How To Create and Implement A Marketing Action Plan

In order to attain anything useful, you need to have a clear idea as to where you are right now, as well as a clear idea of where you want to go.

I like the way Bill Phillips explains this in his book, Transformation. He says, “You can just tell your car’s GPS you want to go somewhere beautiful”, you have to give it a specific location to get there.

Creating a marketing action plan is no different, if you’re going to succeed, you need a plan.

Having a true “marketing plan” is essential to the success of your business. Here’s how to create and implement a marketing plan for yourself.

Creating the Marketing Strategy before the Tactics

Many businesses see marketing as nothing more than running a radio ad, placing a print ad, or paying for ads online.

The problem is, those are all tactics, and it’s really the strategy that makes the tactics of marketing measurable. As in, did this make money, bring in the best customers or did it not?

When you create a strategy first, you can measure with real data, and what’s measured, can be improved.

Today, businesses a faced with so many new tactics of the week, without a real strategy, it’s difficult to navigate everything that is available.

So, if we agree that the key element to making marketing successful is a strategy first approach. And I hope we do.

If you’re not convinced, ask yourself these three questions:

• Are you trying to sell to anyone and everyone?
• Do you struggle to stand out from your competitors?
• Are you unsure of what marketing tactics even make sense for your business right now?

These are all strategy problems and can only be fixed with strategy solutions.

You need to know what your “Big Picture” business goals are. Once you have those, then you can put together the tactics it will take to move forward and make your strategy come to life.

Research and Current Customers

Talk with your current customers.

Your customers hold a wealth of insightful information that can help you shape your entire business, effective core messaging, products and services you offer and so much more.

Asking your best customers the right questions can uncover the most powerful ways to attract, reach, and better serve the best most profitable customers for your business.

Research your competitors

Competitive research is another great way to grow and evolve your business. To get the most of this, it’s more than just researching those you feel are direct competitors, it’s actually taking a look at your entire digital competition.

To start, take a look at what terms your competitors are ranking for online, this will help you better understand what terms you should be ranking for as well (sounds rather strategic, right?).

Next see what type of content they’re using on their website to successfully rank for those keywords or phrases, see what sort of ads they’re running.

This type of research will help you:

• Learn new ways to better serve your customers
• Understand why competitor websites are ranking higher than you in Google
• Expose the type of content you should be creating
• Determine new opportunities based on “data”
• Leverage new opportunities to get new (ideal) customers and grow your business

Promise to solve a problem

If we’re being honest, it’s likely, no one truly wants to buy what it is you are selling. What people want are their problems solved.

This is true whether you are selling to other businesses, or directly to consumers.

For example, if you’re a business that doesn’t have enough of the right customers, you don’t want to buy search engine optimization for your website or advertising, you want your phone to ring with new customers on the other end.

If your back hurts, you don’t want to buy a chiropractic adjustment, you want to live without back pain, or be able to play with your kids more, or be able to golf without spending 3-days in traction!

Okay, that last one may be a little exaggeration, but you get the idea.

You’ve probably heard the old saying, the customer doesn’t really want a drill, they want a 1/4″ hole.

It’s the same thing.

People will buy an improved version of themselves, not a thing.

They want products or services they believe will help them feel better about themselves, have greater achievements, get relief from something that hurts or is causing discomfort, avoid an unwanted situation, or better prepare themselves for the future.

It’s your job as a business owner to understand the problems your potential customers or patients are having and match your products and services to those specific problems.

Now with this new understanding, take a look at your existing website messaging and/or advertising, are you attempting to sell a product or a service, or are you offering to solve your prospects’ problem?

If you’re attempting to sell the product or service, don’t beat yourself up. This is the thing that most businesses do.

Want proof? Just go look at your competitors’ websites or ads, they’re likely doing it too.

Can you see how changing your messaging just a bit, will instantly set you far apart from your competitors?

If you’ve been stuck selling on price or attracting the wrong type of customers, this is the reason.

Map out the customer buying cycle

The customer journey is not linear. It’s our job as business owners to identify interested prospects or even those who should be interested in what we’re offering and help them discover who we are all the way to making a purchase with us.

But there’s more…

Most traditional marketing processes have different stages to identify where a prospect is now in the buying cycle.

They are typically referenced as:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase

But the thing that gets ignored in this is, with any lead or referral generation efforts…

A happy customer is your most powerful asset.

