Five steps to designing a flexible, working marketing plan for 2022
It’s almost 2022. Do you have your marketing plan ready?
If not, we have put together a basic toolkit that will allow you to define your goals for 2022, who you are going to market to and how you are going to market to them. As an added bonus, we have thrown in a tool to help you develop your positioning as a brand or service.
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Not sure how to create your marketing plan for 2022? Below is a quick guide to developing a fail-proof approach to planning your marketing communications activities.
- Review 2021
What did you do well? Which tactics gave you the most bang for your buck? What didn’t work so well? Did you meet your goals or did you come up short?
It’s important to review what you’ve already tried in marketing. This way you can stop wasting time and money on campaigns that don’t work and funnel your resources to more effective channels.
- Align your activities to your business plan
One of the biggest issues we see with clients is their marketing plan doesn’t align to their business plan. What do we mean by this? Well, at its bare minimum, you should have a revenue goal as part of your business plan. Your marketing plan is going to help you figure out where the revenue is going to come from.
For example, your revenue for 2021 was $1MM and you had 100 contracts at $10,000 each. To secure those contracts, you had to generate 5,000 leads through $150,000 marketing spend. In order to generate $1.5MM, you then would need to generate 7,500 leads through $225,000 spend.
Knowing these numbers allows you to make decisions on channels and tactics.
- Know your audience
Marketing should revolve around your audience’s needs—especially now when those needs and how audiences engage in brands is evolving rapidly. In planning for 2022, take the opportunity to review your key audiences and do not forget your employees. They might be the most important audience you have.
Be sure to pay close attention to each persona’s customer journey. Where do most of your paying customers find you? Stick with the most effective channels so you can optimize your marketing tactics based on what works. It’s ok to try something new, but make sure you base it on research.
If you want more in-depth audience insights, you can always engage an agency to do paid interviews with your most loyal and former customers. This can give you an added dimension of certainty about who your audience is and how they behave.
- Set Goals
After reviewing your 2021 plan, learning more about your audience and conducting a business review, it’s time to set goals for 2022 marketing.
Instead of choosing a vague goal like “I want to bring in more customers,” set SMART goals. SMART goals are designed to help you be specific about what you want to achieve, by whom, by when, and what the expected impact will be. This will make it much easier to understand if your marketing team is actually successful.
- Outline Your Content and Tactics
Lastly, what marketing tactics will support your SMART goals? For example, if you need to see a 20% lift in brand awareness by February 2022, which tactics will get you there most efficiently? Need more leads from Facebook? How are you going to do that? Organic posts or paid content?
Only you can choose the tactics that will work for your brand.
As we saw with 2020 and 2021, your marketing plans can change overnight. It’s ok to update the plan as things change. If you follow these five steps, you’ll lay the groundwork for a solid 2022 marketing plan so you aren’t wasting time and resources trying to figure things out as you go.
