Digital Marketing
IN THIS LESSON
Whether you’re launching a new product or service or targeting a regional market...
...put all the pieces of your plan together with a big-picture mindset.
Mapping out an annual marketing plan is a great way to ensure you’re reaching the right customers at the right moments. While the specifics of your strategy will vary depending on your own particular goals as a business owner, there are a few essential things every long-term plan should accomplish.
Identify Opportunities
Start by doing an assessment of your current business. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors? Where are you now, and where do you want to be in one year? Are there opportunities for you to expand your market? What are the inherent risks?
Now is the time to do your big-picture thinking. Once you identify your overarching goals, you can break those down into manageable objectives tied to individual marketing campaigns.
Know your audience
By now, you have familiarized yourself with your target customer and are keeping their needs top of mind as you design and market your products. While you are planning, it is a good time to refresh yourself on your sales data to see if there are any noticeable shifts or surprises in your core audience understanding.
For a refresher on identifying your target customer, glance back over Module 1: Identifying Your Target Customer.
Set Goals
Be specific about what you want to achieve and you will measure your success. Try setting SMART goals for your campaigns, or goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-sensitive.
For example, maybe one of your big, aspirational goals for the year is to grow your total sales by 15% using targeted marketing pushes. Let’s say, for example, your sales of processed and packaged millet have been uninspiring. So, you set a SMART goal to sell 25% more of your premium millet flour during the upcoming holiday season by running specially priced sales for two weeks at a time. The targeted marketing push you decide to use is to blast your prior customers in the Moja Trusted Network. Achieving this relatively manageable goal, in turn, brings you one step closer to meeting your larger goal of capitalizing on seasonal opportunities.
Outline your marketing tactics
The bulk of the work in creating your marketing plan is outlining the strategies and tactics you will use to reach your prospects. There are a few good rules of thumb for building these out.
Market for the full sales cycle
Make sure you’re targeting all points of your sales cycle. Advertising and direct marketing work well for reaching cold prospects, or potential customers who are as-of-yet unaware of your business, while opt-in SMS and email marketing are favorable for warm prospects who are already familiar with your brand.
Tailor your message
Use your understanding of your target customers’ behavioral patterns—where they go for advice, how and when they consume content, what communities they participate in—to determine what mix of media channels you should be marketing on at what times of day. Be mindful of both their aspirations and their everyday needs to keep your content relevant and sticky.
Be conscious of your customers’ cultural values. Is it a traditional or a conservative culture? There are some words that may be fitting in one culture but offensive to recipients of another culture. Learn the appropriate way of reaching the target customers with your message.
Be consistent
In order to increase engagement and inspire loyalty, make sure your message is distinctive and consistent throughout the buyer journey. A well-integrated campaign uses coordinated channels—say, a store banner designed to match a WhatsApp ad that matches a Facebook post—to deliver a uniform message through multiple points of contact across multiple channels. Choose images and copy that are complementary in style and tone.
Keep a calendar
Viewing all your campaigns, events, and deadlines side-by-side is a critical part of planning. Keeping a marketing calendar allows you to:
Get a broad view of your strategy for the year so that you can identify gaps and overlaps.
Keep track of assets and deliverables.
Prepare campaigns for major events such as holidays, seasonal shifts, and promotional periods. As a general rule, these campaigns should run at least two months in advance.
Create a consistent, sustainable content schedule.
Report and remain agile
One of the great things about running a marketing campaign is how much you can learn from it. By tracking your performance via stats such as store visits, conversion, click-through rates, and social media referrals you can make informed decisions regarding future campaigns. If you plan far enough in advance, you can even adjust your strategy as you go based on where your traffic is coming from, ramping up when you identify what engages your customers. Just be prepared to scale quickly!
Budget for success
Marketing is a foundational part of your business, but it does come with a price depending on what you want to accomplish. As you plan, decide what percentage of your gross annual sales you can afford to dedicate to marketing. Tally the costs of the tactics you hope to use and revise as needed to arrive at an affordable mix.