Essential elements of your marketing plan

1. Be Smart: Your marketing strategy should be built upon specific & measurable objectives, otherwise how can you measure its success?

2. Be committed: Setting deadlines and marketing budgets helps you to focus on your priorities & commit to achieving them. Make sales forecasts and non-financial targets a key part of your plan and feed them into your overall business plan.

3. Be focused: Targets can help you identify where your marketing is & isn’t working. Your plan should set out when and how you will communicate with your audience on a daily basis & enable you to amend your activity accordingly.

4. Be timely: Time your marketing campaigns to fit with your customers’ key purchasing and planning dates i.e. Christmas or yearly planning. Look for other marketing opportunities that you can take advantage of. If there are significant gaps in your schedule, fill them with cost-effective activities to help maintain customer awareness e.g. a newsletter.

5. Be personal: If you rely heavily on a small number of important customers, consider developing individual account plans for them. Rather than mailshots and other forms of general communications, key accounts merit regular phone calls, meetings etc.

6. Be integrated: As well as communications, your plan should span the full mix of marketing activities. You might want to strengthen your marketing capabilities. Maybe you need to introduce more efficient systems or measure customer satisfaction. Including activities like these in your marketing plan helps ensure that they are identified as priorities and that you dedicate time and money to them.

Finally, if the thought of preparing a marketing plan fills you with dread, then give us a call. Experts in the field of marketing planning & strategy, we will deliver a plan ready to implement, at a cost affordable to you. T: 01254 693063 W: www.edenmarketing.co.uk