You’ve made the product or developed a great service, now you need to create a marketing plan. Your marketing plan defines the strategies that your organization will use to reach target customers, outperform competitors and position your brand. There are many ways to approach marketing your product or service, but they all share one thing in common— they need an implementation plan. Basically, it’s taking a marketing plan and executing it. That means securing the resources, creating a schedule for marketing activities, and so on.
Creating an implementation plan for your marketing campaigns is an important step in marketing planning because it ensures that everything goes as planned. That requires work, of course, and a lot of coordination between departments, which can be streamlined by project management software. Before we start learning about marketing implementation, let’s define what a marketing plan is.
What Is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan consists of all the strategies that a company will execute to reach its marketing goals over a period of time.
Marketing plans usually outline marketing activities on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. Some examples of marketing strategies that can be part of a marketing plan are online advertising, email marketing, content marketing, social media management, events, etc. Marketing plans vary greatly but they all share these basic elements:
Marketing goals: Define the goals that your marketing plan will achieve, and how those align with the strategic goals of your business.
Market research: Find out who your target customers and competitors are, as well as other characteristics of your market.
Target audience: Who are the buyer personas that you’re trying to reach with your marketing strategies?
Key performance indicators (KPI): Every marketing strategy needs key performance indicators you can use to measure its success. Marketing team: Assemble a marketing team to achieve your goals.
Marketing budget: Create a marketing budget to manage the resources and costs associated with each marketing activity.
Marketing strategies: Some marketing plans may require several strategies that are executed simultaneously.
Once you’ve created your marketing plan, it’s time for implementation. Our free marketing plan template is a great place to start with this process.
What Is Marketing Implementation?
Marketing implementation is the process of turning your marketing plan into a reality. To do so, you’ll need a marketing implementation plan. It details the steps and resources required to execute your marketing strategies. As with any project plan, a marketing implementation plan defines the objectives of the campaign and the requirements to fulfill them. You use it to assess the scope and outline the deliverables. Every task should have a due date, and you should assess risks and create plans to address them. Define team member roles and responsibilities, and develop resource management and communication plans.
Benefits of an Effective Marketing Implementation Plan
Marketing implementation is a key step in bringing anything to market. It lets you turn your marketing plan into a set of processes. Without a marketing implementation plan, the timeline is vague and work spirals out of control quickly.
It’s like throwing away money. Plus, marketing teams are more focused on their work when there’s an implementation plan. It helps them prioritize their work, so the most important work gets done on time. If all this sounds complicated, it is. Marketing projects involve many factors to manage and ensure they’re all accounted for. To keep track of all of them, you need to use project management software.
ProjectManager organizes your marketing implementation from planning to execution. Organize tasks and make assignments from the list view to connect teams and foster better collaboration. Try ProjectManager free today!