It’s Time to Embrace the Short-Term Plan
“Forget grand and detailed strategic marketing plans. In today’s world, they’re obsolete.”
Want to know the #1 thing our agency has learned about B2B marketing in the time of coronavirus? Here it is: Embrace the Short-Term Plan.
Say goodbye to 6-, 12- or 18-month marketing plans for the foreseeable future and say hello to taking it one quarter at a time. It’s actually pretty refreshing once you relax into the concept. And it’s way easier and more realistic than the lofty marketing plans that are created with the best of intentions (on the part of both agency + client!).
So how do you do it?
Here’s how we came up with a short-term plan for our agency because, to be honest, we basically let the wheels fall off of our own marketing (except paid search!) over the past 6 months. Thankfully, it’s because we’ve been heads down working hard for our clients. But still, a marketing company has gotta market.
Step #1: Define a Vision & Goals
Our vision is to get our marketing engine up and running again with a process, schedule and discipline behind it.
Our goal is to drive new potential new business opportunities by creating short-term marketing plans for ideal prospects at a discounted rate.
Step #2: Define a Realistic Marketing Mix
Here’s What Our Sept-Dec 2020 Marketing Mix Looks Like:
Step #3: Define a Plan with Roles, Responsibilities & a Schedule
We’ve created a schedule with all of the above activities broken down into weekly tasks, noting who is responsible for each. It doesn’t need to be complicated – but breaking a bigger plan down into separate activities makes it much more manageable and likely that you’ll follow your plan.
Step #4: Commit to the Plan
See, we’re doing it! This blog post is proof.
Going forward, we’ll check in with our team weekly to ensure everyone has completed their activities for the week and to regroup if changes need to be made.
Step #5: Monitor, Analyze & Refine
For those activities that we can measure performance, we’re checking in a week or two later. So we’re looking at opens and clicks in our drip emails, as well as page visits and form fills for our blog posts and landing page. If we don’t like what we’re seeing, we discuss how we can improve, and make tweaks to keep things moving in a positive direction.
