The proper execution of your marketing plan is essential so that your company will reap the results you want. No matter how good you might think your marketing plan is, without the right course of action to accompany it, your plan might fail.
Launching a successful marketing campaign is highly dependent on careful planning and smart execution. With this tandem, you’ll be getting a better audience sector, increased ROI, and overall company success.
What Is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is a segment of an overall business plan that aims to define strategies to attract and engage an audience. Its main goal is to outline the list of actions required to achieve a specific objective, usually to generate leads and reach the target market.
It also includes the details of your PR campaigns and other outreach activities over a set period. Most importantly, a marketing plan defines the key metrics that your company will use to measure the effectiveness of the said campaigns and activities.
The other functions of a marketing plan also include the following:
- The basis for platform selection: digital, print, radio, and others for each campaign
- Market research which acts as the backbone for pricing decision and market entry strategies
- Customized messages that target specific demographics
Related reading; The 10 best Marketing Strategies for Digital Marketers
Why Execution Is Important
After figuring out the starting point and drafting your marketing plan, the next step is to carry it out. This is the most important step as it can make or break your campaigns. Your strategy won’t matter as much if you fail to execute it properly.
If your plans don’t accurately translate into the proper execution, then you might not get the results you’re looking for. Worse, you’d lose all your money and efforts without anything in return.
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Tips When Executing Your Marketing Plan
In order to avoid the above scenarios, you have to execute your plan properly. Thus, it’s essential to determine the right ways that’ll bring your goals to life. If done correctly, you can deliver the right message to the right people at the most appropriate time.
As such, here are the tips towards proper marketing plan execution:
1. Organize the Team Who Will Work on The Project
It’s essential to determine which skill is necessary to make your marketing project a success. You don’t want to finish your project for the mere sake of implementing it. Instead, you want to give it the best you can with a reasonable amount of time and measurable results.
Start by selecting the most suitable team members who will work on your marketing plan. The people you choose will depend on the tactics and strategies outlined in your project and their complementary skills. For instance, you’ll need content creators, but you have to go into specific details to choose the team member suitable for such tasks.
You can do this by answering some of the following questions:
- Are you going to utilize paid search or organic searches?
- Is it best to upload explainer videos through platforms like YouTube or post short animations on your website?
- Will you be posting ads through social media or search engines?
- Are short copies enough or long-forms better?
- Do your content creators know how to differentiate landing page content from blogs?
Can your teamwork with cloud-based tools like Workday? This human capital management and financial management tool can help streamline your processes. It helps to have team members who know how to overcome these tools’ difficulties, which this post has elaborated on.
By answering questions like these, you can determine which platforms and medium of communication to use. Moreover, it helps you figure out the roles needed in your project, whether that’s editing, writing, designing, brainstorming, and conceptualization, and the like. From there, you can select individuals who can finish such tasks.
2. Make A Creative Brief
A creative brief is a document that you can use to define creative deliverables like copies, designs, animations, and websites. You usually draft this document during the initial part of the project to inform your team about the plan’s goals and requirements.
A creative brief is a significant part of a marketing plan because it helps your team save their time because they have a guide on how to perform their roles. With it, you can also ensure that all communications and expectations are well-documented. This will result in the avoidance of rushed decision changes, miscommunications, and conflicting ideas.
In addition to that, creative briefs help maintain accountability in each deliverable. It clearly states all the parameters and limitations of each task, so you can guarantee that your team and your stakeholders are on the same page.
Another benefit of using a creative brief when executing a marketing plan is a faster approval process. Since creative briefs remove ambiguity in the project, it minimizes difficult confrontation during the assessment stage. This means that the briefing process will be more about aligning objectives than getting clarifications and do-overs.
Thus, you’ll need to make creative briefs the right way to make them effective. However, creating one could take time. So, to save some time, you can use electronic creative briefs, which are available in most work management tools. The briefs are often customizable, so you can edit them in any way you like, but make sure only to put the required information.
A good creative brief doesn’t need to be too long. Instead, it only needs to answer all the questions about each of the tasks for your team members. The brief must answer the questions about each deliverable’s who, what, where, when, and how.
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3. Establish A Timeline for Your Plan
Creating a reasonable timeline for your marketing plans will help you organize each activity in the campaign. Having a timeline also ensures that your team is executing the plan smoothly, which will reflect on the timeliness of their accomplishments.
With such, your timeline should include the following to ensure its effectiveness:
Phasing: What are the phases included in your campaign? Phases may consist of spreading brand awareness, distributing product samples, or educating the target audience. Dividing your marketing plan into phases verifies that you’re using the right combination of marketing steps throughout the entire project.
Live Dates: Certainly enough, you’ll be utilizing multiple channels in your campaign, so you must plan when each channel will go live. Moreover, not all channels are made equal; some are more expensive than others. So, having a plan at the beginning will help you make the most of it without hurting your budget.
Channel Planning: One of the keys to a successful marketing campaign is to diversify. If you’re only utilizing one or two channels, you’re expecting too much from the said channels. This can be pretty risky because you’re not sure how well one channel will perform compared to the others. So, to mitigate the risk, try adding multiple channels in the mix.
Marketing Assets: These refer to anything your company will use to promote your brand, services, or products. These include images, videos, content, sales letters, datasheets, brochures, and emails. However, not all of the types of assets may be suitable for your marketing plan. That’s why you should use the ones that can resonate with your marketing plan, and you should plan them accordingly. For instance, which marketing assets to use, when to use them, and where to post these assets. That way, the execution can go smoothly.
Related Reading: Understanding the Marketing Mix
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4. Track the Progress
During the execution mode, it’s easy to lose track, especially if multiple tasks are being worked on simultaneously. So, it’s essential to check the status of each task in every phase constantly.
However, this additional step can be tedious not only for you but also for your team. You can try setting up key dates, milestones, and updates in a centralized project management tool to resolve this issue.
This way, the entire team will know where everyone is at the moment. The increased visibility ensures that your team is keeping up to date with the project timeline. Plus, it takes away the nagging and asking about which task has been accomplished.
In addition, by tracking your progress, you can easily see what your team members are prioritizing as of the moment. Thus, you can ensure that the right tasks are given enough attention and priority.
And since marketing plan execution can drastically change, tracking allows you to adjust the process depending on the current situation. For instance, if you discover that a specific ad is doing better than the rest, you may want to adjust the campaign’s budget to focus more on that ad. This will ensure that better performing platforms are given the right attention and focus that it needs.
Overall, tracking every progress is essential to ensure that your execution aligns with the marketing plan. If not, you may need to recheck your execution techniques.
Conclusion
A marketing plan is only successful if executed properly. Without proper execution, your marketing plan could fail, no matter how great it is. Thus, consider the tips above to ensure that proper execution is practiced before you put it into action. That way, you can achieve your marketing goals easily.