Top 3 reasons you need a marketing plan

With the way business is run these days, it can seem hard or challenging to take the time to write up a marketing plan. Do you even need a marketing plan? Why even try? Because planning will free you up to create some really amazing, intentional work! When you have a plan you stop running around putting out fires and really see progress. 

Writing a marketing plan is still an important practice today, no matter how many TikToks or posts go viral that seemingly had nothing to do with planning. Here are three reasons why you NEED a marketing plan: 

1. A marketing plan helps you plan around holidays, vacations, sales and promotions. 

At the very least, a marketing plan should be used as an organizational tool to help you plan out your important sales promotions. Having a plan allows you to thoughtfully build ads, content, and partnerships so that your sales and promotions can be more successful and less of a scramble! 

Get a plan in place, then work backwards to schedule out posts, send emails, then make sure your inventory and shipping processes are all ready to go. 

2. A marketing plan helps you maximize your content. 

When you have a plan for content and marketing activities, you can repurpose your created content to really get the most mileage out of it. You don’t have to create new content each month. With a plan, you can have a queue of blog posts to revisit, tweak, and take snippets of copy from that can then become a whole week’s worth of social media posts. 

You can pull up the most loved content, or your evergreen content, and create an email series that highlights that and reshare it with your audience. Are you worried people will be bored, or afraid you’ll sound like a broken record? Nope. People actually have to see your message multiple times before they will take action on it. This is known in marketing as the “Rule of 7” and here’s how it works: a good rule of thumb is that an individual viewing the ad will have to see the message at least 5 times to even read it. At up to 10 times of viewing it, they will remember it, and up to 20 times of seeing it, they will convert – or act on it. So republishing a few content ideas (with tweaks to keep them fresh) is NOT going to sound boring, it’s actually the smart content marketing thing to do. 

3. A marketing plan helps you stay on track, make progress, and see your results. 

I like to use my marketing plan as a document like my calendar, but also a little like my diary, too. It’s my “north star” in marketing, and keeps me on track while I’m looking at all the “shiny things” day to day. I may get distracted by a cool trend on instagram, but looking at my plan and making sure that my marketing activities are aligned with my goals keeps me from going off course in terms of content and serving my audience. 

A marketing plan can also be a place to reference the response your efforts have gotten. You can use it as a place to mark down engagement numbers, metrics, or even sales. In fact, regularly looking at your marketing efforts and tracking your results will close the loop on your marketing plan and help you see what’s working and what to adjust. 

When you are creating your plan, use this list of our top 5 elements to include as a starting point. Ideally, you’ll customize your plan as time goes to what works for you and your business.  

Top 5 Things to Include in Your Marketing Plan: 

• Calendar of the next 6 months
• A place to brainstorm ideas
• A place to track your results 
• Linked docs (blogs, email outlines, link out to where content lives) 
• A place to specify not only the content but the visual content (photos, graphics) 

A marketing plan is one of the most important tools for your business – it can help you be more effective, more purposeful, and make a bigger impact with your audience.

Need help writing a plan? At DASH, that’s one of our specialties. Give us a call for help!