Marketing Strategy

3 Ways Businesses Are Changing Their Marketing Due To COVID-19

September 8, 2020 by Michael Sanders Leave a Comment

Everyone has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but we know that many small and medium sized businesses are feeling particularly vulnerable right now. Brick-and-mortar retailers are looking for new ways to sell amidst a number of physical challenges; doctor’s offices are looking to assuage doubts about in-person visits; and online businesses want to attract new customers.

Whatever your situation, a half-year of varied customer responses to COVID-19 have given us some insights into the marketing trends that are working and what to expect in 2020 — and beyond. While we all know consumers have shifted more online, businesses need to structure their marketing teams to best tap into that traffic, communicate more effectively, and ensure that social media gets increased attention.

Marketing Goes Digital

The most obvious marketing response prompted by COVID-19 has been the acceleration of digital. Stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, and remote work & school have changed the way consumers shop and interact. Naturally, businesses are shifting how they attract new clients and retain long-time ones. Deloitte outlines four marketing keys for organizations to make the shift a smooth transition:

Keep Your Team Connected – Ensure your team has the resources needed to effectively communicate and coordinate with each other and customers
Engage Customers with Unified Empathy – Listen to your customer and ensure the interactions they are having with your brand are consistent across channels
Personalize Digital Experiences – Now is the time shift resources into digital techniques such as remarketing ads to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time
Optimize Marketing Resources – Now more than ever, you need analytics experts in your corner to ensure you’re leveraging the wealth of information at your fingertips

Especially when engaging with potential clients, you need to create personalized journeys across the channels and in the settings that they are now using. For example, in recent months, we have seen a sharp reversal in the trend away from mobile devices as at-home users move back to desktop. Without a careful adjustment to your SEO strategy, your website might have the wrong focus, leading to lost customers. You also need to carefully consider how your customers can and will interact with your business. As customers expect a seamless experience, your service channels must deliver a consistent message to maintain loyalty.

Communicate Availability

According to McKinsey, the availability of products and services is the number one reason customers are switching their brand allegiance. For marketers, this means a number of things. The most obvious (if most difficult) tactic is to increase the days of inventory on-hand of products or the availability of time slots for services. With more people working from home and many kids learning remotely, some physicians and doctors offices with whom we work have reconsidered staffing toward more daytime slots and fewer night and weekend hours.

But what if the overseas lead time for your products precludes increasing stock levels? This is where timely communication is paramount. Depending on industry, we’ve seen returning traffic increases of up to 1200% in the months following the COVID-19 pandemic, as users return again and again to a website. For high-volume items, consider placing a banner on your cite to indicate when the product will be in-stock. If you aren’t collecting customer emails, now is the perfect time to create a subscriber list so that you can be proactive with notifying customers of availability.

Social Holds The Key To 2021

Organizations should be prepared to dedicate more resources to social media marketing in 2020 and beyond. Social media budgets accounted for almost one-quarter of total US marketing budgets this summer, up from 13% this winter. During the pandemic, marketers are increasingly making customer retention a priority. Presented with a list of 5 objectives and asked to choose their primary one, more than twice as many marketing leaders pointed to customer retention (32.6%) as acquisition (14%).

And the primary method businesses are using to engage and retain is social media. Your customers are looking for ways to interact with others in a social-distanced world; to connect with others and even to be distracted from everything that’s going on. Social media is the perfect platform for brands to engage with customers in this way and create opportunities for now and into the future. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn can help you start and maintain meaningful conversations with your most important assets.

Toward Marketing In 2021

Being prepared for the post-COVID world means setting up your marketing and customer service teams for success, communicating more effectively, and ensuring that you’re having good conversations with your clients and leads. Stop wasting valuable resources on pre-pandemic tactics — re-allocate your marketing spend to attract and engage the right customers, in the right place, at the right time. If you still have questions, contact DaBrian Marketing Group today.

