Six Steps To Help With 2022 Marketing Planning
March 15, 2022
It’s not too late for 2022 marketing planning. It’s easy to create a plan based on goals, data and statistics from the marketing tactics from last year. It will be a little more challenging if this is your first plan, but these tips will help in both instances.
6 steps:
1) Establish Marketing Goals
A marketing plan needs to be rooted in goals. The goals become your focus for all marketing-related activities. You’ve likely heard of SMART goals, and this is definitely one of the times to implement the SMART goal approach. For example, instead of jotting down a goal of increasing website traffic, think instead of a goal structured like this: Increase net new visitors to the company website by 8% (compared to 2021) by October 2022.
If your business is focused on a specific product or service in 2020, then your goal might change to focus on increasing net new visitors to that product or service page instead. The point is that the goals should have parameters and a way to determine whether or not the goal has been achieved.
2) Look At The Data
Now that goals have been established, it’s time to look at the data from past marketing activities. For example, if email marketing is part of your 2021 plan, it’s time to review the stats from email campaigns. If social media is part of your marketing, analyze the data. The idea here is to understand what worked and what didn’t in 2021. What worked means that it helped your business achieve its marketing goals!
If your business didn’t set marketing goals, last year or data is not available, that is something to work on this year. Meaning one of your goals may be to implement email marketing analytics for all emails deployed in 2022 by leveraging an email marketing tool with built-in analytics before sending the first email. You get the idea. Analytics are essential because they help to show success with complex numbers. These hard numbers enable you to determine where to focus your time and budget.
3) Determine The Budget
Yep, it’s the budget question. It may make people squeamish about talking about budget, but it is a necessary question. Without a budget, it is hard to know where to spend and how much to spend. Without a budget, your business may be out of marketing cash in June or have a surplus in November…neither one of these scenarios is good.
Identify the marketing budget, and have a clear understanding of what comes out of that budget. Once there is a clear understanding of the available budget, you’ll be able to allot that budget appropriately by aligning it with your goals and data. Also read about our marketing budget rule of thumb.
If we go back to our original SMART goal of increasing net new web visitors, we know the budget should be spent on driving traffic. However, if we bump that goal up against our analytics, we may find that email marketing drove most traffic to our website. Knowing these two components enables us to earmark a good portion of our budget for email marketing and to grow our email marketing lists.
It’s a logical approach, which is helpful when it comes to spending marketing dollars.
4) Talk To Sales
Marketing and sales need to work together, and the best way to begin the process of working together is to understand the goals of the sales team, and how marketing can support them. This also gives you an opportunity to pick their brains! What are they hearing from customers and prospects, what has helped them close a sale faster or start a conversation, what do they know about the competition? The sales team has insights, and it is vital to understand them and create a unified front.
5) Draft The Plan
You’ve collected all of the details, and now comes the fun part, developing the marketing plan! The format of the plan is not as important as the content of the plan. The marketing plan should include your marketing goals, strategies, tactics, forms of measurement, and budget allocation. It should also highlight how often the plan will be reviewed. A marketing plan should be a bit fluid and enable you to reallocate the budget if a tactic is not performing IE., not helping to reach the SMART goals). If the plan needs to be adjusted, don’t sweat it; embrace it. It’s better to change mid-way through the year than look back after 12 months and realize goals were not met.
6) Incorporate Testing
Testing marketing tactics is a critical component that must not be forgotten. Testing enables you to try new tactics within your marketing plan/budget with minimal risk. For example, let’s say you are starting to see a decline in email marketing metrics mid-way through the year. Rather than stay the course, use some of the budgets you allocated for testing to try Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or another form of marketing that is not currently in your plan. And since it is a test, you are leveraging a small portion of the budget within a specific time frame to gauge whether or not it is worth investing more time and potentially reallocating the budget to the “new” tactic.
As you can tell, we believe in marketing planning. It provides a road map and a clear approach to the coming year.
Learn more about our Strategic Marketing Services. Need any help with your 2022 small business marketing planning? Contact us and let’s start the conversation. Happy planning!
This is a guest post from Kristen Davis, CEO & Founder of Athenian Marketing.