Drawing up a Marketing Plan: 4 Tips to Keep in Mind

While keeping up with social media is important to your marketing efforts, it is also important to remember everything you can do to successfully promote your company beyond Facebook, Twitter, etc. Drafting a marketing plan is a great way to keep all of your desired marketing activities in mind. With a marketing plan to guide you, you can more easily stick to your goals and develop a holistic marketing strategy. Here’s how to get started:

• Look Ahead

Draw up your plan in sizable chunks. It’s not a good idea to keep the same marketing plan for years; however, you do want your marketing plan to cover your company’s marketing efforts for a significant amount of time. Therefore, you should draft your plan 3 to 6 months at a time. This way you can keep your company up-to-date without overwhelming yourself with constant re-drafting.

• The Big Picture

When drafting your marketing plan, make sure to address all the marketing strategies you want to use to promote your business. This is the time to take everything into account, including all those offline activities. Look at the big picture as you are budgeting the time and resources you will put into marketing your company. Remember to cover incentives, efforts to gain editorial media coverage, events, social media, and of course, advertising.

• Keep the Media in Mind

If you’ve written the media into your marketing plan, it is important to keep in mind the amount of lead time editorial media needs. Monthly magazines have a lead time of about 4-6 months, while weekly magazines and newspapers have a lead time of 6-8 weeks, and websites, blogs, radio, and television have lead times of 4-6 weeks. Timing is everything in marketing – especially in the media – so make sure you are up on how far in advance you need to prepare with the media in order to get the word out about your business at the time you want.

• Be Realistic

Implement your plan in chunks. Don’t think you have to be able to put your marketing plan into action full force at once. If you can, that’s great. If not, it’s not the end of the world. Rather than overwhelming yourself and jeopardizing the success of your marketing efforts with an unrealistic execution goal, approach your marketing project as you would approach building a brick wall. Set a foundation and build upon it as you go. Add one aspect of your marketing plan the first month and then the next aspect the second month, etc. You can size these steps depending on how fast and how much you think your company will be able to successfully implement. For example, you can start with a website, then develop your social media presence on social networking sites, then begin preparation for pitching to the media, etc.

With so many marketing platforms to keep up with, it can become overwhelming to implement everything on your own. Let Three Girls Media be a part of putting your marketing plan into practice and contact us today to get started reaching all your social media goals!

Special Offer: Three Girls Media & Marketing Inc. loves working with small and emerging companies to raise their brand awareness and name recognition. We offer a complimentary 30-minute phone consultation and can discuss your specific brand marketing needs. Email info@ThreeGirlsMedia.com to make your appointment today!