The Marketing Blueprint

A Publication of DWTM

The Marketing Blueprint to Success

The Importance of Marketing Strategy

www.downwiththeman.io

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.  The importance of marketing Strategy

2.  Audit

3.  Goals

4.  Audiences

5.  Channels

6.  Action Plan

7.  Governance

8.  Budget

9.  Measurement


CHAPTER ONE

The Importance Of Marketing Strategy


Marketing Strategy You have heard it 1me and 1me again. “You need a marke1ng plan. Without a

marke1ng plan you are lost. Marke1ng plan this. Marke1ng plan that. Marke1ng

plan, marke1ng plan, marke1ng plan. Marke1ng plan.” Those people, the

“experts” who say that, are right. A few of those people actually tell you how to

do it. Others just spend 10-‐15 minutes or 1,000 to 3,000 words of your life

speaking on their high horse about the importance of a marke1ng plan. Well, this

eBook is going to spare you the dog-‐and-‐pony show. This eBook is going to cut

through the fluff and get right to it. The eBook will tell you, briefly, why you need

a marke1ng plan, and it will be from a different perspec1ve. You probably haven’t

heard it. It’s important, no fluff, just value. Then you will receive a very detailed

step-‐by-‐step guide to crea1ng an effec1ve marke1ng plan.

The biggest thing you need to know about a marke1ng plan is that it’s just that.

It’s a marke1ng plan. It’s a guide, a roadmap, a GPS system that has your end

des1na1on in mind. It gives you the guidance on how to get there based on the

path you have carved out for yourself. Other 1mes it’s created by your marke1ng

person, whether they are internal or external. Regardless of who created the plan,

there are direc1ons. That is wonderful, magnificent, stupendous, astounding, and

remarkable. Everyone needs direc1ons to get somewhere efficiently or you eat up

1me and resources stumbling to the finish line.

The biggest problem with marke1ng plans is that people spend all this 1me and

money on them, but then they store them in their computers, they stow in their

drawers, they use them as coasters, but they rarely use them for what they were

originally created for.


Marketing Strategy They will change as you go on, but no maVer how many 1mes you adjust and

make addi1ons or subtrac1ons, you need to keep reviewing the plan and use it.

Or all that 1me, money and effort will go to waste. It’s not just about how to use

them effec1vely but about why every business needs them. When you believe in

why you need a plan, the how comes naturally.

The number one reason that every business whether you are one person or a

200,000-‐person business is that a plan clears your mind for other important

ini1a1ves. That could be a number of things. It could be the ability to be crea1ve.

It could be that you need the space to remember your kid’s soccer game later

tonight. You could use the space in your brain to learn mandarin. Whatever the

reason, the less you have up in your head, the beVer.

It also helps when you have mul1ple people working on marke1ng. A plan is a

playbook or the Ten Commandments on how people need to market that

business, what they need to do, and what they are working toward.

There we go. In about 312 words I gave you some of the most straighYorward

pieces of advice you will need to know about being successful with a marke1ng

plan. The reason I know the importance is that I have worked with hundreds of

businesses who either never had a solid plan or rarely used the one they created.

It’s the same thing over and over again. They are winging their marke1ng efforts

wondering why the results are so shiVy. Every 1me I have worked with a company

like this and get them to create but, more importantly, really use a marke1ng

plan . . . the world changes for them.


Marketing Strategy The one thing you have to remember about marke1ng plans is . . . use them! They

understand what they are doing, when they are doing it, and how. In a sense it

almost automates the easy things in their efforts to free them and give them the

ability to focus more on the strategy and the bigger picture of the company. When

they do that and only then, their crea1ve abili1es are truly set free. You see new,

crea1ve ideas jump out of their heads and on to paper. It’s a beau1ful and

powerful thing. It really makes me genuinely happy to see people and businesses

get to that point. Especially because their success rate skyrockets. That’s why we

are sharing this informa1on with you. We can worry less about the businesses out

there and sleep beVer at night. Now, we can move on to the meat of this piece—

How to create a marke1ng plan. Here is a quick outline of the different sec1ons of

a marke1ng plan:

