How to Build a Marketing Action Plan for 2022
Guest Post by Bob Stanke.
As we get closer to winding down 2021, it is time to start building an effective marketing plan for next year. But instead of just drafting up another boring marketing plan, I prefer to think of it as putting together a "Marketing Action Plan", complete with all the tactics you are going to put into action to grow your business in 2022. In this article, I am going to walk through the steps to build a Marketing Action Plan so you can grow your customer base, generate more revenue, or achieve whatever your business goals are.
What is a Marketing Action Plan
Most of us know what a business plan, sales plan, or marketing plan is. We know that it is a reference guide for what we want to do and achieve in the future. However, just by adding the word “Action” to the Marketing Plan, we slightly change the objective of the plan.
An action plan by definition is a detailed plan outlining actions needed to reach one or more goals. It provides a sequence of steps or activities that must be executed for a strategy to succeed. It is a list of specific, measurable actions and the resources needed to make those actions happen. It's essentially a more formal and detailed version of your strategic plan that you may already have or are used to doing in the past.
Why You Need a Marketing Action Plan
There is something very satisfying about going into a new year with a plan of action, especially if it gives you the opportunity to try new things and change up the routine you may have been following the past 12 months. For us small businesses, having a marketing action plan gives us the ability to forecast out all the possibilities we can pursue, which builds up a sense of excitement. That is why I call it the Marketing Action Plan. By adding in the word “action” to the marketing plan, it gives your plan momentum right away, once again, creating an excitement.
Getting your action plan in place in the early part of November also gives you the freedom to finish up the year, enjoy the holidays, and be refreshed to hit the ground running come January.
Before You Get Started on Your Marketing Action Plan
Before we go through the steps of creating your Marketing Action Plan for 2022, there is some general “housekeeping” I recommend you do. We do so many things during the course of the year that it is easy to lose track of things or forget what your overall objectives are. Here are some recommendations of things to consider before you dig into creating your plan
Review Your Customer Segments and Value Propositions
Before digging in on everything you are going to do in 2022, take a moment to make sure you are still aiming towards your overall goal: who your business serves and what value you provide. This might sound basic, but it is important: delivering on the needs of the customers is most important. Over the last year, chances are your business and marketing evolved. You reacted to changes in the market, changes in regulations, changes in your marketing tactics, etc. Get yourself realigned to make sure you are still providing value to your customers, and that there is still demand for what you offer. Perhaps take the time and investment to conduct some market research to make sure your assumptions about your target audience are factual. Doing this simple exercise can help you determine any changes you will need to build into your Marketing Action Plan for 2022.
If you need a tool to help you look at your business model and all the components involved, I recommend checking out how to create a Business Model Canvas.
Another option is to conduct a SWOT analysis, to get grounded on what you are really good at and where there are opportunities for improvement.
Conduct a Marketing Audit
One of the first things I do each planning season is a marketing audit. I take a couple of days to run through all of my marketing components to make sure everything is in order and gather all of the important metrics from the last year to use in creating my plan for the year to come. I start with my website, going through each and every page to make sure my content pathing still makes sense, all my internal and external links all still work, make sure no images are broken, embedded YouTube videos are still displaying, etc. Doing this also offers a great reminder of everything I did the past year in terms of content creation and various projects. Then I do the same thing for all my social media channels, to make sure that my branding is still consistent, my content looks good (since most of us automate our social posting activities and these platforms are notorious for changing their layouts and such).
My next step is to gather all of the metrics from my web analytics platform so that I can look at what performed the best over the past year so I can determine if certain strategies worked well enough to be continued or developed more in the next year… and what did not perform well so I don’t repeat those same strategies.
Now that you have taken the time to look back at the previous year, now it is time to get down to creating your Marketing Action Plan.
6 Steps To Follow When Creating a Marketing Action Plan
As you work through creating an effective action plan, keep these six steps in mind:
1. What are you trying to achieve?
This is your first step and where your strategic planning comes into play. What are you trying to accomplish with your next round of marketing initiatives in 2022? What are the objectives that will help you reach those goals? What targets would you like to meet or exceed? What is your business trying to accomplish in the next three months, six months, 12 months, and beyond? What things do you hope to see happen in the next 12 months that will bring you closer to these goals?
