Numerous businesses struggle with developing a crystal-clear marketing schedule. The difficulty with this is that there are usually many distinct projects and multiple individuals engaged in their ownership. We've seen many instances of some of the most successful and well-known companies being very disoriented across multiple marketing channels and company goods or services.
The issue is with the possibility of disorder. In other words, if you do not maintain a consistent timetable for your team, you risk missing deadlines, making errors, miscommunicating duties, and wasting time on creativity. This results in dissatisfied customers and disappointed marketers.
We'll go through five critical stages for coordinating your marketing efforts and developing a strategy plan that the whole company can rally behind, execute, and measure against in this blog article. But first, let's review the fundamentals.
Also read: Experiential Marketing
What is the definition of a marketing schedule?
Have you ever seen stock images of marketers gathered around a whiteboard filled with colorful sticky notes and charts? That is, in part, what we are alluding to. Not every organization chooses to utilize a paper timetable; digital templates work just as well — if not better — or even better, a combination of the two. In any case, your timetable should include the following:
Dates of completion that are precise and specified
The tasks necessary to accomplish your objective and the team member to whom they are allocated
Status of the task (in progress, delayed, completed, etc.)
The goal is to create a bespoke timetable around these key activities that is tailored to your business's requirements and procedures.
Why Should You Utilize a Marketing Schedule?
Utilizing a timetable helps both your business and your customers. Several significant benefits include the following:
Efficiency — Rather of beginning each day with a wide view, your team may concentrate on a specific aspect of the project. Each day is spent working, not planning. Consider how much time a train would save by not stopping at each station.
Reduced stress - When your team rallies behind a single objective, motivation rises, and when morale is strong, the tension associated with a lack of direction is removed. Marketing is a fast-paced industry, and the easiest approach to avoid feeling overwhelmed by deadlines is to schedule a series of small, measurable micro-goals along the way.
Transparency and accountability — When everyone in the team can see what everyone else is doing, miscommunications are reduced. Having the ability to track the development of others also helps to hold individuals responsible. Everyone is a cog in the same machine, and in order for the machine to function properly, each person must do his or her assigned task.
Creating and Utilizing a Marketing Schedule
Step 1: Toss everything against the wall
This phase entails gathering and categorizing all of your business's existing efforts.
The critical point here is to prioritize these items and identify areas of overlap across efforts. For instance, there may be a content marketing project that, with proper alignment, may not only increase organic traffic through SEO, but also offer great material to supplement your email and advertising efforts in ad text. Capitalize on such chances to optimize the return on your investment. Never underestimate a Venn diagram's overlapping area.
As you begin to categorize these many projects, you'll see areas where you can reduce costs, areas where you can improve alignment, and massive opportunity gaps where the strategy is weak or critical components are absent. A great method to discover these possibilities is to break down the various duties assigned to each department's team members. Once you've broken down each job, you'll see common components and their relationships.
Step 2: Create a journey map for the client
Even if you properly identify the components from step one, this does not guarantee that everything is in order when it comes to consumers assessing your brand and making a purchase choice.
You need extremely specific documentation on your clients – who they are, what they care about, what motivates them to make a purchase, what they fear, and how you can help them.
This phase may be very involved, but it can also be quite simple. For many companies, it boils down to more precisely identifying their consumers' diverse demographic information. The objective is for all marketing components with which your consumers engage throughout their purchasing journey to meet their requirements and communicate directly to them.
Therefore, how does this fit into the marketing plan? You and your team must create a detailed trip map for a typical client. Avoid pigeonholing oneself into a single client profile. Numerous businesses have a diverse demography, and each cohort may take a markedly different route.
Step 3: Conduct an analysis of your statistics and your competitors
This data-driven phase is critical for determining what is presently functioning, where the low hanging fruit is located, and what your competitors are doing.
While each business's objectives may differ, it is critical to include KPIs into your marketing plan. Establish objectives and continue to monitor them. For instance, if your objective is to increase lead generation through email sign-ups, you should set measurable monthly goals. As a result, any marketing department that contributes to email signups should constantly keep an eye on the key performance indicators.
When addressing competitor insights, keep your learning cap on. You may learn a great deal about what to do and what not to do from your industry peers' achievements and mistakes. Look for places where they are not defending themselves so that you may profit from market inefficiencies. Take notice of their positioning, new trends they're adopting, and ideas you might improve on.
Analytics and competition should be a critical component of any marketing strategy. Make it a point of discussion with your team on a regular basis. You'll be able to prevent mistakes while staying current on market trends.
Step 4: On the whiteboard, draw circles around the main initiatives for each bucket.
Venn diagrams were discussed before. They're still as valuable now as they were in middle school. Utilizing these circles is critical for identifying overlaps between your marketing efforts and your target consumers. This enables you to focus your efforts and infuse your initiatives with some synergy. In other words, focus on a single marketing asset and use it throughout many stages of the sales funnel.
Alignment should be your objective. What do we mean when we talk about alignment? Balancing marketing and sales is an age-old balancing act. These two facets of a business must operate together. By definition, the two departments have distinct responsibilities and objectives, but if those two components can be aligned, your money and resources will stretch much farther.
Leads are an excellent illustration of a point at where two universes clash. It's an excellent starting point for collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. Encourage them to develop a lead-generation plan that maximizes the use of both of their resources while still meeting the initiative's objectives.
Step 5: Take up a pen and a piece of paper
Create a thorough implementation strategy for your grand idea. This should contain the precise actions necessary to get there, who will be accountable for them within your company, completion dates, and how they will be assessed. This should also contain long-term objectives, so that the entire plan can be evaluated against a baseline of data.
For instance, if you want to increase subscriptions through an ad-based marketing strategy, you'll need to establish benchmarks for the number of subscriptions, decide on ad creative, assign who is responsible for what, establish deadlines, and determine which metrics will be used to determine the campaign's success. Throughout, you'll want to compare this to your overarching objective of recruiting investors to help expand the business.
It sounds a lot simpler than it really is. That is why a large number of businesses fail to adopt a timetable. It is insufficient to fly by the seat of one's trousers. Establishing a complete marketing strategy for the whole business is a critical choice.
After that, everyone in the team must be crystal clear on the goal, and an effective project management system must be in place to keep things on track and moving ahead.
Finally,
As with everything else, looking at a road map is a very different experience from driving it.
Maintain a swivel head and seek for shorter and more prudent ways. Possess the ability to pivot. While having a thorough strategy is critical, you also need wiggle space for flexibility. Things are always changing, and you must be able to pivot on a dime. If all of your objectives are linked and your team is working toward a similar goal, you'll be well-positioned to pivot smoothly in the marketplace.