How to keep up your marketing momentum

Too often marketing is mistakenly viewed as ‘one of those jobs’ that can be done as and when time permits. You start every week absolutely committed to working on your marketing and somehow Friday keeps coming round and marketing has slipped to the bottom of the agenda – again.

The problem is, all it takes is for one of your competitors to be a bit more committed to their marketing, or worse, for a fresh new competitor to pop up with the energy and excitement of a child in a sweet shop and a fanfare announcing their arrival, and before you know it you’re losing ground and valuable market share.

So how can you keep up your marketing momentum?

It boils down to having five key things in place. There’s no getting around the fact that putting these five things in place takes time, energy and commitment, but I guarantee you that once they’re locked down, then marketing momentum and guilt free Fridays will be yours to enjoy!

So here they are - the five keys to guilt free Friday:

1. Have a detailed marketing plan

When it comes to marketing, the old adage ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’ has never been more applicable. With a detailed marketing plan you will know what your marketing focus, activities and timelines are. Ideally you should have a 12 month plan, but settle for nailing the next six months if that’s more achievable. Anything is better than nothing!

What your marketing plan includes will very much depend on your business. If you’re a start-up then you need to be considering competitor analysis, customer profiling, brand, website and SEO development. If you’re more established, then content development, campaigns, social media, advertising/sponsorship, PR, events and awards might be applicable. That’s assuming you’ve already done your customer profiling, competitor analysis etc.

2. Define your marketing goals/targets/KPIs

Once your marketing activities are mapped out, then you need to add some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to your plan. There’s no point squirreling away at your marketing if you don’t know what your goals are. Each activity needs to have a target. For example, how many visitors do you want to attract to your website each month? How many new enquiries or sales? How many downloads? How many newsletter subscribers? Etc. You need to know what your goals are and more importantly, how you’re going to measure them.

3. Define roles and responsibilities

If there are a number of people in your organisation, then it’s worth looking around to see if anyone can assist you. Is there a PA that could help with event organisation, or someone who can pen some blogs or case studies? Perhaps there’s someone in IT who is a secret social media aficionado? If the business will support it, then allocate responsibilities and share the marketing plan. Make sure everyone involved knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and when it needs to be done by.

If you’re a one-man-band juggling many business balls, then don’t despair – but do make sure you stick to the next point!

4. Dedicate time for marketing each week

I’ve got a client who dedicates his Friday mornings to marketing. It works brilliantly. He’s got his marketing plan and each Friday he knows what marketing activity he’s going to be working on. It might be writing a new blog and sending out a newsletter, or it might be nailing a couple of new case studies or knocking up an award entry. Having a set time dedicated to marketing each week will ensure your diary for that time remains empty and you can focus on the important task in hand.

5. Review results and assess the plan

At the end of each month you need to dedicate time to assessing the results of your marketing activities. If you’ve followed step 2 then you should know exactly where you’re going to collect the results - for example your Google Analytics account. Tracking progress on a spreadsheet will enable you to monitor the results of your various activities. Of course, your marketing plan needs to be flexible, and this is your chance to assess what’s working, what isn’t and what needs to be changed.

If you’ve got people in your team helping you, then you need to sit down with them and plan the next month’s marketing activities. Before you know it, you’ve got a monthly marketing meeting in the diary, and measured marketing activities are gaining momentum and traction.

Of course, it also helps to have a marketing champion like me to give you some direction and focus. If you’d like to find out how I might be able to help you, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.