Planning in Advance Supercharges Your Chances for Marketing Success

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." -Benjamin Franklin

You have a great product or service to promote but you’re not sure where to start. The best place to start is with creating a marketing plan.

A marketing plan includes:

• figuring out your business identity
• determining who your competition is
• who your target audience is
• what your unique selling proposition is
• as well as a way to quantify all of the above

Then it includes deciding what marketing channels you’ll use as well as what methods you’ll use to penetrate those channels.

You’ll need a separate marketing plan for each channel:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Pay Per Click Marketing
• Speaking Engagements
• Joint Ventures
• Events
• Affiliate Marketing
• Contests

Each type of marketing you plan to do needs its own plan and it will likely include more than one of the channels above. For instance, if you have a contest you may use many of the other ways to promote the contest, which is really to promote a particular product or service. You may write blog posts about the contests, social media updates about the contest, mention the contest in a webinar, and so forth.

Don’t just think about the marketing plan, actually put it in writing. It can be just one page. For instance, let’s write a marketing plan for your 12 week course on “How to Create a Widget”.
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• We’ll create an awesome sales page that allows purchase of the product.
• We’ll include great product information, information and so forth for our affiliates who will be excited about the new product and ready to go the moment the sales page is live due to your pre-launch emails to them educating them about the new product.
• We’ll go to our affiliates and customers and ask for testimonials.
• We’ll interview 3 people about how the widget solved their problems, post them to the blog, and post an announcement about them to our email list. Each interview points to the sales page.
• We’ll create testimonials out of the 3 interviews and put them on the sales page.
• We’ll write 6 blog posts educating our audience about the problem the widget solves, linking to the sales page.
• We’ll write a social media update about the blog posts.
• We’ll send out 6 Newsletters discussing the problems the widget solves, linking to the sales page.
• We’ll encourage people to sign up for our newsletter on our blog and on social media to learn more about How to Create a Widget.

Put these actions into a calendar, such as Google Calendar, or a calendar you made in MS Excel, so that you know exactly what day you will do each thing that you’ve decided to do. Be very specific with your calendar so that you can easily go to each day and do the tasks listed and / or hand them off to a contractor. The more carefully you plan each step of your marketing plan the more likely it is to get the results that you want.

When you think about this clearly, you see that planning your marketing in advance supercharges your chances for marketing success.

McArdle Media can help you develop a well-rounded digital marketing plan in alignment with your business and sales goals. Contact us today to learn more.