The Goal at the End of Your Rainbow: How to Create a Marketing Plan Out of Your Business Goals
What is it that you want to accomplish with your business? Do you want to create jobs and make a difference in the world, or just become filthy rich and live the good life with exotic cars and your own staff of butlers? No matter what you decide upon, it’s imperative to have a direction for your business.
The goal at the end of your rainbow sets the framework for where you spend your time on your business. Everything becomes based off of that. By setting up a marketing plan based off of your pot of gold, you create for yourself a smooth, paved road to travel upon quickly to your dreams.
The Big Picture
Ultimately it is up to you, the business owner, to decide where you wish to take your business. You’re the captain of a ship, and it’s important you decide the destination of the ship so that you aren’t floating about aimlessly while wasting resources. This is what strategic planning is for.
By setting up the destination you become able to outline the path necessary to achieve your goals. You’ll be able to have an idea where you want your business to be in the next 20 years, 5 years, 1 year, and even the next month. Everything gains purpose and direction.
“So what would a strategic marketing goal look like?”
If your goal for the next 10 years is to turn your business into a self sustaining, medium to large sized business this is where you start deriving your marketing plan from. You start looking at your strategic business goals, and see where marketing can make those goals happen.
If you’re trying to drastically increase the revenue of your business you’re going to need more clients or customers. You may need to increase your customer base by up to 4x its current size. Therefore, an appropriate strategic marketing goal for a premium subscription based business may fall under the lines of, “convert 4,000 repeat customers in the next 10 years.”
Turning It Into a Plan
To start refining your marketing plan what you’ll need to do is start at the goal of 4,000 new customers in 10 years, and work your way backwards from there. For example, how do you wish to gain these customers? To figure this out you could look at your current marketing channels and figure out which ones are giving you the most success.
Maybe those channels are your website, social media, and e-mail. So now you can set goals for each of these channels. Your 10 year goal for social media may be to gain 700,000 followers across all of your social media channels.
You can then work your way down from there. You could create goals such as “run 40 social media campaigns in the next 10 years.” This goal could then break down into the goal of 4 campaigns a year. Then you can break each campaign down into the tasks related to creating a campaign.
You can set deadlines within the year for when you wish to have the outlines of the social media campaigns finished, the posts for the campaigns finished, and so on. Your large goals start breaking down into tasks to accomplish within the year. This trickles all the way down into weekly and daily tasks for the completion of your campaigns.
Putting It All Together
As you can see, it is possible to derive daily tasks from one 10 year long strategic goal. This makes every step you take a step towards your primary business goal of creating a better world, or making sure your great, great, great grandchildren become famous for doing nothing but inheriting your money.
Obviously it’s not necessary to turn every piece of your plan into daily tasks that entail what you’re going to do at exactly 3:00pm on Tuesday of November 3rd. However, it is possible to do so without losing your mind. The trick is to not do it all at once.
You can create a detailed plan over time, making the process painless and intuitive. To create a plan in this manner start with your yearly marketing goals, and set deadlines within the year for each goal. Then each new month you could set deadlines within the month to accomplish specific tasks. You could even figure out weekly tasks to accomplish that will work towards your monthly goals.
You know what works best for yourself, so see if you can find a way to incorporate your own method of setting up plans and tasks into the creation of your marketing plan.
Writing It Down
To keep organized you could buy a calendar or use an electronic calendar to write your goals and tasks into. You could also use a weekly organizer to help you write your tasks down. If calendars aren’t your thing you could create a document and type out an outline with all of your goals and their related tasks, as well as the deadlines for each task. Again, do whatever works best for you.
Whatever it is that works for you, make sure to try and have your goals and tasks written down with their deadlines, and in an organized fashion. This will keep your plan orderly and effective. Once you have your plan written down you will have created for yourself a highway that leads to your businesses success, and ultimately your staff of butlers.
If this sounds like too much work we can create a marketing plan for you! All you have to do is sign up for a consultation with us to get on your way to success! We wish you the best of luck at bringing your dreams to reality!