Marketing Plan is the key to your company’s success! It guides and controls you to do the most important work getting the word out about your product, service, and company. Marketing Plan and Budget are two key points to help you succeed! Marketing Plan and Business Budget are vital concepts and should be at the top of your business priority list.
A budget is a compass; without one, you could be sailing in the wrong direction. But it is very hard to stay on track with your financial goals and that will drastically affect your overall success, so design your marketing plan and budget in accordance with these two key points: quantifiable (numeric) goals like sales, gross profit, number of new customers, and breakdown by category as desired. Quantifiable goals must be quantifiable, i.e., they have a specific date, measurable (in numbers), and can be checked against other goals within your budget to ensure these are on target. To do this, each project must be brokered out into a specific level of activity with a detailed budget for each, with a date for each as part of the budget.
When properly broken down into daily, weekly, and monthly activities, your budget will show where all funds are spent. With the budget, determine which tactics work best for your marketing plan and budget. One of the best tactics to keep in mind when setting your budget is the cost per action, or CPA, ratio. This ratio measures the cost of producing a one-time marketing campaign vs. the cost of producing multiple similar campaigns over time. Knowing how much to spend on a single campaign will ensure that you spend on tactics that produce results in the end.
If you are looking to increase your social media presence, you may want to allocate more funds towards this effort, or you may want to split your budget into different social media efforts. This will allow you to utilize different tactics to reach the same audience, without needing to invest the same amount of time into each. For example, if you have two different social media accounts for your company, it would be wise to allocate a portion of your marketing budget towards each account so that your employees have something to follow and spread the news about! Your marketing strategy will likely focus heavily on your company’s website, so ensuring its effectiveness through the purchase of web analytics software is imperative.
Marketing plans and budgets need to take into account the future, too. Knowing where you want your business to go will help guide you to the right tactics to use today, in addition to helping you decide what tactics will be necessary in the future. As stated earlier, it is important to break down your budget into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly objectives, and keeping these in mind can help you stay on target with your goals. Keeping track of your progress can also serve as motivation and a great way to reward yourself when achieving your goals.
By breaking down your current marketing techniques and focusing on your company outcomes, you are more likely to succeed in the future. By properly executing tactics that complement your business outcomes, you increase the chances of making your goal a reality. To learn more about using current and upcoming marketing techniques to direct your business outcomes, register for a free online business ebook by following the links below.