Keeping Your Marketing Plan on Track: What You Need to Know

Once you’ve decided on the direction in which you want your marketing activities to go, it’s time to set them in motion. The implementation of successful marketing campaigns is a difficult business; success or failure hinges on a number of different factors, and even when you’re up and running it can be tricky to keep your activities in line for the duration of an entire plan. Take a look at our guide to implementing and maintaining a successful marketing strategy to ensure a good return of investment for all of your marketing activities.

 

Target – The first step to any marketing campaigns is warranting that you fully understand your audience. Some of the world’s biggest companies have committed atrocious marketing blunders because they’ve failed to anticipate audience trends ahead of time, so you need to ensure that you’re on the same page as your audience from the very start of your plans.

 

Scope – Once you’ve established where you want to take your marketing activities, you need to set some targets and understand the company’s ambitions. It’s no good going out there without any idea of what you want to achieve; how else will you measure your progress and determine success or failure? Every marketing plan should have a clear vision of what the key objectives are before being implemented.

 

Create – Once you’ve determined how you want to approach your audience and what your ideal outcome will be, it’s time to generate some ideas. These need to be different and interesting without alienating anyone; you need to maintain a sense of brand identity without coming across as too corporate. Many companies may find this the most difficult part of any marketing plan, while others generate the creative ideas first, and then try to tailor these to specific audiences and outcomes. An effective marketing plan will combine the most creative minds with more figures-focused business drivers to generate exceptional results.

 

Speed – Don’t let an exceptional marketing strategy sit inactive in your company in-tray for months. Markets move exceptionally quickly in the 21^st Century; if you rest on your laurels, you run the risk of your shiny new strategy becoming redundant in mere months. No matter how effective your campaigns might have been, they won’t be anything if they’re not implemented.

 

Communication – Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to simply buy yourself exposure and popularity; consumers are far more discerning than they once were. Ensure that your copy and campaigns are top-notch, mistake free, and that they accurately communicate your message in a way that people can understand and remember.

 

Review – As we’ve mentioned before, markets and audiences have a tendency to change very quickly, and they won’t wait around for you to catch up. It would be naive to think that a marketing strategy will work for you indefinitely. Set dates and milestones along the way when planning any marketing activities to analyse and review the performance of your campaigns, making changes along the way as results dictate.

If all of this sounds like more than you can comfortably take on by yourself, take a look at our range of marketing implementation services and what we can offer in terms of support, or contact us directly for more information.