10 Point Checklist: A Must for Any Marketing Plan

Jennifer Szumiesz

It is hard to believe that 2015 is only a few short months away! Chances are that you have started to briefly think about your growth goals and how you are going to achieve them. A marketing plan could be the answer.

Follow the simple checklist below to ensure that your time and money is well spent when putting together an effective marketing plan.

1. Know your goals – If you don’t know what you want to achieve, how will you get there? This is crucial. If you don’t know your goals, you: (1) might not put the right marketing plan in place (a goal of increasing exposure might be most suited to have some sort of an advertising/sponsorship campaign, whereas a lead generation goal should probably involve more content focused marketing elements), (2) you might not be satisfied with the end result, and (3) you certainly won’t be able to measure success along the way because you won’t know what to measure.

2. Identify the internal skills of your team – What skills have you exploited internally, and which ones haven’t you tapped into? Perhaps you have someone on your team that enjoys social media, and perhaps they could take over your social media presence so that you don’t have to outsource it. Great! On the flip side, if you are recognizing the value of content marketing but don’t have either the skills or time (time is a big constraint) internally to pursue it, outsource that job to a company that can really help. At insideARM.com, we work with many clients by ghost writing content for them to publish; this gives our clients a thought leadership presence and doesn’t take much of their time getting us up to speed as content writing in the ARM space is what we do every day and have consistently done for years. Long story short, make sure you utilize all of your internal resources and acknowledge the areas where you need help.

3. Acknowledge what has and hasn’t worked in the past – It is just about as important to recognize your failed marketing attempts as it is your successes. You can learn a lot from failures like what didn’t work and why. The reason why a marketing initiative was unsuccessful might be due to unforeseen circumstances, or it might be something that you can’t change (for instance, in the B2B space, spending a lot of time marketing your Facebook page has proven not to be as valuable; this means that you might want to consider ignoring that channel as your main focus when considering your next marketing push). You will want to make a note of what marketing initiative didn’t work in the past but should be given a second shot, and which ones were successful and are worth having time and money put into them.

4. Identify the message you want to convey – You should know what you want people to know about your company to make you stand out from the pack. This is important because you need to ensure that the delivery of that messaging is a match with what you are trying to convey. For example, if you want to be seen as an industry thought leader, you need to have a voice and a good way to do this is through content. If you sole marketing plan is focused around advertising, great, but you aren’t going to be able to “say” enough in an ad that would have your prospects associate you with being a thought leader; advertising can certainly be a part of the plan, but don’t rely on it solely.

5. Determine your target audience – Chances are that you will probably need a different marketing plan depending on who you are trying to reach. The breakdown can be something as simple as clients vs. prospects. Or you can get even more granular (which I would recommend) to company types and various business roles that you want your marketing plan to reach. You can then use this information to determine which marketing outlets will allow you to reach that target audience.

 6. Have some sort of a budget in mind – Oh the dreaded B-word…budget.  Sometimes it is extremely difficult to have a specific number in mind, but having a general idea of what that number is can only help. Certain marketing initiatives require a fee (ex: PPC, outside promotion of webinars and events, conference presence, advertising, sponsorships, ghost writing, etc.), and knowing what kind of a budget you are working with helps you to prioritize those marketing options. You may want to move forward with 10 things but if your budget only allows you to pursue two of them, that is important to know. It also keeps you, your team, and the overall expectations of the marketing plan in line.

 7. Know of a general timeline – How soon do you want to start? When do you want to finish? As we say around here, marketing should be viewed as a marathon, not a sprint, so keeping a reasonable timeline in mind is critical. And this timeline certainly varies based on the marketing channel that you are pursuing. For instance, if you want to start writing content for a blog, you need to give yourself several months of content and promotion before people really start to rely on it as a useful source of information (not to mention to receive the SEO benefits). Other marketing initiatives that are a part of you plan might not take quite as long to make an impact, but it is important to keep the varying timeframes in mind when setting a marketing plan timeline.

 8. Make note of important service/product/event announcements – When creating a marketing plan it is important to consider any major announcements or message pushes that you will have during the plan timeframe. Be sure to identify these as areas where you want to place extra resources and exposure so that you do not have to restructure the plan once it is underway.

9. Determine how you will track success – You want to be sure that you have this tracking process determined prior to the start of any marketing plan. This will ultimately tell you whether or not the activities were a success, and should decipher which ones you should pursue again in the future and which ones should be left in the dust. Hint: If you do not have Google Analytics set up on your website, get it! It is an incredibly useful way to see the traffic you are getting, where it is coming from, audience demographics, what your site visitors are doing, etc., and it allows you to track change over time.

10. Recognize who is involved in making the ultimate decision – It isn’t worth your time to pursue something that you might not be able to get sign-off on. Make sure you get the decision team (whether that is a products team, marketing team, upper management, etc.) on the same page about the previous items in the checklist so that execution of the marketing plan is a no brainer.