A strategic plan should be the foundation of your marketing, but it needs to be translated into actionable tactics in order to generate success. Making the jump from plans to actions can be easier said than done, but a strong marketing partner can work with your organization to create a strategic plan and convert that plan into tactics that drive results. Let’s take a look at how the following aspects of your strategic plan need to be put into action:
Your strategic plan has marketing goals at its core, but goals mean little without planning out the steps that will take your organization there. You can state that you want to increase the number of leads collected by a certain percentage in the coming year, but to actually do so you need to break down what that goal requires in terms of marketing actions, resources, benchmarks and more. This is the first step in translating your strategy to tactics: establishing the short-term actions that build into long-term goals.
In addition to marketing goals, your strategic plan should lay out the KPIs you will track and how you will measure them. In the move from strategy to tactics, this tracking becomes more concrete. Your marketing firm will establish benchmarks toward your plan. This is also the time to establish measurement for all tactics (tracking URLs, set-up in Google Analytics or other tracking system, etc.) and determine data sources (Google, publisher data, third party ad servers, etc.).
If your brand positioning is part of your strategic plan, it should address your competitive differentiators, market niche and brand strengths, and how your marketing efforts address these three elements as a foundation for reaching your audience with effective messaging. On a tactical level, that’s a complicated process, and may involve the creation of various forms of marketing content, segmenting your audience and planning the distribution of that content to them.
As you move from strategy to tactics, your partner will help plan the use of your messaging in new marketing assets, advise on the allocation of resources and time for creation and distribution, and, again, set up a process for tracking success and making adjustments based on data as necessary.
Your strategic plan should give a broad overview of the timing of marketing activities. Then, when working from that strategy, your marketing firm will map that general timeline out into day-to-day activities. At this stage in the process, a strategic initiative like “build thought leadership through contributed content” becomes an actionable plan. Monthly and quarterly plans are broken down into daily and weekly steps toward the completion of each activity.
Do you want to learn more about strategic plans and how a marketing partner can help you establish one and put it into action? Contact us today.
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