Creating a yearly marketing plan is key to ensuring your overall business success. Your marketing efforts help you reach out to your target audience, showing them who you are and why they should trust you. A yearly marketing plan can set your business up for long-term marketing success. However, it's essential to take a look at these key elements and how they have the potential to impact your overall marketing plan and goals.
1. Your Business Goals
Before designing a marketing plan for the coming year, consider your business goals. What are you hoping to accomplish this year? You want your marketing plan to reflect those goals, so your marketing efforts are geared toward helping you reach your overall business objectives.
2. Your Brand Message and Voice
Once you have laid out your business goals, consider what message you want to send out to your target audience. How do you want to position your brand in the larger market? When you connect with your customers, what do you want them to take away from those communications? You may, for example, want your marketing message to focus on specific aspects of your business, including specific services you offer.
3. Your Target Market
Whom are you planning to reach with your marketing messages? As a business, you want to ensure that you focus on marketing platforms that align with your target market. That means knowing which social media platforms your audience is most likely to use, what type of content they are most likely to be interested in, and, most importantly, what pain points your users have and how your brand can help solve them. The better you understand your target audience, the better you can design content that will meet their needs.
4. Your Marketing Budget
Every business needs a marketing budget. You may have a set number of resources to commit to your efforts, from the content you want to create to the events you want to hold. Your budget can profoundly impact the materials you can create and how well you can promote them, so it's critical to lay out your budget as part of your annual marketing plan. Of course, like other elements of your yearly marketing plan, your budget may need to shift as the year goes on to reflect changing priorities or shifts in the market.
5. Your Preferred Marketing Mix
As part of your yearly marketing plan, carefully examine where you intend to allocate your efforts. What platforms will you use? How much of your marketing is digital versus print or physical? What social media platforms do you want to advertise on? Remember that your marketing mix should reflect where your target audience will most likely connect with your material. Like many other elements of your efforts, you may find that your marketing mix needs to be adaptable and agile to keep up with changes throughout the year.
6. A Clear Timeline
A timeline is critical for meeting your marketing objectives throughout the year. Lay out key milestones and deadlines for your initiatives, including when you may want to launch specific campaigns or seasonal changes in your marketing efforts so that you can keep your plan flowing smoothly.
7. The Metrics You Want to Track
Carefully consider what key performance indicators you need to track to determine the overall success of your campaigns. How will you know if your initiatives are meeting their goals? Consider lead generation, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs as you design the metrics for your yearly marketing plan.
8. An Analysis of Your Competitors
A competitor analysis can provide considerable information about how your competitors handle their marketing, giving you better insights into how you want to manage your campaign. Look at competitors' strengths and weaknesses and where you fit into the market to better understand how your business will likely perform.
9. Roles and Responsibilities within Your Company
Whether you have a marketing partner who will handle most of your marketing efforts or you have an extensive marketing team, it's essential to know who will be responsible for each element of your campaigns. Lay out clear responsibilities for the members of your team.
10. Contingency Plans
Things may not go as smoothly as you hoped for your business. As part of your yearly marketing plan, create contingency plans that will allow you to adapt as needed and keep your business at the top of the market.
Are You Ready for This Year's Marketing Efforts?
Mid-West Family Northern Illinois offers various marketing services that help set you up for success this year, from designing your annual marketing plan to helping implement it throughout the year. Contact us today to learn more about our marketing services and their benefits.