�Audit

�Goals

�Audiences

�Channels

�Ac1on Plan

�Governance

�Budget

�Measurement


CHAPTER TWO

Audit


Audit The first step to crea1ng a marke1ng plan is to evaluate your current efforts. You

need to audit yourself. If you have been a func1oning marke1ngolohic you have

been throwing a bunch of shit against a wall hoping something will s1ck and

having problems for a long 1me. In all of your 1me, you probably have tried

almost every hot trend out there at one point or another. What you have found is

that word of mouth works the best. Referrals, the people who use your services or

your products are the best piece of marke1ng you have ever had. That’s true, but

that’s not enough to con1nue to grow. In some circumstances it can be the

demise of the business. Trust me; we know. we have seen it happen 1me and

1me again. People con1nue to complain, “I’ve tried everything under the sun, but

my customers are my best form of marke1ng. The referrals are what keep me

afloat, but . . .” There’s always the “but.” “But, I want and need to grow my

business.” The reason for that is that they never had a solid plan that they

developed, worked on, executed, adjusted, and con1nued to execute. So, here’s

the long winded explana1on of all this: you need to take an inventory of what you

are currently doing. What are the results? And give some insight to how you use

those channels. For example, do you have a website? Do you have analy1cs set up

on it? Do you know how many people are coming to your site every month? How

much 1me do they spend on the site? What is the purpose of the site? Is it e-‐

commerce? Is it lead genera1on? Define the goal or goals of the site. Then

evaluate how people are accomplishing the goal of your site. What other channels

are you using? Social media? Which ones? How many followers or likes or

connec1ons do you have? What are you pos1ng? Are people engaging? What are

they engaging with? Get into the details.


Audit The more you know, the easier it will be to determine what channels you will

need to focus on when we get to that sec1on of the plan. The flip side to this is

that if you are just star1ng a business you will be star1ng from scratch. This

sec1on will not apply to you. Ader we outlined all the details of the current

marke1ng ac1vi1es or not, for the sake of the new business owner, we need to

move into the goals.


CHAPTER THREE

Goals


GOALS When you define your goals, ini1ally you need to define the major or macro goals

of your organiza1on. Every marke1ng goal needs to associate with a business goal

of the organiza1on. Is the company trying to increase the yearly revenue by a $1

million? If so, how much of that is going to be upselling customers or cross selling?

How much is that is going to be new revenue? How much of that do you project

will come from each service or product? Each business is going to be different.

However, they don’t call this a plan for nothing. You need to take some 1me to

really think about this. Each sec1on from the audit to the goals all the way to the

measurement are going to be extremely important in developing the other

sec1ons. Once you have the main marke1ng goal determined, and once you break

that goal down, you will use that informa1on later on in the channel sec1on of

the plan to determine the individual or micro goals for each channel. The micro

goals will lead you to the achieving the major goal of the plan. Keep the year in

mind while you are building out the goals and the en1re marke1ng plan. There is

no reason to go beyond. Think ahead to a year out and break it down from there.

Planning out seasonal dips or spikes for the year is important as well, if you have

that data. The other aspect of goals is to make them SMART. For anyone who

doesn’t know what SMART stands for, it is Specific, Measureable, AVainable,

Realis1c, and Tangible. You need to write that down, post it somewhere, maybe

taVoo it on the inside of your arm. Either way, remember it. You need to apply

that philosophy to every type of goal, macro and micro. Alright, we have the

macro goals defined with SMART methodology in mind. The next sec1on is the

Audiences


CHAPTER FOUR

AUDIENCES


AUDIENCES The Audiences sec1on is going to be the area where you define every possible

profile of a customer or a client for each service or product you provide. Details

are very important here because the way you crad each message needs to be

specific to that audience. Each audience is going to have different pain points. The

way you talk to a 24-‐year-‐old female is different than how you talk to a 56-‐year-‐

young male. You won’t use fluffy words with the male, and you won’t use macho

words with the female. So, list out all your services and products. Then list all the

different types of people or businesses that use each of your services. Be specific.

Include the loca1on that people buy from. Include the age of the profile you are

building. The gender. The pain points. What problem are you solving for them?

What happens prior to them needing your service or product that leads them to

needing your service? Think long and hard about all of these criteria. List them all

out. If you don’t know this, then you need to spend the 1me finding the

informa1on out. The best way is to ask people. Ask people who are poten1al

customers or current clients. Ask people who have used a similar service or

product of yours. See why they chose that product. How did they make their

decision? Market research is extremely important. It’s the difference between a

million-‐dollar business and a hundred-‐thousand-‐dollar business. With the internet

and social media there are plenty of ways to conduct that market research

without having to investment thousands of dollars into a market research

company. You have gathered the data. The profiles are built out. You understand

why and who uses each of your products or services. Since you have those profiles

constructed, it’s 1me to determine what channels you are going to use to reach

your goals.


CHAPTER FIVE

CHANNELS


CHANNELS Channels. You will need to pull out your audit and your audience sheets here to

be able to determine which channels will be best. One thing to keep in mind is

how big your organiza1on is. More specifically, how many people do you have

allocated to inves1ng 1me into the marke1ng efforts? Will you use contractors?

Will you hire agencies for certain channels? Keep all this in mind.

Based on your audit, what has been working and what has not been working?

Based on your audience profiles, where do those types of people spend 1me? A

few channels are going to be given.

