Marketing gets a bad rap. Really! What other business disciplines can lay claim to clichés such as spray and pray, throw enough mud at the wall and see what sticks? For small business owners, these clichés and fallacies detract from what should be a pillar of the company’s past, present and future. Marketing is a journey, not a periodic test. It is a process (read our previous blog post on committing to the process), not an intermittent attempt, wild guess, nor –pardon the cliché – is it a shot in the dark. Just as finances, operations, management and personnel require long-term planning, so too does marketing. A strategy tailored to building credibility, promoting products and services and connecting with target audiences is a dominant cell of a business’ make-up and marketing DNA.
In a Social Media Explorer post, Is Your Digital Strategy Designed to Fail or Designed to Deliver, author Nichole Kelly provides a long-term planning framework for corporate marketing teams, which small business owners and marketers will find of value too. Here are a few highlights:
To be successful, we need to put some real time and energy into strategic planning. At a minimum the plan should take 6-8 weeks, which allows time for research, feedback and in-depth brainstorming.
Teams should be building and modifying plans that focus on the next 36 months. Anything beyond that and the plan will include a lot of vapor. This allows the company to look at what they are building towards and creates room for more proactive initiatives. Further, the team can look and see where they are in achieving the goals for the 12-month plan and whether they are on track for future plans. …We wouldn’t build a business plan to focus on only the next 12 months and our marketing plans shouldn’t be any different.
If strategic plans focus on a technology solution or a specific channel, you know there is a problem. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the project will be implemented on Twitter or Facebook. What matters is that you are trying to engage your customers in social platforms. Those platforms may change before the plan is implemented and the plan needs to include room for modifications based on current trends. Tell your teams to stop focusing on the channels and start focusing on the objective. …A strategic plan must be a living, breathing document.
Don’t be scared to try something new. Instead, put parameters around how innovative ideas will be tested quickly and with a minimal investment.
Is long-term planning in your small business marketing DNA? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.
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