✦Marketing · 14 recordsWrite a marketing plan

Marketing plans fail by trying to be everywhere. This starts with the customer you already have, picks the two or three channels that customer actually uses, sets a number for the quarter, and schedules a monthly look at what is working so the plan changes before the budget is gone.

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✦ Everything it creates

The whole plan, before you install it

Goal

A marketing plan the business actually follows Month 3

Judged each quarter against a number agreed before anything was spent.

Write the plan Week 3

Customer first, channels second, tactics last.

  • Describe the best customer I already haveDo firstDay 4
  • Find out where those customers actually spend their attentionDo firstDay 9
  • Choose two or three channels and drop the restDo firstDay 13
  • Set a budget and one number per channel for the quarterDo firstWeek 3

Run the first quarter Month 3

Kept up long enough to learn something.

  • Plan the first month of activity on each channelDo firstWeek 4
  • Monthly review: what moved the number?Do firstWeek 7
  • End-of-quarter review, and rewrite the planDo firstMonth 3

Routines

  • Do this week's marketingweekly
  • Record the numbersweekly
✦ It puts something in the calendar

Dates you will not have to remember

Quarterly marketing review

Month 310:0090 min
✦ It comes with a note

Fewer channels, kept up

A channel posted to twice and abandoned costs the setup and teaches nothing. Two or three, kept up for a quarter, will tell you plainly which ones are worth the time.

The number per channel is agreed before anything is spent. Agreed afterwards, it always turns out to have been met.

✦ Questions

Write a marketing plan, answered.

Who the customer is, what you are saying to them, which channels reach them, what it will cost, and the number that tells you it worked. Most plans spend their length on tactics and skip the last part, which is the only one that lets the plan improve.
Two or three, done consistently. A channel posted to twice and abandoned costs the setup time and teaches nothing, while one kept up for a quarter tells you plainly whether it is worth keeping.
A campaign is one push with a date. This is the plan the campaigns sit inside: the audience, the channels and the quarterly numbers that decide which campaigns are worth running at all.
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