Marketing Planning

Hi everyone and welcome to my video series. Today I wanted to talk to you about marketing planning. I feel like it’s that time of the year. Now it’s coming to the end and we need to start thinking about what we are going to do for January, 2023.

Marketing planning usually happens at this kind of stage of the year, and I think it’s good to kind of get ahead and have a really great start to the new year.

What does a marketing plan include?

What are the key areas that you need to have a think about? So I think first of all, have a little bit of an analysis of where you are now and where you are at the start of the year. What’s changed in your business? Has your services changed? Has your competitor landscape changed? Has what you offer changed? I think it’s a really good way to kind of put a point in time to say, you know, this is where we are, this is where we are now and this is where we want to be by the end of next year.

And then you can create a plan that’s structured around what it is you want to achieve.

Your marketing objectives

Talking about achievements, I want to also have a marketing plan that has objectives in it. So whether or not those are objectives that are financial or marketing related, have a think about what you want to achieve. What does good look like for you in 2023. So objectives are really, really key because it helps you to drive all of your marketing activity.

Marketing Strategy

A good marketing plan would also include things that you might have already done before, such as who your target A is. Do you have any new target audiences? Has their needs, pain points, challenges changed? Do you need to create anything for any new particular target audiences that you want to target?

What are the key messages that you want them to know about you and how do you position your business?

Is it still the same as it was last year? Has the positioning changed in relation to your competitive landscape? Do you know, what makes you different? Is there anything there that is new? And again, if you’ve already written your plan, this will be a case of just double checking it against last year and sense checking it.

Marketing Tactics

I’d also be looking at what your tactics to market, things like your website, seo, blogging, email marketing, social media review, how that’s been going, what isn’t working, and then what you could improve upon for next year.

Also, have a look at your offline marketing such as events, awards, trades and conferences. What could you be doing there or can you change things up or what is and isn’t working? What else could you be doing as well? I’d also be looking at the business development pillars such as your collaborators, your referrers, new client targeting, your existing client, upselling. How is that going? What’s working, what isn’t? How can you improve it?

If you’ve already created a marketing plan in the past, it’s just a sense check of where you are and then how you can improve, and get better in the future.

Marketing Action Plan and who does what?

Once you put that together or you’ve got a better understanding of what it is you want to do, the channels that you want to use going to market, then it would be looking around putting that into an action plan to make sure that you do it.

Either you’ll be doing it, or you’ll be giving it to a virtual assistant, or you might be giving it to a marketing executive in the team, or they might be helping you write that marketing plan. But there needs to be a structure of activity that has to happen and then how you would like to measure it.

Milestones throughout 2023 will be important every quarter, like, how are we doing and comparing it to what you think you should be doing. You don’t want to get to the end of 2023 and then do a milestone review because it might be too late.

Anyway, that’s what I think a good marketing plan should look like for 2023. Let me know if you like the video, please subscribe to my YouTube channel for more interesting insights like this. Thanks very much.

Want to find out more about how I can help with your marketing planning? Take a look at my marketing planning page.

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Marketing Planning