For many businesses, marketing revolves around specific promotions, seasons, or initiatives. A new product launch begins as soon as a holiday promotion ends. Despite the continuous marketing activity, they find themselves underperforming in one or more key areas. They may find few of their target consumers are aware of their businesses, products, or services. They may also find their conversion levels lag that of competitors.
The likely culprit? These businesses don't develop and implement an annual marketing strategy. Crafting an annual marketing strategy maximizes your likelihood of growth by allowing you to review and learn from past performance, clearly identify your target audience, set appropriate goals and objectives, and more.
Here are some of the steps to developing an annual marketing plan for your business:
1. Review and Learn from Past Performance
Using an annual marketing plan to guide your efforts has several benefits. First, you can compare your results from the end of the year to your plan and projected outcomes. By measuring the gap between the two, you can evaluate what worked and what didn't. You can use those insights to build a more effective plan for the following year.
If you didn't have a formal plan last year, creating one this year can help you evaluate your performance at year's end and set the stage for continuous yearly improvement. The planning process alone can help you identify marketing goals that are closely aligned with your financial goals and business vision more effectively than you can with one-off campaign plans.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
The marketing planning process will also help you identify your business's target audience. If you're shifting from campaign to campaign, the market you target will be appropriate for each campaign.
However, you run the risk of missing prospective consumers who want your product yet don't fit into the customer personas you've developed for your campaigns. You also may devote too many resources to consumers more interested in your seasonal or promotional offerings than your brand.
But when you spend time developing multiple customer personas as part of your annual marketing strategy, you can develop a clearer picture of your prospective consumers. And with that more precise understanding, you can advertise and sell more effectively.
With a more accurate picture of your target markets in hand, you can also conduct market research about new product designs, branding efforts, and other important business considerations with greater confidence.
3. Set Goals and Objectives
When you develop an annual marketing plan, you can set more appropriate goals than with multiple marketing campaigns. With an annual campaign, you can develop goals that are closely aligned with the rest of your business, including your annual financial goals, new product development cycle, production and distribution calendars, IT spending, and more. And you can use your annual marketing campaign planning to determine which marketing plans would most effectively achieve your broader goals.
An annual marketing strategy will also help you set SMART goals. SMART goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. When you create SMART goals, you're developing goals you are more likely to achieve and have a higher alignment with your organization. SMART goals are even more important if you don't have prior year data to evaluate.
4. Determine an Appropriate Budget
It's easy to overspend on marketing without a tight plan in place. And if you're shifting from campaign to campaign, chances are you're not making the most cost-efficient ad buys, overspending on collateral, and realizing fewer conversions than possible. You also may find yourself regularly needing to ask for additional financial resources while justifying underwhelming results. Doing so makes it more difficult for the business to budget appropriately and could negatively impact the bottom line.
Developing an annual marketing plan means developing an annual budget. Such a budget helps your financial team plan effectively while helping you make wise and cost-effective spending decisions. If extra resources are needed, it may be easier to justify them, especially if you have months' worth of strong outcomes from your plan under your belt.
5. Choose the Right Marketing Channels
With more precise customer research and budgeting, choosing effective and cost-efficient marketing channels is much easier.
Your chosen channels should match your goals and objectives and resonate with your target audience. In fact, by delving into your target markets and developing the right customer personas, you should know exactly which channels will help guide them along their customer journey when engaging with your brand. By planning your marketing strategy in advance, you should also be able to take advantage of any volume discounts available and save money.
6. Monitor and Measure Results
Effective marketing isn't just about the ad that goes viral or the new product that resonates. It's also about continuous improvement. To be effective, you must monitor and measure results and adjust your strategy and tactics to ensure you can hit your goals.
With today's digital technologies, you can make many changes in real-time and mitigate the risk of underperformance. Moreover, you can capture emerging insights and capture latent demand that bubbles up from your marketing efforts. However, you can only do so if you actively monitor customer feedback along the way.
Not every ad goes viral or produces immediate positive or negative results. Often it takes time for a new marketing campaign to bear fruit. Frequency and consistency are the keys to most marketing successes. It's important to stay on the course while keeping an eye on your results to ensure you can capitalize on gradually improving performance or address simmering negative sentiment.
Partner with a Full-Time Media Partner
Developing an annual marketing plan for your business involves time, effort, and expertise. But when you're running a full-time business, time is a scarce resource. Even if you think you don't need to plan, effective marketing requires dedicated time to strategize and often can benefit from an outside, objective perspective.
If your in-house marketing efforts aren't yielding the results that you think they should, Mid-West Family can help. Our expert marketing professionals can help you build an annual marketing strategic plan tailored to your specific business, region, and customers. We'll help you identify the right tactics to help you reach out to your target market and guide them along their customer journey.
Contact us today to talk with a Mid-West Family strategist!
