Step-By-Step Guide To The Perfect Marketing Action Plan

Building a business from scratch is never easy. However, what's tougher is growing that business by spreading its message. That's where marketing comes in and helps you reach your target audience. Back in the day, outbound marketing was the main focus, and companies used that to answer customers’ primary question: Why should they purchase from you?

With changing times, evolving technology and customer behavior, the marketing scenario has transformed dramatically. Along with traditional outbound marketing, companies now have several more marketing action plans to consider, like inbound marketing, social media marketing, content creation, SEO and SEM marketing, and more.

It can seem a bit overwhelming, but that's where we swoop in to help you. Once you've built your business, set your directives, found your target market, and settled on a unique message, you must choose the right marketing strategy. We will discuss a step-by-step guide on creating one that will be effective for you.

Step 1: What's Your Goal?

Before you start working on your marketing strategy, you need to have the answers to a few crucial questions ready. Without these answers, the marketing strategy will not be tailored to your needs or effective enough. These answers will define success for you and the marketing action plan.

• Who is your target audience? Depending on your product or service, you should have the answer, but dig deep and figure out their pain points and motivations, which you can use to attract them to your company.
• What do you consider success? Depending on how you want your target audience to react, it can be conversion rates, return on investment (ROI), website traffic, or a few more things.
• How to automate? Once you've decided on these factors, you can't repeat the process manually with the ever-changing custom behavior. So, automate the workflow through effective marketing software, like HubSpot, to keep churning out more numbers.

Step 2: What's Your Communication Channel?

During the early days of marketing, companies used only a few reliable channels to get their message out into the world. To say that the world and these channels have changed will be an understatement. However, we still can't know that traditional mediums have become obsolete. Your marketing strategy should focus on what channels your target audience uses more. Your budget will also dictate the channels you can use to relay your message to potential customers.

Traditional Legacy Channels

Traditional channels that are still relevant in this day and age are:

• Broadcast media, like television or radio 
• Physical attendance at industry events, like expos
• Posters, billboards, and flyers
• Print media, like newspapers or magazines

New-Age Digital Channels

There are a few mediums without which today's communication will collapse. Hence, using these channels is essential to reach the target audience. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two of the most important channels, along with social media and virtual industry events, like webinars.

Step 3: Creating Content to Convey the Right Message

This is essentially the most important part of the marketing action plan. That's why it's important to understand what kind of content will be effective for you and how to create it. There are several types of content you can go for, including but not limited to blog posts, social media posts, social media videos, podcasts, infographics, and more. You can choose the right type of content depending on your target audience. For example, social media content is the way to go if you're trying to reach a younger audience.

Now, after deciding on the type while creating the content, you'll have to remember one important thing. Your content should focus more on your target audience and their pain points and less on the description of the unique selling points (USP) of your product or service. Understand the seamless mix of the two and incorporate it. For example, while writing a blog post, keep 90% of the content focused on the audience and the problem, then present your product or service as the solution in a brief and seamless way.

Step 4: Evaluate and Update

Some marketing action plans will work for you, while some won't. Once you've implemented one or a few, you can't relax. After a certain time, you'll have to evaluate the success of your strategy. If you're not getting proper ROI on the money spent on your marketing strategy, then it's time to update.

Measure the KPIs separately to understand better what needs to change. Use data analytics to see the number of leads generated or converted, social media engagement, and/or website traffic coming in from different channels or types of content. This will help you truly understand what's working and what isn't.

In this competitive market, you can't sit on something that's not churning out numbers. According to the analysis results, you can update and make some changes by tweaking a few things in the strategy according to the changed customer behavior, adjusting your budget allocation, experimenting with new channels, and more. 

Go With the Pros

In conclusion, you can have multiple marketing approaches, but if you follow these four steps, they will be tailored to your company, effective, and bring in your desired numbers. Additionally, deploying the right marketing action plan for you can become a bit overwhelming. A specialist marketing agency can help you in that case. With experience in making it work for similar companies to yours, such agencies can get you to your victory line more easily and quickly.