Campaign Planning
The web is becoming more sophisticated – did you notice? When you see an advert these days you’ll see the same advert on TV, in the newspaper, magazine, website and these days you’ll probably get it in your Inbox, on Facebook, Google and Linked in and it will either force you to buy something or drive you up the wall.
What’s happening is real planning for your marketing. Few of us actually sell anything any more, we market our goods in the hope someone will visit our website and buy into it. We all do it, most companies have a brochure or business card that resembles their website. Nothing new here.
What I am saying now is that you need to plan for it. The more you can plan the better and it should be dead easy. The simplicity is the key – you know your business… it’s ups and down, when demand might be high or low. When you need to fill a hotel room, run a January Sale, galvanise a system upgrade, provide additional support to clients. I unfortunately as your website design do not.
The solution is a Spreadsheet – so simple and so overlooked… in the rows go the months or ‘time’. In the column should be ‘Last years campaign’, ‘This years campaign’ and ‘Notes’ – pretty much all you need, but of course you can make it more complicated.
The Marketing Plan is a guide only, everything else happens around it, but if you share it with me on something like Google Docs, I’ll have a rough idea of your whole year’s marketing effort. I can then suggest ideas, plan ahead, adjust your Google Adwords spending, eNewsletter sending and gear your SEO towards your core aims and finally report back on the whole lot..
The simpler the plan, the more flexible it will be… that is why I recommend only the roughest of guidelines that can be changed and adjusted. But the value is incredible, as suddenly everyone in the marketing team will know where they are going.
Take a step back this week and spend just 15 minutes on your marketing plan – and share it with me!