codes, a unique phone number, business reply forms and other techniques to measure response rates? Calculate ROI on those projects and use that insight to build future efforts focusing on which efforts are working, eliminating those that aren’t.
Based on the data from this year’s marketing efforts, start building a marketing plan for 2019.
Key Elements of a Marketing Plan
Whether you’re developing a B2B or B2C marketing plan, successful campaigns begin with research. This requires you to get involved and stay informed. What are the needs of your target audience? What are the trends in the current market? What are the latest regulations that might affect their business? What are your competitors up to? The more you can keep in touch with overall conditions, the better.
As you answer these questions, start thinking of how you can craft a compelling message in a way that answers the needs of your prospective clients. While it’s good to explain the product features, it’s better to describe benefits. And it’s even better to clearly show how those benefits can make their life more comfortable, more enjoyable, or more rewarding.
Developing an Integrated Marketing Plan
Today you have to deliver your message in more than one format. By leveraging all the appropriate media, you can capture additional opportunities for communicating. Television and radio spots, lobby videos, your website, email blasts, social media, and other techniques will reach a wide variety of demographics at various times and places. Using the right mix of all the key tools, in line with your budget limitations and marketing opportunities, is the ultimate goal. It’s all about striking a balance.
Building an Effective Marketing Plan is Easy
How can you develop an effective marketing plan? At Westamerica Communications, we provide clients with a workbook to help them assess, refine, create and build a marketing plan. Our 2019 Marketing Calendar & Planner contains proven guidelines for success. Some of these include:
- Setting specific, realistic objectives
- Targeting clients in terms of demographics, needs, wants and “hot-buttons”
- Determining the most effective medium: direct mail, radio/TV, direct selling, email, social media, in-branch merchandising
- Reviewing past promotional results and challenges to help predict future opportunities
Even a relatively small marketing project can have lots of moving parts. The key to tying them all together is consistent communication. Internal coordination can help minimize redundancies, revisions and false starts, which often add extra time and cost to a project. Working with Westamerica gives you a real advantage with external coordination, eliminating the need for multiple vendors and keeping you firmly in control.
Careful planning will help make 2019 an extraordinary year for your business. If you’d like to receive the 2019 Marketing Calendar & Planner, you can find it HERE
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
― Yogi Berra