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How to Transition Marketing Staff and Hand Over the Reins

August 19, 2020 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

In the COVID-19 world, we’re all just trying to survive. That includes navigating remote work, medical leave, layoffs, and co-workers leaving their existing jobs for opportunities that are better for their families. Keeping all of it organized and everyone on the same page is more important than ever. That’s why we’ve put together a marketing checklist of things that businesses should do while in the transition to better position their employees and marketing departments for success.

Ensure You Know What Marketing Projects are In Progress

There is always work to be done so make sure that you know what projects are in progress so you can plan accordingly and assign responsibilities to existing employees or a new hire. Look to understand the role, deadlines, and the employee’s involvement in all projects. I recommend that you gather a list of projects, the employees, the deadlines, and specific responsibilities all in writing so you have a reference document. Depending on the complexity, consider project management software that includes a marketing project template, such as Asana.

Obtain Marketing Plans, Strategies, Goals & Objectives

Collect all existing versions of marketing plans, strategies, goals, and objectives for your existing employees. These documents should have insights that will help the next employee or marketing agency hit the ground running! Find out how you are tracking progress against annual and quarterly goals and objectives. This should save you time, money, and the effort of creating marketing plans or strategy from start to finish. New to marketing strategy? Start by getting your digital marketing priorities in order.

Get Key Contact Information for Marketing, Sales, and IT

Collect the contact information of key players in marketing, sales, and IT. This list of key contacts should include internal and external stakeholders. These contacts will be able to provide historical information and insight into existing marketing projects and marketing plans. Make sure key information is shared with your team.

Gather all of the information about the marketing department so that the next person has an idea of how things work. For example, you should have organizational charts, product/service information, process guides, manuals, etc. These documents will provide your people with a sense of direction, knowledge of processes, and points of contact that will make it easier to get work done.

Examine Marketing Vendor & Partnership Agreements

In most cases, you will have multiple vendors or partners to help with different aspects of your marketing. For example, who do you use for print materials, hosting, and digital marketing solutions? It’s also important to understand what you own versus what you rent. Some web design agencies will say that you own your website but you cannot move it to another web host or agency. Considering company downsizing and the amount of remote work currently being done, it’s key that you examine your agreements to ensure you’re still getting the services that you were promised. Acquire all agreements and make sure you understand the scope of work.

Do not hesitate to contact these vendors and providers to assure yourself of these services and promises. In the post-COVID world, it is imperative to be sure you are receiving what you are paying for. Six months into this new environment, your business partners, by this time, should have their feet on the ground and operating efficiently and effectively to serve you. If not, perhaps reexamine your partnership.

Inventory Your Marketing Tools

Depending on the complexity of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, it could cost your business anywhere between $12 to $300 per month for each user. Build a list of all of your marketing and sales tools. This list of marketing tools will give you information to show you where you are overspending or have redundant tools. Understanding what tools you have will help you to transition duties to another employee and obtain support to get the most out of your tools. In my experience, it would be wise to start your marketing and sales list with your CRM, email marketing platform, social media publishing tool, etc. because these are commonly used among businesses no matter the industry.

Know What Reports the Employee is Accountable For

The marketing department usually has daily, weekly, and monthly reporting which funnel into executive reporting. Request an example of these reports for your reference. Our clients have had success in having discussions about who is responsible, what and where are the data sources, what is the process, and who needs to receive these reports and by what date.

Schedule an Exit Interview & Revisit the Job Description

If an employee is leaving the marketing department voluntarily, you need to gain insight into why. According to Harvard Business Review, exit interviews are key to long-term business success as they help you to keep a pulse on functional units, improve processes, and increase retention. The employee’s feedback can help you to improve the job description for future candidates or uncover issues that need to be addressed. It will also help you in the decision-making process when determining if you will choose your internal employees or outsource some of your marketing efforts.

