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In today’s digital age, there are more marketing channels to get your business and product in front of potential customers than ever before. The marketing industry seems to change and evolve faster than ever before, so it can be challenging to keep up and know what platforms you should be using to reach your market effectively. Marketing without a plan can be extremely risky, and even if you are an industry where everything changes fast, you still need a plan. Here are five steps that make it as easy as possible to help you create and execute a marketing plan without stressing out.
Define Your Audience and Goals
First, you have to know who you want to reach. If you are a new business or brand, you need to get out there and talk to people who might be interested in what you are selling. Do some research to find out what type of clientele you might want to attract.
Or, if you have an existing business, make sure you are spending time analyzing your Google Analytics and social media traffic to find out what your audience demographics are. Once you’ve identified your audience, you can start to formulate a plan better.
You should also know what you want your marketing campaign to achieve. Do you want more customers, sell a particular product, or get new signups on your email list? Figure out what you want in order to create a plan to get there!
While you might be tempted to look at what your competition is doing and copy them, that can actually hurt your chances of standing out. Most marketing channels are very saturated and expensive to break into; try thinking outside of the box and trying something original.
Identify Your Resources
Now, access how much time and money you have to spend on your new marketing plan. You should be extremely realistic at this point in the plan because depending on how much money and time you have at your disposal will significantly change your plan.
If you do have room in your budget, you could consider a digital tool like Husky which will allow you to improve the quality of your plan and help you organize quickly. Whether you are working alone or with a large team, using Husky makes managing a project easy. That way, you can work with your entire team on the plan in one location. If you already have started collecting data, you can even integrate your entire marketing database easily into Husky.
Explore Platforms
Next, you have to determine how you want to market your campaign. Depending on the goals, the size of your team, and your resources will determine how you market to your target audience. If you are just a one-person team, make sure you aren’t trying to do too much and stretching yourself too thin. It is better to market on one platform completely, then underdeliver across multiple channels. Creating a social media account on major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter can help create brand recognition. It’s important to remember that each channel markets to a different demographic and has its own style of consumption. One post cannot be shared across all platforms without tweaking the message to fit each platform. You can get more inspiration on how to determine the correct communication channels for each project here.
Make A Marketing Plan
While the days of creating a plan for the better part of a decade are now over, a marketing plan is still vital to your success. You should be making a plan for the next two to three years of business but always be ready to evolve and change as the market grows. Flexibility should be a key aspect of your marketing plan. Using a digital tool like Husky is perfect to help you build a dynamic plan that keeps up with the fast-paced world.
Writing a plan can be incredibly stressful, especially when you think of all the research and data collection that needs to be. Strategies, audiences, strengths, and weakness all need to be accessed, and that could mean the accumulation of tons of different Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files. Husky can help streamline the process because you can quickly look over your plan to make sure you are staying on track or make adjustments as needed. Or, if you don’t know how to make a plan, Husky even has templates, so it doesn’t matter if you have never made a plan before, they can help you from the start! For a more hands-on approach, Husky has tutorials from seasoned marketers who can help you learn the necessary tools.
You should be created multiple strategies to test throughout the upcoming weeks. No matter how great a marketing plan seems in the office, once it is out in the real world, it might not perform as well as you would have thought. By having a backup plan, you won’t waste time or money because you can quickly switch out the parts of the plan that aren’t working as desired.
Monitor The Plan
The ideal marketing plan shouldn’t be executed and then forgotten. Especially if you are working with a large team, it can be hard to know what has been completed and what hasn’t been, especially if the work is tracked in different places. Keeping track of your strategies is vital to ensure the continued success of your plan. Husky Marketing Planner makes it easy for you. Once you have uploaded all your logos, corporate identity documents, price lists, and other marketing tools into your marketing plan, Husky makes it quick for you to find everything you need. By using Husky, you can keep track of everything because it is right at your fingertips.
Once you can start to identify what works and what doesn’t, you can keep trying to replicate this success. Just remember, a good marketing plan never sleeps! You can’t create one strong campaign and think that will continue to work year after year. Constantly changing, networking, evolving, and learning is the best way to market your campaign. This dynamic tool is a more efficient way to execute a marketing plan without stressing out.
Husky Marketing Planner is a user-friendly software to centralize all of your data for marketing planning into one digital tool. This digital marketing planner is an answer to common problems and frustrations when it comes to marketing strategy and marketing planning. Visit Husky today and and take your marketing plan to the next level.