And because of this, we at Marketing Velocity subscribes to, and teaches a seven-stage model, which is this:

• Know – When of the best ways today to become known to potential customers looking for your solutions to their problems is through organic search online. Start using online content to get found by, and spark your prospects’ attention.
• Like – Once the prospect is aware of your business, this is the time to give them more content as useful resources for them that demonstrates your expertise, allows them to get to know why they should consider choosing to do business with you, and ultimately causes them to like you or your business.
• Trust – People buy from businesses or practices they trust. This is where highlighting positive online reviews, videos, case studies, stories, and social media come into play.
• Try – This is the stage where the prospect wants to give you a try. Anything you can do here to lower the barrier to entry is a plus. Is there an irresistible offer you can make to give them that extra little push that is sometimes needed to go ahead and decide to do business with you?
• Buy – Time to get down to business and give the customer the best experience with you possible. Think about how you can focus them in the right direction, exceed their expectations, and even surprise them when they’ve made a purchase. The faster you can start this the better. The complete customer experience will be measured not only by the end result but everything they experience after making the purchase through to the end result, not what you did to get the sale.
• Repeat – the best way to get repeat business is to make sure the customer has a good experience when they purchase from you and to stay in touch and ask them to do business again. 68% of people report not doing business with a company a second time due to perceived indifference.
• Refer – Turn happy customers into referring customers! Give your customers an exceptional experience and exceed their expectations so they are compelled to share your business with your friends and family. It helps if you let them know what or what type of customer you’re looking for and exactly what to do when they are in a conversation with this person. Now they can recognize this is a person who could benefit from doing business with you, and they know exactly how to refer you. This gives you better control over referrals.

Every business has these 7-stages, it’s just many don’t recognize or address all of them. Determine what the customer buying cycle is for your ideal customers and you’ll be ahead of the pack.

Because referrals typically bring better-qualified prospects with a higher propensity to go ahead and buy from you as well as spend more when they buy, I want to delve into the process here a little deeper.

To do that, I’ll use a company I once owned as an example. It was a remodeling company and we offered a warranty after every project we completed, actually, we were required to offer at least a 12-month warranty, but I would have offered it anyway, and here’s why: I used it as a business generator.

I called this my “Warranty Profit System”.

I would call my customers at various intervals throughout the warranty period and let them know we needed to schedule a warranty inspection to make sure everything was holding up correctly and check for anything that may need repair or replacement under the warranty.

This approach may seem counterintuitive but here’s what it did:

1. Showed the customer we cared about them and their project… even after we had been paid (This showed we cared and took care of that perceived indifference problem).
2. Allowed the customer to think about and ask us to look at other projects within their home.
3. Reminded them of people they thought would be good prospects for us (referrals).

It was really quite amazing how this worked, if you offer any sort of warranty, I recommend you give this a try, preferably today. I guarantee it’ll result in a great income stream.

If you don’t currently offer a warranty, is there a way you could?

Okay, onward.

Using content as a sales strategy

Content creation has grown beyond just putting up a blog post on your website so that the search engines see your website is updated regularly.

Today it affects every part of your marketing and it powers the customer journey.

People now expect to be able to find information about every product, service or challenge they are facing by simply taking out their phone and doing a quick Google search.

Think about the last time you faced an issue or wanted to know more about something.

What did you do? Probably did a quick Google search, right?

If your business isn’t showing up, you are missing the opportunity to make the sale because there is a very good chance they’ll find your competitor instead, decide whether they are a credible source or not, and keep going, never even knowing you exist.

People go with solutions they feel they can trust.

To compete, you must create content and use it as your voice and strategy. The very best way to do this is to produce content that focuses on educating prospects about how your solution can get them the result they want, as well as building trust with them during the education process.

Develop a list of quarterly priorities and live by the calendar

As a small business owner, you know that there is always plenty of things to do and typically not enough hours in the day to get them done.

But marketing needs to become a habit and a part of your regular routine. We can show you ways to leverage existing content so that you don’t always have to come up with something new.

In fact, you can normally just create one piece of content per month and leverage that for the next 30-days or so.

As we talked about at the beginning of this article, it really comes down to having a plan. Know what needs to be done and when.

This will help you stay focused and give you the largest ROI.

Start by creating a list of the highest impact items you need to fix or implement each quarter and schedule or assign them to an employee.

Then pay attention to your calendar. If you don’t schedule it, it most likely will not get done.