Many brands have trouble understanding how to develop a precise marketing plan. The issue is that there are usually many different initiatives and many different people managing those initiatives. There are numerous instances when many of the top famous and prominent brands are confused across various marketing channels, business items, or even services.
The issue lies in the possibility of chaos. If you’re not keeping your team centered on a typical schedule, it’s possible to be late, miss deadlines, commit mistakes, miscommunicate tasks, and spend time working on ideas. All this can result in unhappy customers and frustrated marketers.
In this blog post, we’ll go through five steps for aligning your marketing strategies and developing a roadmap that the entire company can unite around, work on, and track against. First, let’s look at the basics.
What’s a market plan?
Are you familiar with those stock images of a conference room filled with marketers sitting around a whiteboard with colorful sticky charts and notes? That’s what we’re talking about. While not every company chooses to use a printed schedule, digital templates can be just as well or perhaps an amalgam of both. Whatever you decide to use, your plan must cover the following essentials:
Due dates are clearly stated and transparent.
The tasks you must complete to reach your ultimate goal and the team member is assigned to.
Task status (in progress, delayed, completed, etc.)
The idea is to design a customized program around these critical tasks based on the demands of your company and the processes it follows.
Why Use a Marketing Schedule?
Utilizing a schedule will benefit your business just as it will benefit your customers. Here are a few significant benefits:
Efficiency – Instead of beginning every day with an overall view, your team could concentrate on a specific aspect of the task. Every day is spent working instead of making plans. Imagine how much time trains could cut down on by not having to stop at every station.
Stress is reduced – When team members are united around the same goal, it improves motivation. When your team’s morale is good, anxiety that results from an absence of direction can be eliminated. Marketing is a frantic environment, and the best method to manage deadline stress is to set up a sequence of small, recognizable micro-goals throughout the process.
Transparency and accountability everyone in the team can observe what’s happening. This reduces the chance of miscommunication. Being able to view others’ progress helps keep everyone accountable. Everyone is an integral part of the same machine, and for the device to function, it must be able to complete its job.
Steps To Creating and Using a Marketing Schedule
Toss everything against the wall.
In this stage, it is necessary to collect every single initiative your company is involved in and sort the results into buckets.
The most important thing is to determine the most critical aspects and look for overlaps between these initiatives. For example, it could be an initiative in a content marketing campaign that, with a solid alignment, could help increase organic traffic via SEO and provide stunning content that can enhance your marketing and email efforts in your ad content. Take advantage of these opportunities to get the most value from your investment. Don’t underestimate the overlap region of the Venn diagram.
When you begin to bucket the various initiatives, you’ll see areas to eliminate, areas that could be more aligned, and massive opportunity gaps in which the strategy is not working or essential components aren’t there. One of the best ways to find these opportunities is to break down the aspects of each department along with the team members. After you have broken down each job, you’ll identify common elements and their relationship to one another.
Map the customer’s journey.
Even if you have identified the components in the first step, that doesn’t mean the elements align with your customers looking at your brand and deciding to purchase.
You must have a clear and concise record of the details of your clients (who you are and what they’re most concerned about, the factors that drive them to purchase and what they’re scared of, and the ways you can resolve their problems.
This process can be pervasive, yet it can also be accessible. For various brands, it’s all down to better understanding the diverse demographics of their clients. The objective is that each marketing element that customers interact with throughout their purchase journey should be in line with their requirements and appeal to them.
How can this be integrated into your marketing strategy? Your team and you have to design a step-by-stage journey of your ideal customer is. Don’t be limited to one customer profile. Many companies have diverse populations, and each cohort could have different paths to success.
