Your business and marketing have likely evolved over the last year due to changes in your industry’s market or your marketing tactics. It’s essential to realign who your business serves and the value you provide to your customers. Revisiting your overall marketing plan will help you better serve your customers. Let’s look at how to develop a marketing action plan that will help you achieve your business and marketing goals.
What Is a Marketing Action Plan?
Most people know what a traditional business, sales, or marketing plan is. A marketing action plan takes things further by detailing specific and measurable actions to achieve your goals. Developing an actionable marketing plan allows you to change what you’ve done in the past and incorporate new ideas. Building an actionable plan will enable you to map out your possibilities for the year.
How to Develop Actionable Marketing Goals
Marketing strategy planning and setting goals don’t have to be complicated. Marketers who write down goals and objectives will have greater success. Without having clear benchmarks, you have no way of measuring success or understanding how you’re providing value to your customers. Having clear goals will allow you to build a strategy to achieve them.
Research Your Existing Customers
Researching and understanding your current customer base is critical to providing value. Many marketers spend time and money acquiring new customers instead of contemplating the impact of growing revenue within their existing customers. Review your recurring revenue, significantly impacting target revenue and marketing goals, improving customer retention. Acquiring new customers is always valuable, but focus on opportunities to grow your existing customers’ spend with your company.
Understand Your Business Objectives
Your business’ value directly correlates to its marketing results. Your goals might be to increase your website’s organic traffic, improve conversions, or drive click-through rates on paid ads. Understanding how these goals connect to your objectives is key. For example, increasing website traffic can help you establish authority and gain new customers.
Many companies have broad goals that aren’t set by the marketing team. It’s essential to know what these goals are. When you start with a new company, they often share their goals. If they don’t, you might have to do more legwork. Understanding what the business is trying to achieve ensures you invest your marketing resources in the right places.
Establish What to Avoid
Before establishing your business’s attainable marketing goals, determine what ideas and strategies to avoid. There are many great ideas and effective marketing strategies out there, but not all of them will fit your business. During your marketing strategy planning, brainstorm ideas and determine their feasibility and how they apply to your business, marketing, or client goals.
Internal resources, target markets, timing, and budget all play a role in what’s achievable. Capturing the reasoning behind why you’re not choosing a specific direction will save time when similar ideas get proposed in the future. It’s also important to note that just because an idea doesn’t fit this year’s marketing plan doesn’t mean you can use it in future marketing plans.
The Takeaway
There will always be unexpected changes in the industry that will involve refining your existing marketing action plan. Necessitating ongoing communication with your team will help you stay the course to achieve your goals. Additionally, quarterly reviews of your marketing goals will allow you to track progress and ensure your goals are still attainable. Following these marketing strategy steps will help you develop actionable goals and grow your business.