A website. Every business in the world needs a website. Doesn’t mean it has to be

top of the line and have a 100-‐product ecommerce store or have sign-‐up forms up

the wazoo. It does need to be presentable. It does need to have a defined

purpose. It does need to provide informa1on. Most importantly, it does need to

have calls to ac1on.

SEO. The website needs to be searchable. It doesn’t mean you need to spend

thousands of dollars a month on making sure you are ranked first on every page

of every keyword. In fact, that is completely irrelevant anymore. Search has

become so personalized that it is much more strategic than tac1cal and for good

reason. Google needs to make sure that the search results are the best and most

relevant to their customers. Just like you need to provide a message and a service

or product that is relevant to your audiences. No maVer how much effort you

decide to put into this channel, you need to put in some because everyone

searches. They really do. It will only become more important. Where they search

is different story. That will change as the years go on. It’s actually changing as we

speak.


CHANNELS Content. Every s1nking business out there beVer be producing some sort of

valuable content to their audiences. If you are not, you will be led in the dust only

to aVempt to play catch up. The catch-‐up game is a very expensive and

some1mes a devasta1ng game to get into. Avoid that at all costs. How you do that

is take all that valuable informa1on you have accumulated over the years in your

exper1se and throw it out. Share it with the world. Your audience will thank you

later. You will thank me later. It’s necessary. It’s not hard. There are plenty of

ar1cles, books, courses, and consultants who can help you with crea1ng effec1ve,

valuable, and original content that keep your business thriving. Do it or go find a

company to work for because if you don’t you will be out of business very soon.

The rest of the channels are up to you. We do recommend including social media

into the mix because that is where Search is shiding to. If you are producing

content, you need an effec1ve way to share it with interested people. Social

media is a huge asset in that area of sharing. If you are a smaller organiza1on that

is doing a majority of the work yourself, do yourselves a favor:

1. Get training in the different marke1ng areas. Focus on one at a 1me. Don’t

overdo it. A big downfall for companies is that they never invest in their people to

stay on top of the current marke1ng channels. The more you know, the beVer you

are. Even if you hire a company to manage a channel or two, you s1ll need to

have that knowledge to be able to speak to them intelligently about the ac1vi1es

they are responsible for. If not, you bear the risk of being screwed. That I have

seen way to many 1mes. Invest the money to save yourself and the business some

costly mistakes.


CHANNELS 2. Keep the channels manageable. That means between 5 and 7 at first is very

doable. 5 is beVer. Once you master each area and each channel is becoming

successful you can begin to entertain the other channels out there.

The other channels are to include offline avenues like speaking engagements or

workshops or direct mail. There a lot of different marke1ng channels that will be

produc1ve for you. However, you need to keep your audience in mind. You need

to keep your budget in mind, and you need to keep in mind who is going to be

doing what. Your resources are very important in how complex and how many

channels you will and can use. When you set your sights on the right mixture of

channels for your business at the 1me, you will have to set individual goals for

each of those channels. How much traffic does your website need per month to

get X amount of lead forms? How many blog posts are you going to produce per

month, and how much traffic will they produce to the site? Ader you determine

what channels are going to be best for you to get in touch with your audience and

the goals that go along with those channels, it’s 1me to move on to the fun

part . . . the ac1on plan.


CHAPTER SIX

ACTION PLAN


ACTION PLAN The ac1on Jackson plan. The ac1on plan is where you determine what is going to

happen and when. How many blog posts are you going to produce weekly and/or

monthly? How are you going to promote them? What call to ac1ons will be 1ed

with the posts? What topics will they be about? When will they be posted? When

will the emails go out? What will those topics be about? How many speaking

engagements are you going to shoot for per month? What goes into producing a

speaking engagement? What social media channels will do what? Will you use

LinkedIn for lead genera1on? Is TwiVer going to be strictly for PR purposes? If so,

what sort of ac1vi1es are you going to do on the channel? If you have decided

through your past research and analysis that it makes sense to redo your website,

then what is the plan there? Crea1ng calendars are very helpful here. Content

calendars. Social media calendars. Event calendars. A general calendar. It’s all

useful. There is a lot to lay out here, but it is necessary. Very necessary. It leaves

no ques1ons unanswered. That is important to be a fully func1onal marke1ng

engine. Plus, it complements the next sec1on, which is the governance.


CHAPTER SEVEN

GOVERNANCE


GOVERNANCE Governance. Who is going to do what? This is where you outline each individual

or group who is responsible for what and how the process works. Areas to

describe include:

� Who is responsible for the content calendar?

� Who is responsible in crea1ng content?

� Who edits that content?

� Who posts the content?

� Who posts the content to the social media area?

� When someone interacts on TwiVer or Facebook who is the person or people

who respond?

� Who creates the content for the email?

� Who sends out the emails?

� Who responds to the emails? And to what ques1ons?

� Who is responsible for the SEO efforts?

