Before diving into your marketing campaigns and objectives for the year ahead, you must develop an annual strategic marketing plan. The following vital tools will allow you to construct a structured approach to the year ahead, control your spending with more predictability, and act more decisively when it comes to moving forward with some campaigns or revising others. You can start by copying over last year's yearly marketing plan as a template, or start from scratch by partnering with a marketing consulting partner like Mid-West Family Springfield. As you build out your 2023 marketing plan, make sure it addresses these critical factors:
- Strategy: Business goals, timelines, competitor analyses, metrics, and contingency plans
- Finance: Budget
- Marketing: Target audience profiles, brand messaging, marketing roles and responsibilities, and your marketing mix
Now, let's take a closer look at the key components of a strong yearly marketing plan:
Strategy Elements
While marketing plans are living documents that help guide individual campaigns and budget allotments, they're primarily strategic documents. So, make sure you devote time to these five strategy components:
1. Business Goals
In a Clutch survey of over 500 small businesses, results show that only 5% of businesses achieve their annual goals. However, that could be because less than half set strategic goals in the first place—only 41% of businesses have a marketing strategy, and only 46% have a sales strategy. Developing clear business goals can immediately set your business on the right path to success. But having a plan that incorporates those goals will help you stay moving along that path.
2. Timelines
Timelines are almost as critical to executing your plan and achieving your objectives as the objectives themselves. Create a broad timeline for your marketing initiatives that considers seasonality (ex., the holiday shopping season, peak summer sales, etc.). Set deadlines for different objectives and then smaller milestones along the way between then and now. Milestones are good opportunities to reflect on whether you're making suitable progress or if you need to make changes to your approach.
3. Competitor Analyses
SWOT analysis and competitive advantage analysis both give you a lot of insight into your business's position relative to other companies in the market space. For example, you may be competing against a company with an established brand, but you may have a better customer service record. When you understand your own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you can create strong messaging. When you understand your competitors', you can better maneuver around them.
4. Metrics and Analytics
How will you know if you're achieving your marketing objectives or reaching your milestones? Set key performance indicators (KPIs) that quantitatively measure your progress and can alert you to underperforming campaigns. Some basic KPIs all marketing teams should track include web traffic, conversion rates, the total number of leads generated, and customer acquisition costs. These numbers will show your growth and the efficiency of that growth.
5. Contingency Plans
The plan you make at the beginning of the year might not account for all the changes to come in the future. Economic events, turnover, new competitors, and changes in the market can happen at any time, and you'll need to be ready to adapt. Contingency plans outline steps you can take to respond to likely changes so you aren't caught completely off guard at a pivotal moment.
Finance: Set Your Budget
Marketing costs money—even worse, it costs money weeks or even months before your business sees any return on those expenses. However, understand that marketing your business is also an investment. That's why it's so important to set a budget for your marketing initiatives. Determine how much you can spend overall, what you can invest on specific channels, and what you want to set aside as additional spending for growth moments and potential new opportunities. As you gather historical data, you'll be able to predict your budget needs with more and more accuracy.
The Marketing Specifics Themselves
So far, we've looked briefly at general business and financial elements that are crucial to your marketing plan. However, also consider these marketing-specific considerations that can help guide your whole plan for a successful marketing year.
1. Target Audience Profiles
Gather research about your existing customers and your target markets. Who are they? What are they interested in? Where do they spend their time, and how much money do they have to spend? By determining the answers to these questions, you can develop customer personas: detailed representations of your customers so you can more accurately plan your messaging and campaigns.
2. Brand Messaging
Once you know who you're marketing to, you can also refine your brand messaging. Developing a unique, recognizable, and consistent style of messaging will help your audiences build familiarity and trust with your company. To ensure your messaging stays on track, write the norms and style elements of that messaging so everyone on your team can orient themselves toward it.
3. Marketing Roles and Responsibilities
Everyone involved in your marketing efforts has a distinct role that comes with a set actions and decision-making responsibilities. Whether you handle marketing alone, lead a team, or work with contractors and services, outline which roles or parties who are responsible for the different aspects of your marketing efforts.
4. Marketing Mix
Start with the end in mind. Go back to your customer personas and all of your research about where they spend their time. This will highlight which marketing channels belong in your marketing mix: email marketing, specific social media platforms, radio or streaming ads... Your unique marketing mix will depend on your particular audience(s) and your budget.
Mid-West Family Springfield Is Here to Help
Work with marketing experts to develop your yearly marketing plan. This will help ensure you have all your bases covered. At Mid-West Family Springfield, we can help you determine the best marketing budget for your current position, reach out to different marketing channels in your ideal marketing mix, and more. Reach out today to get started.
