When it comes to marketing for small / medium-sized businesses, a business owner and his or her marketing team may find themselves in difficulty: what are the major digital trends to follow? What to choose from so many content marketing strategies? What will work best in terms of ROI? To answer all these questions and have a realistic view of things, we cannot do without a solid plan. Today we will take a close look at a checklist offered by ikvala to help you implement a brilliant marketing plan.
1.Design a marketing mission statement
Such a statement describes the main reasons the company created content and marketing campaigns, outlining the priorities you have. It is an essential part of any marketing plan checklist because it keeps everyone on the same page and marketing efforts are focused on the business. Ask yourself these questions:
- What is your business goal?
- What is your unique content marketing value to your business?
- Who is your target audience that meets the goal?
- What can you do differently to get audiences to reach your goal?
2.Sketch the review personality
One of the biggest marketing challenges is creating a buyer persona for your business. You can have a holistic perspective on your general audience, but a buyer’s personality is a deeper characterization of a target audience segment. Ask yourself these questions:
- What is this?
- What are its relevant needs?
- What role does it play in the buying process?
Focusing your marketing efforts on your buyer personas leads to more effective strategies because you can deliver the content people want, not the content you know the most.
3.Develop the marketing map
Some call it an editorial plan, but a marketing map goes a little beyond a list of articles to post on your business blog. A marketing card usually contains:
- Your strategic goals
- Marketing calendar
- Editorial plan containing topics and ideas
- Workflow process corresponding to a calendar
- Channels to use
- Team resources
- Opportunities offered by the market, partners and customers
- Key performance indicators
- Ways to monitor performance
- Reassessment / monitoring of strategies
- Budgeting
There are a few major points at this stage that you should fully document:
- Align your content ideas with your business goals
- Align your content with the right audience, on the right channel at the right time, so that your call to action is aligned with your business goals
- Involve the right team resources in the marketing plan by assigning the right tasks to the right people.
- Budget accordingly
- 4.Work on customer engagement and retention
This is a crucial tip in Michelle’s marketing plan checklist. While many treat these strategies separately from content marketing, in reality they cannot work without each other. Customer retention works be
st if you have a strong customer engagement strategy and it is 90% anchored in your marketing plan. Simply put, you need to follow your customers from the day they learn you exist through the days they show loyalty to you, working hard to keep them loyal. As marketers know, it is much cheaper and more effective to retain customers than to gain new ones. Therefore, your marketing should target your audience base (and in particular your buyer personas). Here are some tips to achieve this:
- Learn all there is to know about them: it may be important that they use Charter Spectrum or another ISP
- Understand their consumption preferences: use surveys and polls and extract relevant data from customer reviews
- Find out their favorite engagement channels and habits: which social media they prefer, what type of content they share the most, which of your business stories engaged them the most, and more.
- Learn their weak points: what aspects of your business do they dislike? What products seem to make them less satisfied?
Keep in mind that all of these strategies can be used both ways: content marketing and analytical techniques.
5.Use marketing tools
The last, but not the least, tip on this marketing plan checklist. As you’ve probably figured out by now, posting a blog post or writing a smart Facebook status isn’t enough to push your post further. Marketing today benefits from a very wide range of tools that make automation, analysis and reassessment much easier, faster and cheaper. Sure, some of these tools need to be properly budgeted for by the business before using them, but they are your next best friends, especially if you want to use big data and advanced analytics to craft a brilliant marketing plan. Here are some areas of interest to consider:
- Email Marketing and Email Automation Tools
- Website traffic monitoring tools
- Social media automation and monitoring tools
- SEO tools
- Surveys and survey creation tools
- A / B test creation tools
- Predictive analytics tools
These marketing tools not only help you deliver your content, but many of them help you track results, allowing you to make corrections and adaptations along the way. There are certain tools that need to be used by the marketing team every day (email automation, SEO, SM automation and monitoring, website analytics, etc.). Others are more “seasonal” to speak, used when the situation requires it (A / B tests, polls, surveys, etc.).
