In my experience, the difference between a run of the mill marketing plan and an effective one lies in whether or not the marketer or marketing team have taken a data-led approach.
Analysing historical performance for trends in channel combinations and seasonality in delivering relative levels of ROI, along with data on the particular industry your business competes within and any overall consumer trends, will provide you with much needed insight to be able to go from ‘marketing plan’ to ‘better marketing plan’.
But having completed a data analysis, what next?
Marketers can use a simple Start, Stop, Continue approach post a data deep dive to start refining marketing tactics.
Thinking through all the data points mentioned above and subsequent findings, which are the tried and tested tactics that consistently deliver? Or those that have a clear role in helping a last-click channel deliver? There may also be tactics that are ‘hygiene’ factors requiring very little budget or resource and while they can’t directly be attributed to ROI, turning them off saves the company nothing in budget or energy. Better to keep these running and perhaps experiment with turning them off in controlled situations to get a better measure on their contribution, before culling them and finding out they were actually fundamental in other channels being able to convert.
These are the tactics you could likely Continue.
Likewise, there may have been channels or tactics that no matter which way you looked at internal and external data, there was no way to link them back to driving ROI, either directly or in supporting secondary channels. There may be tactics that have worked to some degree, but have been a drain on budget or time/resource where it makes sense to scale them down or cut them out. There may be other tactics that have hit their point of diminishing returns and need to be re-organised in the marketing plan to ensure they’re well-scaled with enough budget but managed closely to keep costs as low as possible, or creative needs to be experimented with to see if it can be reinvigorated.
These are tactics you may either be able to Stop completely, limit to some degree or need some experimentation to inform fine tuning or optimisation.
Finally, there will be a host of new ideas that you may have had that you now want to test out. These can include some of the tests that came out from the tactics above that are doing something, but not enough to drive effective ROI.
There may have also been ideas generated during exploring your target audience or evolving consumer trends that would be prudent to test in order to stay relevant to your audience.
Perhaps there are channels that have been performing really well consistently and therefore it would be a good idea to test whether there’s the opportunity to scale it.
These are the tactics you may want to test Starting, but note the word ‘test’.
Essentially, these are tactics that are untried and tested to varying degrees, and therefore present some element of risk to the business in putting budget and resource against them. Afterall, what if the insight gleaned from data was misinterpreted somehow? When that tactic is implemented it may end up being a waste of resources.
That’s where hypotheses and further testing come in.
Check out my previous blogs on developing hypotheses from these insights for steps and benefits on taking an experimental approach to translating insights into marketing tactics while lowering your company’s risk of spending money, time and resource on tactics that may not deliver ROI.
Taking a Start, Stop, Continue approach, coupled with experimentation using hypotheses, helps translate all the hard work done in data analysis and target audience profiling into lower-risk, (more likely to be) effective marketing tactics to develop a better marketing plan.
Don’t fall into the set and forget trap though.
Effective marketing plans require ongoing experimentation and optimisation to stay effective.