Your Turnkey Marketing Action Plan for This Year-End

The effectiveness of your marketing strategy depends on how you implement it. This transition from theory to practice is articulated in an operational document called: marketing action plan. This will allow you to have a detailed view of all the steps necessary to achieve your business objectives. Discover in this article the steps to follow to deploy an effective marketing action plan. Let’s get started!

As a reminder, what is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is the translation of business objectives into concrete marketing actions. A marketing plan consists of organizing all the stages of your marketing strategy in order to achieve your objectives. It’s a roadmap, a list of concrete actions to be carried out, and the associated timelines to best deploy your marketing strategy.

These marketing actions are quantified and measurable via key performance indicators (KPIs).

A marketing plan can be put in place for the launch of a new product or service offering for example, or for the launch of a commercial operation…

The marketing plan is a very operational document that lists all the actions to be carried out and also includes all the actors participating in the project, the implementation deadlines as well as the budget necessary for the proper execution of these actions.

Key Steps to Build Your Marketing Action Plan

1- Analysis of Your Brand and Your Market

As with any marketing project, it’s important to start with the basic elements that make up your brand and ask yourself essential questions such as:

• What is the history of your brand, your DNA?
• What is your vision, your mission?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• How do you communicate?
• What are your opportunities and threats?
• What is your added value compared to competing brands?
• Who are your competitors? What are their products and services? Their messages, their way of communicating?
• Etc.

This first step of laying out everything concerning your brand and your market allows you to take stock of your current situation and thus have a clear vision.

The objective here is to ensure that you respect the identity of your brand that you build on a daily basis. It is essential that there is some continuity in your actions in order not to blur the messages you send to your customers. This step of analyzing your brand and your market allows you to be certain of starting in the right direction and building a coherent and solid marketing action plan.

2. Defining Your Business Objectives

Now we get to the heart of the matter! Defining your business objectives is of course a mandatory step. Thanks to the previous step, you have a clearer vision of your brand, your market and the direction in which you want to go.

You will now determine one or more objectives to achieve in order to evolve your brand in the right direction.

For example:

• Increase your sales and turnover;
• Increase your visibility and awareness;
• Retain your customers;
• Conquer a new customer segment, a new target;
• Improve the visibility of your website, get more traffic on your product pages;
• Change the way your brand is perceived in the eyes of consumers;
• Etc.

The objectives can be multiple, but whatever they are, they must be SMART, which means:

• Specific,
• Measurable,
• Achievable,
• Relevant,
• Time-bound,

Of course, depending on the objective(s) to be achieved, the marketing and communication actions, deadlines and budgets can be totally different.

For each of your objectives, don’t forget to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) that will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing plan over time.

3. Study of Your Personas

For your marketing action plan to be effective, you must clearly identify who your personas are, i.e., your typical customers.

• Who is your ideal buyer for your products or services?
• Which market segment is most likely to provide you with a good ROI?

Try to create a typical profile for each of your personas that best represents them by asking yourself the following questions:

• Who is your ideal customer?
• How old is your ideal customer?
• Where do they work?
• What are their character traits and background?
• What are their expectations and needs?
• What are their motivations and obstacles?
• What are their consumption habits?
• What is their purchasing power level?
• Etc.

This step is fundamental to knowing exactly who you’re addressing. A good understanding of your personas will allow you to orient all your strategic decisions and actions in a single direction.

By intimately knowing your target market, you can more easily determine how to reach it and how to effectively communicate how your product or service offering meets its needs.

In this context, the SaaS software developed by Trustt supports your development by collecting fresh data and relevant consumer insights. Gathering this valuable data allows you to refine your targeting and customer knowledge and thus optimize all your marketing actions.

4- Identification of Marketing Channels

Now that you’ve done the bulk of the work, know where you stand, understand your market, identified your competing brands, determined your business objectives to achieve, as well as your marketing target, you can list all the marketing channels on which you could present your product or service offering.

In other words, you will now think about how to reach your target to meet your objectives.

There are a very large number of marketing channels. Among them, we find:

Digital Channels

• Blog / Website,
• Social Networks,
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
• Adwords / Display Campaigns,
• Email Marketing,
• Remarketing,
• Mobile Marketing,
• Influencer Marketing,

Traditional Channels

• Radio,
• TV,
• Press,
• Outdoor Advertising,
• Public Relations / Press Articles,
• Events,
• Etc.

Which media and marketing channels are best suited to reach your target? Which ones do they turn to for information about the type of product or service you offer?

Once you have determined where to communicate with your target audience, define the types of content preferred by your personas. Then list them as well.

5- List the Marketing Actions to Implement

This step is the heart of your marketing action plan! You will now build an implementation schedule.

For each objective and sub-objective that you have previously defined, you will describe in detail all the marketing actions to be implemented to achieve them.

Each marketing action should be planned in time according to the most appropriate moments to act.

Finally, in this implementation schedule, you can associate all the stakeholders involved and mobilized on this project.

6- Define Your Budget

This final step consists of determining the total amount allocated to the implementation of your marketing action plan. Your marketing budget includes all the investments that will need to be made to precisely achieve your business objective or objectives.

It is important to clearly define your budget when drafting your marketing action plan.

In this budget, you will associate an amount with each action planned in your marketing plan. Of course, this budget must be realistic and correspond to the current situation of your company.

Depending on the possibilities, you can adjust the marketing actions listed previously.

Now that you have your turnkey marketing action plan, all you have left to do is “to monitor the” evolution and impact of all your actions in order to measure the results and adjust them over time if necessary.