How to Marketing Plan?
Creating a plan is just part of the job but delivering on your plan is far more difficult; it shifts from a set of plans on paper to numbers in action. The two key components that will decide success vs. stalled efforts are the execution calendar and the analytics.
Step 1: Build an Execution Calendar
An execution calendar is your most valuable tool, as it can help operationalize your plan. Until you have an execution calendar, your plan is just an abstraction of a plan. An execution calendar tells you what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, and estimate of how long things will take.
Best practices:
● Work backwards from the launch: What is of the utmost importance to you, is the launch date, so work backwards from launch-date: creative development, approvals, testing, and distribution.
● Tasks by category: Have a general timeline for product development, pricing, communication, and sales enablement.
● Partners in sync: For any co-branded or cross-industry campaign, timely milestones need to be agreed from both party's perspectives, or if not, you may find yourself with a bottleneck during execution.
When your execution calendar is built, you will create accountability amongst the teams and everyone will be aware of what to do when, so everyone does not wait till the "end" and get the "crunch."
Step 2: Build the Analytics / Measurement System
You have executed the action - if there is no measurement then there is little to no meaning; it is simply a guess. Analytics is what will close the process loop between planning and results. A planner has honed in the objectives and KPI's - analytics will provide method to track and report back on progress.
Effective approaches are:
● Select meaningful metrics: Depending on campaign objectives, this could be leads, sales uplift, return on investment (ROI), or indicators of brand loyalty. Create a monitoring plan: Use monitoring tools, ranging from dashboards (like Google Analytics, Tableau, or even Excel) to capture and concentrate campaign data; otherwise, monitoring and reporting manually can lead to blind corners and delays.
● Measure cadence: Determine what needs to be measured daily (like ad impressions) and how to review key performance measures weekly, monthly, or quarterly (like contribution margin or churn). When marketers match execution with analytics, they pivot from reactive, tactical marketing to a proactive and informed basis for decisions by refining execution based on actual data from the real world.
The most successful campaigns go beyond launching; instead, they learn. While an execution calendar helps ensure that things happen on time, analytics offer clarity of whether things that happened were a direct result of that action. Together, they form the essential under pinning for disciplined marketing execution.
