3 Ways to Jumpstart your Marketing Action Plan

Was your New Year’s resolution to focus on your marketing action plan? If so, it might be frustrating if you haven’t yet seen any results from your efforts. While it’s true marketing does take time to produce the results for which you’re aiming, there are certain tactics you can do to jumpstart your marketing action plan.

Re-Evaluate the Strategy of your Marketing Action Plan

Before you do anything, you should examine what you’re already doing. It’s important to ensure all of your marketing messaging is consistent and points back to your goals. Look for any gaps where your marketing efforts might be getting lost or just don’t quite make sense. Does your messaging appeal to your personas and revolve around your unique selling proposition (USP)? If you have no idea what those things are, that’s your first step. If you need help developing a complete marketing action plan, use this marketing plan template to get started. Our FREE persona toolkit is also helpful for defining your specific target audience. These strategies will set you up with a firm foundation from which you can complete campaigns.

Download the 22 Website Hacks To Drive Traffic, Leads & Sales Free eBook

Create One Amazing Offer

Using your USPs, ideal personas, and goals, create an offer that knocks it out of the park. This is the quickest way to build a marketing list database. An offer is something you provide for free that your customers will find valuable enough to give you some basic information (email, name, phone number, etc.) to learn more. It can either be something they download after filling out a form on your website. Or, if you have a physical storefront, it can be something to get people in the door. Let’s say you’re a financial planning service. Here are a few examples of different offers a financial planning service could use:

• A coupon code or discount on your goods and services: You could provide a coupon for a free initial consultation to get people to make an appointment.
• Write a guide that solves one of your persona’s problem: Write a helpful guide for how to save for retirement or putting kids through college. A guide is a short explanation of a single issue.
• Write an eBook: An eBook is a few steps above a guide. It’s a comprehensive guide that explains everything from A to Z. A specific example would be “Investment Strategies for Every Stage in your Life”.

If you don’t have the time or resources to put together a big offer, just make sure it’s valuable and will get people to either fill out a form or come to the physical business.

Put Some Dollars into Online Advertising

Make the most of that great offer by making sure people see it. The quickest way to get your offer in front of people is to take advantage of buying ads on Google. The great thing about buying ads on Google is that you can be very specific - narrowing down who sees your advertisement. You control the demographics and how much you spend. Create an ad that specifically promotes your offer and then get started. Google will actually guide you through the whole process, ensuring you have appropriate keywords, are spending exactly what you want to spend, and targeting exactly who you want to target.

There isn’t one specific formula for a marketing action plan. The important thing is that you start with a foundation that clearly exudes your goals and appeals to your personas. From there, keep trying tactics. You’ll need to continue to try different tactics until you find one that works for you and your business.

For more ideas to jumpstart your marketing action plan, download 22 Website Hacks to Drive Traffic, Leads, and Sales.