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4 minute read
If you’ve followed the steps of a good marketing strategy, you’ll have the raw materials of an effective marketing plan. However it’s important to make sure your plan is well-rounded and set up to deliver ROI, so all your hard work in the strategic steps pays off.
Consider these 7 elements of an effective marketing plan
- A full-funnel approach
A good marketing plan should be a tactical answer to the insights found and decisions made through the strategic steps, while avoiding focussing on one end of the brand or sales funnel at the expense of a full funnel approach.
For a sustainable and long-term impact, any business will need to maintain awareness and consideration and find ways of helping potential customers decide to transact with them over their competitors.
An effective marketing plan should feature tactics to ensure the target audience is aware of your business or services, tactics that will get them to consider you, tactics to create preference and tactics to support them taking action.
A marketing plan that successfully takes a full funnel approach will set its business up for long-term success rather than a quick sugar hit.
- Existing customers
With so much energy and budget going towards attracting customers, a key priority of any marketing plan should be on customer retention, cross-sell, increasing the lifetime value of a customer and encouraging advocacy and referrals.
Working together with the product and sales teams to research and define what makes customers love their experience versus what disappoints them, can unearth tactics to prevent a leaky bucket when it comes to future revenue.
A good approach here will not only ensure all the hard work further up the funnel doesn’t go to waste, but over time as the customer base grows, reliance and dependence on attracting new leads should relax a little and become easier to achieve. Afterall, your customers will be doing your job for you by telling others how good your business is to deal with or how well your product solves their problems, so that new customers will come knocking.
- Paid, Owned & Earned
A handy exercise to ensure your marketing plan isn’t missing a trick is to plot out all your paid, owned and earned channels, platforms and assets.
For example your owned platforms may include your social channels, website or app, store front, branded vehicles, even your business cards.
Your owned platforms and assets can be used as distribution vehicles with limited dependencies and even cost, so it's sensible to ensure your marketing tactics include them wherever possible or appropriate. Each touchpoint you have in-market with your message will help build frequency and familiarity, helping to build and maintain your funnel.
Similarly, ensure your marketing plan includes keeping your earned platforms (testimonials, reviews, social mentions and other brand buzz) healthy. This social-proof and word of mouth is critical in helping potential customers move down the funnel.
Finally, having exhausted your owned platforms, consider appropriate and cost-effective ways to intersect with your target audience in other locations such as at work, grocery shopping or being entertained on their devices. Paid channels can include traditional media, digital advertising, social media and more specific, targeted or creative solutions.
- Build once, use many times
Thinking through a full-funnel, acquisition and retention approach leveraging paid, owned and earned channels may start to feel unwieldy. The trick is to keep your plan simple, with a clear focussed message tapping into your target audiences’ needs. Build that comms strategy once and use it many times throughout the all the above elements of your marketing plan. What that message looks like in 3 second brand media will need to be adjusted to what it would look like in a lower funnel social post or customer email. But the under-pinning sentiment behind the message will be the same.
Build efficiency and simplicity into your plan alongside effectiveness by taking this approach, and you should find it has the added benefit of bringing you back from ‘overwhelm’ to clarity.
- Seasonality & competitors
Most businesses should have some learnings or at least hypotheses under their belt when it comes to seasonality trends, and all businesses should be watching what their competitors are doing.
Considering these factors to help select when to be in market with particular tactics will ensure you’re not wasting money. It will also keep you honest to the strategy you’ve worked on. For example if you’re trying to win market share from a competitor, your marketing plan would need to reflect this by spending more than they are and being deliberate about what you’re pitching to the target audience and when. Likewise, if you’re going after a segment with competitive clear-space you may decide to avoid being in-market when your competitors are.
- Your winning channel combinations
Other insights most companies should have if they’ve been marketing for a few years consistently, include tactics or channels that always seem to work well, or those that work well when used together. If there’s a winning combination then be sure to include this in your plan. Equally if there are other insights around tactics or channels that haven’t worked at all, or need to be used in combination with something else for it to work, then ensure to consider these insights in your plan as well.
This is another great efficiency builder to save from reinventing the wheel.
- Estimate the outcome
Once your marketing plan is complete, ensure you estimate its budget requirement and revenue or customer outcome in order to estimate the return on ad spend or even better, return on investment. Go the extra mile to impress business leaders by presenting a few options, each with different budget weights and tactic inclusions to demonstrate the optimal spend for customer or revenue outcome.
This will provide assurance that the marketing plan should in fact be effective, plus will have assumptions baked into it that can be referred back to later if it under or over performs. These assumptions can then be validated or disproved, providing laser focus on where extra time and energy is required later on, to optimise the plan towards greater effectiveness.