Create an Onboarding Plan for Staff

Develop an onboarding plan for new employees, transitions in responsibilities for staff, or your new marketing partners. This plan should include obtaining access to marketing tools and internal resources, documentation, training materials, and meetings to confirm or validate their learning as well as capabilities. You’ll see better results by scheduling recurring meetings to measure progress for the first 90 days and throughout the year.

Moving On From Marketing Staff or Ad Agency

According to Spencer Stuart’s 16th annual CMO Tenure Study, the average tenure for Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) decreased from 43 months to 41 months in 2018. You have to weigh the pros and cons of internal staff versus a strategic marketing partner. Going through these steps that we’ve outlined here, give you the information to change processes and procedures, identify talent, and position your business for success with internal, external, or a combination of all marketing resources.

Like what you’ve read? Have we inspired you and given you a springboard for moving your marketing department and business into the post-COVID business arena? Access more valuable information regularly by subscribing to our blog and following us on social media.

5 Signs You’re Attracting The Wrong Customers — And How To Fix It

July 15, 2020 by Michael Sanders Leave a Comment

Understanding your ideal customer(s) is paramount to your digital marketing success and the growth of your business. Many organizations attract the wrong type of website traffic, leads, and clients. Narrowing your focus and refining your buyer personas will help you stop wasting valuable resources on the wrong types of people and enable you to bring in more ideal customers for your business.

One key factor is to ensure you are targeting not your current customers, but the customers that will drive your business forward. Chances are, you are attracting more potential clients who will not be profitable or engaged. In this article, we examine five signs that your business is attracting the wrong customers — and how to fix the underlying issues so that you bring on more of the clients your business wants in 2020.

1. You Still Haven’t Defined Your Customers

If you still haven’t defined your current and ideal customers and shared that knowledge among your employees, you’re firing blind. The most critical attribute to discover about your customers is their buying intent. Knowing why the people who buy your goods and services chose your product or service is paramount to understanding both what is driving the marketplace and your key differentiator within it.

2. You Haven’t Defined Yourself

If you truly believe in something, someone will probably disagree with you and get upset. And that’s ok. If you aren’t upsetting anyone, it’s likely that your brand is so vanilla that it doesn’t mean much of anything, to anyone. It’s impossible to gain the vocal champions you need among clients to spread the word about your business if you don’t stand for anything. Your goal should be to have a clear vision and mission statement and attract clients that share your values. Check out our blog to learn how to find your brand voice.

3. You Compete Primarily On Price

There are only a few valid ways to compete — and if you are Walmart, go ahead and compete on price. Are you Walmart? I didn’t think so. If you don’t have the lowest cost structure and compete on price, eventually you’ll go out of business. That’s just how numbers work. Stop chasing low value clients who prompt you to do 80% of the work but 20% of the profits. The ones worth your while aren’t the ones who talk about price until you’ve established your value. And once you’ve established your value, you have the flexibility to charge more. It’s really that simple.

4. You Don’t Do Enough Discovery During Sales & On-Boarding

Before your marketing team can effectively do anything, they need to intimately understand the pain points and goals of your new clients. If your customer service, project management, and/or salespeople don’t have the right tools or exert enough effort to have a firm grasp on the motivations of new customers, it will be next-to-impossible for your marketing team to consistently deliver value-driven solutions.

5. You Have A Disorganized Sales & Marketing Process

If your company doesn’t continue to put energy into re-establishing your brand, over and over again, you will find that your brand value erodes over time. A disorganized brand will attract disorganized clients, and that spells death for your business. You want a firm brand (again, it’s ok to alienate some folks) that evokes a belief in everyone on your team — and by extension, it will evoke a belief in the people with whom you want to work.

Fixing The Issue

Now that we’ve established the “wrong” customers, how do you go about attracting the right customers? Everything boils down to a strategy that aligns your brand, profit model, and target buyer persona with each other. Try these three fixes for starters:

Create Your Target Persona

Note: the operative word here is “target”. That means you need to stop being all things to all people. You have to drill down and discern what is the core audience your business aims to serve. It may be a role, an industry, or a service — it might even be some combination of all three. Either way, focus on a narrow niche and get to know it better than anyone else in your market. That will lend credibility to your offering and allow you to earn a better profit for your services (see below). Here is a previous article to help get you started on writing to target personas.

