So you hit the end of 2015 and you still had a lot of marketing ideas you hadn’t gotten around to doing or maybe your marketing wasn’t as successful as you expected. Whilst there can be many reasons that this can occur, the main reason is not undertaking marketing planning at the beginning of the year. Planning your marketing early gives your business focus, reduces wasted spend and maximises your marketing throughout the year to achieve the best results.
Its easy to get distracted by running your business and not put the focus on your marketing but if you want to grow your business, increase leads, close more sales and retain clients your marketing planning has to be a priority. Don’t worry though you’re not alone, here’s the top 4 excuses for not getting a marketing plan in place
1. I am too busy. I can’t find the time – Add up the time you waste madly reacting to a marketing opportunity that comes up during the year or developing last minute marketing materials or finding new customers or trying to stop existing customers from leaving. If you put aside some time upfront to create your marketing strategy and plan of activities, you could save wasted time and effort down the track particularly on the wrong marketing.
2. We don’t have the money – have a good look at last year’s financials, realistically how much did you spend on marketing activities that didn’t work or reach their full potential? How much money did you spend on people’s time to do marketing activities that took three times as long as they didn’t know what they were doing? How much did you spend on creating marketing materials that weren’t effective?
3. We don’t know what we are doing – it’s amazing what you can learn about through articles/blogs/videos and webinars, or the templates you can find to help get you on track. However, we don’t all need to be experts at everything but we do need to be prepared to call the experts in when you need it. You engage an accountant when you need your taxes done so why not engage a marketing expert when you need your marketing done. Whilst it’s an investment upfront ultimately bringing in the professionals will provide return on investment in reducing wasted spend and optimising results from any marketing you do undertake. A marketing expert will make it easy for you by helping you define a strategy to achieve your goals, picking the right opportunities for your business so you don’t waste money and optimising each marketing activity to get the best results.
4. We can’t measure the results – it can be tricky to measure the results of marketing campaigns but you just need to plan for it – set targets and define how you are going to measure a campaign before you do it eg use individual promo codes, have targeted landing pages etc. Utilise any channels you can to get data for example Website data, Ad Word metrics, social media data, email rates etc.
So if you want to drive maximum marketing performance and business growth in 2016 – no more excuses. Find the time, the money and the motivation to start planning and take action.
If it’s still all too hard, I am offering $50 off for ABN members that book our Kick Start Your Year Marketing Session including a 2-hour strategy and planning session so you walk away with a marketing strategy and 3-month+ program of activities to start driving results early. Get in early as I only have a few places available with me, and there is limited spots with my expert Marketing Managers, for these one on one sessions.
