A Great Marketing Plan: The Sum of the Parts…

A good plan deployed now, is better than a perfect plan delayed.

Apologies to General George Patton, I took some liberties with his quote, but so many great marketing plans and campaigns never see the light of day and their subsequent parts languish in obscurity because someone needs to take every contingency into account. It can’t be done, perfection that is, especially when you want to take advantage of an emerging opportunity, waiting to get the stars to align… just so… before responding is a lesson futility.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for sloppiness, I am saying that having a plan is always a good thing, from a simple list to a full-blown blue print, every body benefits when there is a plan.  But the real trick with new media and the digital age is planning just enough to get everyone going but not so restrictive that it misses an opportunity or that it can’t be flexible enough to accommodate changes on the fly in the field.

With the addition of blogs, social media, and micro-sites into the marketing mix the emphasis is now on creating a systematic and timely response to an audiences needs or to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. Calendars, lists of obscure holidays, seminar dates, webinar dates, trade exhibits, blog entries, campaigns, and monthly SEO and SEM reviews requires new media marketing know how to set-up and use. But the beauty of the whole mix is that they can change at any moment. They can be cancelled, their focus switched, a new audience can suddenly emerge, or fade with little to no expense. If your plan isn’t flexible enough to allow for it, you’ll be left with no one showing up, no one visiting, or worse looking like a fool.

So how do you approach setting up a marketing plan or planning in general in this day and age? Well, it’s quite simple actually; here are my 5 points to getting your marketing efforts out there and not missing the bigger picture:

1. Know your audience:
   It goes without saying but now with the addition of social media, knowing what social site your audiences are using and when they’re using them makes a big difference. But you should also know some of their behaviors and proclivities as in; is it better to use LinkedIn vs. Facebook, should you redirect them to a landing page or to a microsite, or should they go directly to your home page. It depends on the audience in question and the desired result, and whether you want a macro click or a micro click.
2. Rough-in the touch points to them:
   Will your audience be at a seminar or event, will they be on certain publications web sites or blogs, will they be coming to your site or to your office, whatever or wherever they’re coming from and why will all require different needs and paths to satisfying them.  It may also require extra budget or changes in the schedule and they may they need a couple of different ways to interact with you, ie: forms, click paths, calendar entries, QR or bar codes, review sites… make sure you know where they’re coming from and how to secure them once they’re with you so you can then convert them.
3. Determine the critical path/point in your plan and prepare for it:
   A critical path or point isn’t just the route someone takes or where they take it; it can be a date, an object, or a destination… taking this one item into consideration and planning to it will allow for a rough hierarchy to emerge and then subordinate tasks and functions will fall into order behind it.  If you take care of this in your planning you will have piece of mind and know all the while that you’ve taken care of the most important item in your plan.
4. Commit to deploy the first aspects of you plan:
   Put your work out there and don’t allow a failure to launch response to take over. I’ve heard it referred to as “analysis paralysis” and it’s a real thing. When it happens it can be from a minor player or a major one, either way it’s usually something insignificant and it requires a “Gordian Knot” leader to move things along. Put your work out there and begin to evolve it as the plan advances, you can always accommodate the unexpected, just don’t let it stop you.
5. Review review review:
   This is critical, once your work is out in the ether you can always go back and adjust, edit, and redeploy. Spelling and grammatical errors will be found and fixed and your audience will forgive you for them.  Context errors are different so try your best to make sure to avoid them since they will cause confusion.

Using a Gantt chart, Google docs, and iCal meetings as well as being able to map out project dependencies are required for any project to succeed.  I am not trivializing them. What I am saying is don’t hide behind them. In short, a good marketing strategy is dynamic, shared, and open, and it will always rule the day.  Inaction is never going to get you anywhere, obviously, and using all the tools in the world is great but if you use the abundance or lack of them to justify your inaction? You’ll need to reevaluate your role in the mix. It’s scary to deploy your plan but it should always be scarier not to.

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