5 Mistakes to Avoid when Crafting a Marketing Plan

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[1] Bad Research

Before crafting a marketing plan or campaign, you must understand your customers. Regardless of the purpose of your campaign - creating brand image and awareness, generating sales, creating engaging content for the audience, video stories, it must appear compelling to the audience.

Take out a portion of your marketing strategy for research. Try to use your money to test numerous messages and offers across different marketing channels like an email newsletter, direct email, and weekly blogs to see how much response you get from the customers before putting in your effort and budget into a full-time campaign. This approach is known as A/B testing.

Once you get an excellent response, then you can scale it up to get the benefits. Do not stop here and keep testing a new bunch of messages to find performance across various channels.

[2] No Tracking of Performance

Present time technology has made it easier than ever to keep track of the customer's response and behavior, which can be very useful to you. Many brands use this data to create campaigns they believe will do well. However, they fail to track the performance to recognize the areas of improvement.

So, with such technological advancement, it is recommended that track the performance timely before investing in a campaign. You can conduct small campings and see how well the customers respond to them. If the campaign's performance is good, you can invest in it on a large scale then.

Tools such as Google Analytics can be used to track the results of your campaigns. Then after fetching the information, you may adjust it accordingly and start a new campaign.

Since data is an important part of marketing, we have data at our fingertips with the help of the right tools, we have data at our fingertips, so why not use it well. Using such tools is smart and necessary to get the right understanding of your audience and track the campaign's performance.

Before crafting the campaign, make sure to define clear performance goals at the beginning so that you always have an idea about the campaign's performance. Otherwise, your money could be used somewhere else better because if the campaign fails, it is a total waste of money if the campaign fails. So, track anything and everything to make the system work smoothly.

[3] Wide Targeting

New tools and technologies allow high targets. Identifying the core audience is easier than ever. With the luxury of data, and the information available on social platforms, brands can get a comprehensive idea of their audience. It provides you with demographic statistics such as age group, gender, and geographical areas where most of the customers come from, and targeting can be narrowed down to social media platforms for the promotion.

The first step of a successful marketing campaign is targeting the right audience and connecting with them. Marketing is just not the logical presentation of data, but the information about your products to the customers, why people should buy it, what all things your brand has to offer, and at the end, drive customers. You might need logic to sell, but it takes emotions to hook people that require more than logic.

So, always stay connected to your audience. With time, your business also needs to grow, so try out to get new customers with new platforms to stay profitable in this ever-changing world. The brands unwilling to adapt and grow will be left behind. The most successful companies do whatever they can to let their business achieve new trends and reach new heights. So, always be willing to adapt to changes in the trends.

In general, it is noticed that 80% of sales come from existing customers and 20% from new customers that buy for the very first time. If you fail to retarget your previous customers, it could be a downfall in your profits.

Selling to a new customer is quite more expensive than selling to an existing customer. So, don't forget to have a few marketing campaigns for your existing customer base. By doing this, you will attract existing customers and have a wider customer base.

[4] Not Writing Your Goals Down

When you make a plan, write it down, it sounds simple. But, surprisingly, many people are aware of their goals and strategies, but never formally document them, or write down some bullet points for their own understanding.

You might have a clear idea about your plans now, but what after two months, or six months? You won't remember much. Once you have started with your business goals, it is essential to have them on paper. There might be a chance that your Marketing Head might leave someday, will there be someone who would be able to pick just where he went?

Your marketing strategy should contain enough information that you can handle it to someone else and know what has to be done. Your target audience, marketing campaigns, planning, everything needs to be on paper.

Along with that, you need to be able to respond to changes in the market well and update your documents accordingly. With the updates in social behavior, plans, changes in the market, and changes with your business, you can constantly update your record, keep it handy whenever required. To manage these documents, cloud solutions can be used, so that it is easy to access any time.

[5] Failing to Keep Up With the Plan

When you are ready with the marketing plan, the next step is to implement it, right? Now, execution of the plan and everything is done.

If you follow the approach to craft the plan and then execute it, you make the most common mistakes. Marketing is not something that can be done and forgotten. It has to be analyzed constantly. Keep an eye on all your statistics across all the platforms and tools you are using.

Focus on KPI to know the impact on your business. If traffic is dropping, search for the root causes. If there is high traffic on certain pages, look what the difference is. Is it the content, audience, the platform, or something else?

When you see certain things not working as per plan, change them. And for the things that are working, clone those everywhere else and see the results. If something works, it doesn't mean that it cannot get any better. Keep looking for the best options. Don't get sloppy lazy just because things are going well. See for the areas of improvement.

And above everything, make sure to react to the events that are outside your control. Consider the sensitivity of every situation and make decisions. If you go wrong somewhere, the costs would be considerable regarding reputation and removing physical marketing materials.