� Who does the keyword research?

� Who creates the meta 1tles and descrip1ons?

The list goes on and on. Spell everything out. Don’t leave any stone unturned.

That way there is no “he said, she said.” Everyone’s role is defined. That person or

those people understand what they need to do and what they are working

towards. The less you leave for ques1oning the beVer the organiza1on will be as a

whole. I have seen major meltdowns and failures from companies that refuse to

define roles. The employees are confused. They don’t know what they need to do.

And a lot of efforts are never completed. That in turn puts a major wrench in the

marke1ng plan. You don’t want that or need it.


GOVERNANCE The combina1on of the ac1on plan and governance will create a marke1ng

opera1ons process. Crea1ng processes are impera1ve to the con1nued success of

your efforts. It will take 1me upfront; however if there is turnover internally or

change in roles, there will be less 1me training people in the long run. As soon as

the opera1ons are determined, you will need to set a budget.


CHAPTER EIGHT

BUDGET


BUDGET Budget. A budget is very important. For some organiza1ons they never commit to

a budget, so it’s like shoo1ng from the hip. You might hit something if you are

lucky, but you are beVer off taking your 1me, aiming, and firing. A budget allows

you to do that. The budget will allow you use a channel or not use a channel. Like

every other sec1on in the marke1ng plan, details, details, and more details. Leave

no ques1ons unanswered. What is your budget for the new website? Do you have

money to allocate to buying an email list, or is it all organic? Are you inves1ng in

Google AdWords? Are you inves1ng in social ads? Are you hiring a company for

SEO? Are you hiring a company for social media management? Are you inves1ng

in social media management sodware? How much does the training investment

cost? All the numbers need to add up. Depending on what stage your business is

in will dictate the budget you allocate towards marke1ng. If you are in growth

mode, you will need to invest in more than a business that is just trying to sustain

itself. Typically, the best prac1ce for a marke1ng budget is between 5-‐15% of the

annual sales. That, again, depends on what stage the business is in. Growth will be

on the higher end, and sustaining will be on the lower. It’s ok not to have money

to invest. You might be what they call bootstrapping. However, 1me is s1ll money.

You need to factor 1me into this, but don’t get caught up in 1me. The more effort

you put into it, the more you will get out of it. No maVer where you stand, you

need to figure out the numbers and commit to them. That brings us to the last

and final area of the marke1ng plan, the measurement sec1on.


CHAPTER NINE

MEASUREMENT


MEASUREMENT Measurement. Measurement is measuring towards success. Success is

accomplishing the goals you set out for in the beginning of this plan.

Measurement is an area that many fall short on. It is very, very, very important to

set goals; however if you are not measuring against those goals, then how will you

ever know if you are achieving success? To ensure you are hirng your numbers

you need the help of certain tools. The two main tools for measuring marke1ng

success are:

Google Analy1cs

Social Media Analy1cs – if you are using social media

Google Analy1cs is a must. It’s free. It’s powerful. And it opens your eyes to so

many possibili1es. You just need to know how to read the data, ask ques1ons,

turn data into insights, and insights into to ac1ons. That process is not easy but

extremely necessary to be successful with the marke1ng efforts. GA will allow you

to measure the success of any channel, offline or online to a certain extent. If you

are not selling anything online, than from a revenue standpoint you will need to

use a CRM or customer rela1onship manager to keep up with the actual sales and

conversions. Within GA there is so much you can measure. The biggest focus is

the conversion points. How are they gerng to your site, and when do they

convert? Google Analy1cs is focused on the ROI.

On the other hand, if you are using social media, and you really should be, then

you want to measure engagement. How many people are liking your posts? Who

is commen1ng? What type of posts are they commen1ng on? Are your posts

being shared? If so, which ones?


MEASUREMENT Based on the results and especially because a good majority of your posts will be

content bringing people back to your site, you will need to see what content

people like and don’t like. That will give you a beVer idea of how to enhance the

engagement with your par1cular audience. Give them the content they want.

Based on the insights the data produces for you, you will be able to make

adjustments accordingly. Those changes will be impera1ve to the op1miza1on of

your marke1ng efforts.

There you go. As we so bluntly explained in the beginning, this is not easy. A

marke1ng plan is not a cake walk. It takes 1me and a lot of effort to plan out how

you are going to get to your goals. However, with the right plan, you will be

successful. Keep in mind that plans change and to reach your des1na1on you

must consistently review the road map. Without a review, you will get lost. When

you refuse to ask for direc1ons, especially us males, you get discouraged. The

discouragement will lead to rever1ng back to the old ways of throwing shit

against the wall. We all know how that turns out. Follow the steps. You will reach

those stars.


SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWS LETTER

SIGN UP


The Marketing Blueprint

Documents

Transcript of The Marketing Blueprint