Putting your Marketing Plan into Action

Once you have a marketing plan, it is time to put it into action.

Broadly speaking there are three main types of marketing activity:

Awareness – let your target audience, and potential customers, know you exist
Acquisition – turn your leads into customers
Retention - this is your strategy to impact customer loyalty and keep your customers

It is a good idea to focus on one area to begin with rather than trying to do everything at once. This will not only be the most cost effective way to achieve your objectives, but give you a good idea of what type of activities have the most influence.

Here are some tips to consider when planning your activities:

1. Make sure you have the resources available to execute your activities. This includes ensuring that you have the right people and adequate budget to cover all your planned activities, with some in reserve for follow-up activities.
2. Know and understand your customer’s behaviour and what appeals to them. Every customer wants to be associated with a brand they can relate to, that makes them feel good and delivers on its promise.
3. Choose marketing activities that reflect your brand’s values.
4. Develop creative that reflects your brand’s overall positioning. It’s important to involve the design team in meetings to ensure their buy-in.
5. Evaluate and review your marketing activities regularly. You need to be able to see the link to revenue, customer acquisition, sales and market share.
6. Timing is key. Time your activities to maximise sales opportunities and leverage other events.

There may be a big difference between the activities that you want to execute, and the activities that will be the most useful to achieving your objectives. This distinction is not always clear and it might be worth engaging a marketing consultant to help put your plan into action and to start you on the right track.