6.08 – Mapping Out Your Action Steps

After working through your goals and identifying your position through a SWOT analysis, functional alternatives, and understanding your customers and influencers, it’s time to put your plan on paper. This involves assigning actions, timelines, responsibilities, and metrics.

Creating a detailed marketing plan is crucial for many reasons. It helps you and your team clearly understand your goals, vision, current knowledge, planned actions, and the budget for those actions. Essentially, it organises your knowledge, defines your priorities, sets your tasks and schedules, and aligns your team.

Why a Marketing Plan is Essential

A successful marketing plan includes all the elements discussed in this chapter and assigns actions to associated goals. Here are some justifications for the time spent organising a workable plan:

Best Practices Identification: A plan helps you identify the best practices, eliminate unprofitable ones, and keep everything on schedule and within budget. Many businesses without a plan react to opportunities that may not pay off. Having a plan helps you work smarter and more efficiently.
Focus and Clarity: The planning process helps you think through necessary changes to improve your results. Writing things down often adds clarity and focus to tasks.
Control: Planning helps clarify and control key elements of your marketing programme, such as branding, pricing, content, and selling strategies.

Another significant benefit of planning is encouraging creative thinking about your marketing programme. As you plan, you question old assumptions and practices and consider new and better ways to boost sales and profits.

Steps to Mapping Out Your Action Items

Here’s a step-by-step guide for organising your thoughts and outlining your actions so your document becomes a true action plan, not just a good idea put in writing.

Step 1: Complete a Situational Analysis/Summary

Outline the current circumstances or situation you’re facing. For example, what is your level of brand awareness compared to competitors? What are your constraints on resources, funding, and ability to scale? Explain the current situation concisely so all team members understand where you are and where you need to be.

Step 2: Establish Your Benchmark

When setting your goals, consider your past achievements and actions that have paid off. Establish a starting point or benchmark from which you want to build and improve. Review sales, market share, profits, customer satisfaction, web visibility, or other measures of customer attitude and perception from past campaigns.

Step 3: Define Your Goals

While working on everyday goals for marketing and sales, don’t lose sight of your long-term objectives. Set goals for incremental sales, customer acquisitions, profit margins, market share, and more. Quantify your goals and assign metrics to all your activities.

Step 4: Take Note of Lessons Learned

Continuously monitor your results to assess the return on resources spent and impact on sales and revenue. Include lessons learned from competitors or other businesses that have had success or failure with similar marketing initiatives. Consider results from A/B testing of campaigns, offers, promotions, channels, and events.

Step 5: Outline Your Strategy

Mapping out your strategy and steps for executing every aspect is like building a roadmap with milestones to your destination. Your strategy should respond to market conditions, opportunities and threats, your positioning, and your messaging.

Example

Strategy

Create a hip new brand of dog treats and sell it to younger, active pet owners.

Objectives

Brand the product to appeal to hip, younger consumers.
Build awareness through the web, advertising, press coverage, and word of mouth.
Get at least 10,000 households to try samples.
Build distribution through the web and retail stores.

Tactics

Product: Design a product that makes dogs healthier and more energetic.
Pricing: Price it slightly above competitors to signal it as a specialty product.
Placement: Sell it online and in pet stores, expanding to grocery stores as volume allows.
Promotion: Create a catchy brand and logo. Use events, social networks, print advertising, and in-store displays.

Step 6: Commit to Action Items

Outline specific actions in your marketing plan and use a spreadsheet to map out the timing of execution, due dates, roles and responsibilities, and status of each action item.

Step 7: Build Learning Plans

Everything you do must be measurable and testable to know what works best for your brand and budget. Include actions like:

Research Projects: Identify new research projects, such as Voice of the Customer programmes.
A/B Testing: Try direct marketing campaigns via A/B tests.
Channel Testing: Test promotion channels for the best response and return.
New Segments: Examine new market segments for future growth.
List Testing: Test list providers for the best performance.
Year-over-Year Comparison: Compare responses for past and present campaigns.
Engagement Programmes: Experiment with online and offline engagement programmes.

Adapting Your Plan

A marketing plan is not written in stone. It’s an evolving document that should be revisited and adjusted as you implement it. Use the plan to guide your resources and remain flexible to adapt to market and customer changes.

By following these steps, you can create a comprehensive action plan that guides your marketing efforts towards achieving your business goals efficiently and effectively.