Common Marketing Plan Fails
Common Marketing Plan Fails
Hi there and welcome to another Wednesday wisdom video. Today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the common problems that I see with marketing plans and hopefully, this will give you some ideas about how you might want to update or tweak your marketing plan going forward.
What are your goals?
The first one that I see all the time is there’s been no clear setting of objectives and goals. I asked quite a lot of clients when I’m doing my marketing plan questionnaires, what is it that you want to achieve this year? And I ask them that financially and from a marketing standpoint and they struggle. So it’s really important to get that down because if you don’t know what your objectives are then you can’t back that up by any of the actions that you want to do and everything that you are doing becomes a little bit silly because it might not be supporting the objectives that you should be trying to achieve.
So have a really hard thing about what those objectives are for your business and what’s important because everything stems off objectives and goals.
Who’s your target audience?
The next thing I see quite regularly is there’s not been that much thought about the target audience in terms of who they are, where they live, what their problem points are, and what are the benefits of your products and services that can help solve their problems. So take some time to think through because once you’ve got your target market in your mind’s eye, you can start thinking about the different marketing channels to use for them rather than just going in a very haphazard way out along a lot of different channels.
Actually, have an action plan – do the doing!
The other thing that I see is not having a concrete action plan. So a lot of people go, Oh, I’m going to do this and then don’t.
And I’m a big fan of having a gantt chart or some structure to say, right, I’m going to do this activity, then I’m gonna do this activity. Then I’m going to do my Instagram and I’m going to post this many times and I want to do some LinkedIn advertising and a post this many times. I’ll do an email marketing letter every month. I’m going to do a website blog every three weeks. There’s no real structure. It all becomes a little bit ad hoc. So have a plan, stick to the plan and do it consistently and persistently.
Don’t have a plan.
The last thing that I see is not enough tracking. So I was working with a charity and I asked them about all the marketing activity and what the ROI is on all of their activity and they couldn’t tell me.
And it’s important to keep an eye on things like, you know, Google analytics and your website stats, views of your blogs, your increase in social media followers, how many people open your emails, how many people get in touch with you on the basis of an offer. If you don’t track your marketing and how will you know what isn’t working? It can be a pain, but it is worth tracking your clients back and understanding where they came from because instead of going out across a variety of different channels, there might be a couple that works really, really well for you.
So I hope you found that helpful as a couple of things that I see quite regularly. Have a look at your marketing plan, see if you’ve got all of those things covered. And until next time, bye for now.
Who I work with:
