Hey there I’m John Doherty and I’m the founder and CEO of Credo where we help great companies get introduced fast to the best pre-vetted digital marketing firms. And if you find this content helpful, I’d love for you to subscribe to this channel so that you’re notified about weekly videos moving forward.

Be sure to stay to the end where I’ll tell you where you can go to download our free guide to hiring a digital marketing firm.

Today we’re going to talk about building a marketing plan for your business or the business you’re leading marketing for. While I believe action is incredibly important, we need to do it while heading in a specific direction that has been thought about beforehand. Planning things out as much as we can with the information we have lets us waste less time and get results faster.

If you’re watching this video, you probably have the following challenges:

  1. You’re doing things, but not getting the results you want or need
  2. You’re not sure what to invest in next (or first) to start seeing results
  3. You don’t have the budget you need to hit goals, and maybe you don’t even have goals set.

The opportunity ahead of you after watching this video is big.

  1. You’re going to understand why a marketing plan is important and can help you procure a budget and set goals.
  2. You’re going to learn how to stack marketing channels to see results based on the budget you have or don’t have.
  3. You’re going to understand what to include in a marketing plan to make it effective.

I’m a marketer by trade. I’ve grown client companies and my own companies and websites. As a professional marketer, I have specific channels I can make work really well and I pick the projects I work on based on whether the channels I know well will work.

For many marketers, things aren’t so straightforward. You have to procure budgets, get the right channels working at the right time to see great results, and do all of it while hiring and managing a team, not to mention having pressure from above to perform.

I know. I’ve been there. I’ve made the mistake of NOT building a marketing plan when starting with a client and we got burned. I’ve since only built strategies from the start and results are obtained faster and better, every time.

The myth I’m going to dispel today is that a marketing plan has to be onerous and take a ton of time. While sometimes you do need to dive in and do a big investigation and put together a big deck, the best marketing plan is short and actionable.

Let’s dive in.

  1. You need to define your goals. Do you need more leads as a B2B company or more customers as an eCommerce business? Look at your current metrics, then set goals for where you want to be in a certain amount of time, based on historical data.
  2. Write down who your target customers are and where they hang out, both online and offline.
  3. Write out what their problems are and the messaging that communicates how your offering solves that for them.
  4. Define the budget needed to reach them based on historical data or competitive intelligence. Tools like SimilarWeb and Semrush are going to be your friend here.
  5. Write it down. Include what your company offers, what goals you want to hit and why you’re doing marketing in the first place, who you’re targeting, where they hang out, the budget needed to reach them effectively, and the marketing channels you’ll use to get there.

Marketing plans are important because they help you focus and rally the company around what you are doing, why, and what the goals are. They help with internal communication and keeping everyone on the same page.

To review:

  • Today we talked about marketing plans and why you need one.
  •  We covered the 5 steps to creating one including what you need to include to make it successful.
  • We talked about what a marketing plan can do for increasing focus and communication within your company.

If this was helpful to you, search “busy executive’s guide to hiring a digital agency” in Google and download the ebook you find there on our site. Or, find the link below in the description.

I’m John Doherty, founder and CEO of Credo, and I’ll see you next time.