Creating Your Marketing Action Plan (Action Wednesday/Process)

Hello, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing.  Today is Action Wednesday and we’re going to take a look at creating a marketing action plan, or, something I refer to as a MAP.

The marketing action plan is a valuable tool to identify the important marketing action items for your company.  What I love about a MAP is that it centralizes all of these items in one place.  Then you are able to prioritize which items you want to do first and which will be completed at a later date.

A documented marketing action plan enables you to ensure accountability by assigning responsibility as to who owns accomplishing each action item.  Lastly, the MAP provides flexibility.  Circumstances may change in the market place or in your company; the market action plan allows you to be responsive to an ever evolving environment.

Let’s take a look at the elements of a good marketing action plan.  I use project management software, such as FastTrack, to maintain my MAP and break tasks down into three categories: short term, intermediate and long term.

Working with key members of your organization, first create a column for tasks and describe each task is in as much detail as required.  Next, include a column for responsible party. This is the individual in your organization who is the champion of the task and owns its timely completion.  Ensure start and finish dates are determined for each item.  Include budget or cost where applicable so you know the amount of resources to allocate toward the task.

When the marketing action plan is complete, share it with the appropriate individuals in your organization and review it regularly to establish progress.  When your team members have input into developing the marketing action plan and have committed to a timeline for task completion, hold responsible individuals accountable for missed targets.  In my opinion, that should to be done more in small organizations.  When people know they are going to be held responsible they are going to get things done.

Your task for today is to do is build your marketing action plan.  The very first task should be marketing every single day with Once a Day Marketing.

That concludes Action Wednesday.  Be sure to join us tomorrow for Recon Thursday.  To discuss an online or face to face service engagement and enhance the marketing and branding for your organization, contact James Glover: (505) 501-1330 or onceadaymarketing@gmail.com.  I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing and we’ll see you next time.