We’ve hit the final stretch of 2014. Before you sign off for the year to focus on all the family, food, fun and festivities that the holidays bring, ask yourself this: is my marketing plan buttoned up and ready to go for 2015? Am I ready to hit the ground running and make 2015 my organization’s biggest year yet? If the answer is a no (or even if it’s a “maybe” or a “sort of”) You need to download and get to work on our latest and greatest workbook: Ready, Set, Build Your 2015 Marketing Roadmap.
Download your copy here.
Ready to get started? Here are some key things to keep in mind when building your marketing roadmap:
1. Start by developing clear goals and objectives.
The goals and objectives are the destination points you’re headed toward with your 2015 marketing roadmap. Without them, you’re leveraging tactics that aren’t necessarily aligned with where you’re looking to go. Remember, goals need to be S-M-A-R-T: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
2. Take the time to clearly define your target personas.
In order to communicate with your target stakeholders in a meaningful, personal way, you need to put yourself in their shoes. Who are they? What do they care about? What does a typical day look like to them? Where do they get their information?
3. Create key messages as they relate to each one of your target stakeholders.
Using your brand values as a compass, develop key messages for each one of your target stakeholders. Keep in mind the way you communicate your brand values to one stakeholder may be different than the way you communicate those same values to another. Look back at your personas when you go to draft your messages. It may take some time to really solidify your messaging. Revisit the matrix we provided as guidance on a regular basis.
4. Educate, engage, activate.
Create content for your stakeholders regardless of where they are in their journey. As we talked about, one of the most common marketing mistakes we see is when content is only developed around the activation phase of the stakeholder journey.
You want to develop meaningful material for people who are just getting know your industry, issue or cause; for those who are showing more interest and just starting to get involved; and for those who are your strongest and most vocal advocates. Thanks to new digital tools – online forms, Twitter lists, email segmentation, website landing pages – if you create great content, it’s possible to communicate and connect with all of your stakeholders in a specific and targeted way.
5. Plan ahead and create a calendar.
Be intentional with your marketing efforts. While you may not be able to plan out your entire year in detail, you should map out as much as you can based on your goals and defined key performance indicators. This will ensure a sound marketing strategy, and as things come up throughout the year, you will have a framework to work off of as you make marketing decisions.
6. Evaluate your efforts.
Determine how you will evaluate your success against the objectives you’ve defined and measure and track your success regularly. At Prosper Strategies, we evaluate our strategy and tactics on a monthly basis. We track all the information in a central spreadsheet so we can identify trends.