2. What's working now?
The key phrase here is "what's working now." This is why I recommend doing the marketing audit prior to working on your marketing action plan because now you are going to reference what you discovered and what best practices have emerged.
What has been successful in the past that you can expand upon? What branding initiatives or promotional activities have paid off? How have your content marketing efforts performed? Do you need to scale the number of blog posts you need to have in order to drive more website traffic? What marketing tactics seem to resonate with your target audience, and how can you build upon them without cannibalizing yourself? What programs are delivering results now that you can maintain and even build upon, and what's no longer working well? Are your lead generation strategies working?
What marketing efforts are producing less-than-optimal results? Consider things you would like to see happen that is not happening yet? Identify strategies you need to abandon since they're not working anymore? What do these successes say about your target market, and what can you learn from them? What has been successful in the past but perhaps no longer fits?
3. What are the best options for you?
What will work best for your company to help achieve the goals set forth in your strategic plan? Know all of your choices, and which ones will be the most effective at helping you reach those goals. Create solutions that fit best with what works now, or what can replace what isn't working anymore. What do these options say about your target market, and what can you learn from them?
Identify protocols or marketing strategies that have been successful in the past but perhaps no longer fit. Marketing team members should define marketing objectives for the short term (three to six months) and long term (one year or longer).
4. Outline Your Marketing Plan
What will you do, and when, to achieve success with your marketing tactics? Identify the specific steps that will help you meet your objectives. More so, know the resources (money, time, or labor) needed to make these plans happen. What can you commit to doing within the next week (or even today)?
Make sure you know what needs to be done within the next month. Plan what you will achieve in three months or six months, or a year from now. Is there anything these plans say about your target market, and what can you learn from them?
This section outlines how these marketing objectives will be achieved. The strategy section often defines the tactical "how" of an organization's marketing program. It distinguishes high-level goals from specific action items, which include specific marketing tactics, products or services, geographic markets, and timing.
5. Know Your Timeline
It's important that you know when these things will take place. When do you need to make progress with your initiatives, marketing campaigns, and plans? What specific dates will you shoot for? What do these timelines say about your buyer personas, and what can you learn from them?
6. Financial Considerations
This section addresses how the marketing plan fits into your business's financial plans, including its revenue and expense budgets and return on investment expectations, and how does all of this affect the marketing budget.
Diving into Planning Your Marketing Activities
Now that you have spent time reviewing the last year, and asking yourself very important questions about where you want to go, now you need to start digging in on creating marketing actions.
They include marketing planning, marketing design, product marketing, marketing communications, marketing strategy, marketing research, content marketing, and marketing channels. These marketing activities are used to meet consumer needs with the right product at the right price with the right message.
These marketing activities bridge your business’s goals with the marketing strategy, marketing mix, marketing tactical plans, and marketing projects. Thinking through and having this marketing action plan, complete with marketing activities can help become more effective when it comes time to put the plan into action.
How Your Marketing Action Plan Integrates with Your Overall Business Goals
Knowing the business goals are important for marketing. You can only develop a marketing action plan if you know the business goals, otherwise, you will have mismatched strategies rowing in different directions. This seems basic, but I can tell you from experience that not being aligned on business goals can be catastrophic. The marketing department has to implement the marketing plan by implementing marketing tools such as marketing research, marketing communications, and marketing strategy, and those are all driven by the overarching business goals.
Make Your Marketing Action Plan Agile
Throughout this article, I have referenced the importance of thinking strategically about what you want your business and marketing to achieve over the next three, six, twelve months. I do think there are benefits to longer-term thinking, but I believe one important thing to remember is that the execution of a strategy should be done in shorter time periods. This is where the concept of Agile Marketing comes into play and breaks the marketing goals that you created in the Marketing Action Plan into smaller tactics. Using an Agile mindset to deliver value to your customers, and then gathering feedback to then implement that into your next set of actions is very important.
The best way to make your marketing activities agile is to break your Marketing Action Plan into two-week chunks for the first couple of months when 2022 starts. Pivot as needed when the weeks go by and don’t worry about if you have to break slightly from your marketing action plan. Marketing moves fast! The faster you adapt to the changes, the more success you will have.
