Magnetude Blog Series: A First Time Founder’s Guide to Building a Marketing Plan (Step VI)
Welcome back to Magnetude Monday! Today we’re going to show you how to aggregate all of your previous work and use it to prioritize and plan your marketing programs.
Step VI: Assess & Prioritize
With a basic understanding of the arsenal of marketing tools at your disposal, you have likely already started to formulate judgments on which areas are most important to your business right now, and it’s time to review your learnings from Steps I-V of our previous blog posts.
If you missed any of the steps or were reading each post passively, now is a good time to go back and jot down at least a sentence or two relating to each area below. You can review the steps here:
- Step I: Document your business objectives
- Step II: Resource allocation
- Step III: Unpack your target customers
- Step IV: Define your message and position
- Step V: Understand your marketing channels and tactics
Questions to Ask Yourself
- Which of my business objectives do I expect marketing to impact the most?
- Which marketing tactics do I have the resources and appetite to employ in the coming months?
- Who internally can I appoint to this effort? Do they have the skills to execute this or do they need training or support?
- Do I need external support to plan or execute?
- Are there additional investments in marketing infrastructure needed to be successful?
After you’ve answered these questions, now it’s time to map out details for each marketing tactic you wish to pilot. Write down:
- Which business objectives it serves
- Who the specific target audience should be
- How many hours you expect this to take
- Who internally and externally will be involved
- Who should lead (pick a point person)
- When you hope to launch
Take a look at each item you wrote down, match it against the expected hours and total hours available, and settle on the activities that will comprise next quarters’ marketing activities. When you build your plan, note which activities you can drop from the plan midstream if other activities take up too much time. Once you have that down, you’re finally ready to build your plan!
Join us next week, when we share our last step to building a marketing plan!
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