Advertising, Marketing & Strategy

4 Essential Factors to Consider for your Marketing Plan

By: Brooke Snelling, Director of Client Services

As we reach the end of the year, it is an important time to make sure you are headed into the new year with a plan in place. Given the climate of 2020, it is especially critical to proactively map out a growth plan for your business, which should include your marketing approach. There are four key areas to ensure you’ve considered before you finalize your marketing plan:

1. Target Audience

As you determine the product or service you want your business to focus on and develop, you should identify the target audience it applies to. If you are not adding new products or services and will continue to focus in the areas you have previously, reassess who is consuming or utilizing your business. Have their behaviors or needs changed over the course of the year? Are they consuming media differently now? More people have shifted to online shopping and increased usage of digital platforms, which should play a factor in your decisions.

2. Marketing Mix

Prior to finalizing your marketing mix for the new year, analyze how each of your marketing channels performed this year. Your business may not have experienced significant growth given the unpredictable nature of COVID-19 and the presidential election, however there are likely channels that did better than others. You may consider eliminating low-performing channels all together and doubling down on the ones that performed best. Again, with the shift in media consumption, you may want to add channels you have never used before. It is recommended to apply an integrated approach with a focus on upper- and lower-funnel marketing channels.

3. Measurement

One of the most important parts of developing a marketing plan is knowing in advance how you will monitor performance and make optimizations. You will obviously have an overarching goal, but benchmarks should be set against each marketing channel. You’ll want to make sure you have a regimented schedule to look at performance and make decisions on how to pivot if you are not getting the output anticipated.

4. Budget

It can be difficult to know how to set an appropriate marketing budget. You may know marketing is necessary to build awareness of your business, but you are not sure how much to spend. Consider the resources and skillsets you have available and the areas you may need to tap into a marketing expert. It is a good idea to establish a budget your business can afford and spend under budget so that reserves are available to apply to channels that are performing best. This way you will not exhaust your budget against channels that don’t drive growth for your business.

These vital areas will ensure your marketing plan is set up for success. MassMedia’s experts are available to support you with your marketing planning efforts.

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