What are you doing to market what your organization has to offer? Do you have a marketing plan outlining when you want to launch certain campaigns and a way to track whether your efforts are working? Or are you taking a more reactionary approach?
While reactionary marketing may seem like the easier route, we’re here to tell you it’s far from the best. It can create undue stress and chaos, which is why we work with our clients to create an annual marketing plan.
The thought of sitting down to create a plan may seem overwhelming, but with a team to guide you through the process, you’ll find it’s less stressful than you think. Consider this: You wouldn’t build a house without a plan, so why approach marketing without one?
The Annual Marketing Plan Workshop
Our Annual Marketing Plan Workshop breaks the process of creating your marketing plan down into easy-to-digest steps. This helps you focus on your organization’s needs and goals so we can build the right mix of marketing strategies and tactics to get your message out in all the right places so you can build stronger connections with your audience and begin reaching, and even exceeding your goals.
S.W.O.T. Analysis
The first session of our Annual Marketing Plan Workshop begins with a S.W.O.T. analysis of the last 12 months of marketing and your business, looking at your strengths and weaknesses from an internal perspective and opportunities and threats from the external viewpoint. We want to know what you think went well, where your shortcomings were, and start spotting opportunities to improve or try new tactics, as well as anything that could be a threat in the future, whether that’s new competitors entering the market or a possible recession.
S.M.A.R.T.E.R. Goals
After the S.W.O.T. analysis, our team will lead you through a goal-setting session where we set S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goals. With this method of goal setting from Michael Hyatt, we work toward setting goals that are:
- Specific enough to focus and direct your energies.
- Measurable so you can keep track of your progress.
- Actionable with a clear, initiative verb that prompts specific activity.
- Risky enough to leverage our natural tendency to rise to challenges.
- Time-keyed so you’re prompted exactly when to act.
- Exciting enough to inspire and harness the power of your intrinsic motivation.
- Relevant within the overall context of your life.
As we are creating the first draft of your goals, we’ll start making note of the objectives (measurable target), strategies (the plan to hit the objectives), and tactics (the tools we use to implement the strategies) for each. We will also begin thinking about a theme for your 12-month marketing plan, which is a topic to rally around that connects our efforts and is consistent for the year ahead.
The Marketing Audit & Your 12-Month Plan
After the first session of the Annual Marketing Plan Workshop, our team will conduct an audit of your organization’s marketing over the past 12 months. We’ll look at all available data, which can include website statistics, social media and email marketing insights, SEO, Google Ads, and any other data you have. Compiling this data helps us know what is currently working for your organization so we can make better recommendations for what to continue, new tactics to try, and what you may want to sunset if the efforts aren’t generating results.
We’ll also spend time refining each goal and finalizing the corresponding objectives, strategies, and tactics, compiling them into a preliminary 12-month calendar to show how each fits into the year ahead.
In our second Annual Marketing Plan Workshop session, we will review the marketing audit and present the refined goals, objectives, strategies, tactics, and the annual theme along with your preliminary 12-month marketing calendar. As we discuss our recommendations for your marketing plan, we can talk about what support you may need in order to carry out the plan so you are proactively working toward your goals.
It’s time to stop reacting to your current situation and start planning for the marketing goals you want to achieve. If you’re interested in our Annual Marketing Plan Workshop, fill out the form below, and a member of our team will contact you with more information.
