With the new financial quarter rolling in, everyone is frantically trying to close out last minute sales and fill any budget gaps. Hopefully you’ve been plotting your spend for 2013 too! If you haven’t already done so, then now’s the time to get started.
This post should give you a quick overview of how to work out your high level marketing plan and correspondingly your high level marketing budget.
Your marketing budget should be based on your ideal marketing plan (the ideal plan is what you’d do if you had unlimited funds and resources).
So what would you spend all your time on? Social media? Blogging? TV adverts? Any strategy you create needs to consider your customers at it’s core. There’s no point in being present in magazines – if your customers won’t read them.
- Identify customer persona’s
- Prospective Mediums
- PR
- Social Media
- Email (EDMs)
- Co-branding
- Partnerships
- Industry Magazines / Journals
- Radio/TV
- Industry Events
- SEO/SEM
- Next: Expanding on your mediums
- Next: Creating timelines
- Next: Measuring & Fine Tuning
Jot down a few notes about your ideal buyers, these persona’s are iconic and ideal. For example, if you sell Japanese food one of your ideal target markets might be: expat Japanese employees, they work for Japanese companies, have high disposable incomes, speak limited English, are likely inducted via a moving agency that the company is associated with or the Japanese embassy. (Downloadable sample profile coming soon)
Imagine you’re one of your ideal buyers, and think about what they’d like to see, what message they’d like to respond to, and what excites them. Then go and ask them to validate your thoughts!
Now that you know who your audience is you can start working out what mediums to use to reach them. Here’s a few ideas you can use to build your list of prospective mediums:
In the next post I’ll run through a few ways of expanding on the mediums, how to build a workable timeline and finally how to measure the peformance of your strategy & campaigns.