Create Your Profit Model

When businesses attract the wrong types of customers, it’s often due to a bad pricing strategy. If you price too low, you’re going to attract bargain shoppers who bleed your time and resources. We are not advocating that you overcharge: we’re just saying you should reframe your business and brand story so that it focuses on the value that you can bring to customers. Sell them on your unique ability to solve their problem and you’ll be surprised what they’re willing to pay.

Create The Right Story

Your brand narrative acts as a beacon to attract and retain the right (or wrong) types of customers. Creating the right story typically involves the following elements:

Distill your core values and your brand purpose
Create a mission statement if you don’t have one
Dig deep to understand why you started the business in the first place
Find elements that make your brand unique

When telling your story, try and visualize the ideal customers. Craft your story to appeal to them. Introduce story elements that would filter out customers that are wrong for your business. For this, you need to go back to the buyer persona creation step.

Wrapping it Up

Being prepared for the post-COVID world means knowing whether you are attracting the right — or the wrong — customers, and why. Understanding where you’re going wrong from among the five common errors is a start. From there, narrowing your focus and refining your buyer personas will help you stop wasting valuable resources on the wrong types of people and enable you to bring in more ideal customers for your business. If you still have questions, contact DaBrian Marketing Group Today.

5 Steps To Find The Right Digital Marketing Agency

February 21, 2020 by Michael Sanders Leave a Comment

A great digital marketing agency can increase traffic to your website, leads to your sales reps, and revenues for your business. For example, an agency with expertise in running paid ad campaigns can refine your Google Ads targeting so that your business earns $2 in revenue for every $1 spent. But how do you know when a digital marketing agency is the right fit to work with you and your team? Here are five steps to find the right one.

1. Check Out The Agency’s Digital Marketing Assets

A good agency should practice what they preach. Are you interested in updating your stale website and hiring someone for ongoing SEO management? Search for and review the agency’s own website. If they are using best-practices, the site should rank high on the first page of Google results. Their website should be user-friendly, current, and function smoothly on mobile devices. If you are hiring them for inbound marketing, do they employ a strong inbound marketing strategy, themselves? The site should possess a simple navigation structure, feature an active and relevant blog series, and contain professionally written service pages that prompt clear calls-to-action from users.

2. Research Their Marketing Team

I am going to let you in on a dirty industry secret: most local marketing agencies now outsource over 40% of their client work. Every business hires specialists or offloads work during busy periods. After all, that is probably why you are researching marketing agencies right now, yourself. But are you really paying an agency $100-an-hour just to have them turn around and have a freelancer who doesn’t know your business, do it for $5? I didn’t think so.

The digital marketing agency should have a team page that is easy to find and outlines each individual’s competencies. Investigating a company for Google Ads that doesn’t list a paid search consultant on-staff? That’s a red flag that some of the info you convey to the agency will get lost-in-translation by the time it gets to their third-party partner. That will impact the effectiveness of your ads and how those ads align with the branding and messaging of all of your other marketing collateral. Work with a local agency with real people that intimately know your industry and your business.

3. Investigate the Agency’s Tools and Credentials

That digital marketing team should display diverse talents and deep areas of expertise. They should use industry-leading tools and make it easy for you to validate that they have experience using them. If their website doesn’t display their credentials, ask to see them! Here are a few leading platforms to familiarize yourself with prior to beginning your agency search:

Website Performance: Google Analytics
Inbound Marketing: Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot
Email Marketing: Hubspot, Mailchimp
Social Media: Hootsuite, Sproutsocial
SEO: SEMrush, Moz
Paid Search: WordStream, Optmyzr

Agencies that are willing to pay for and learn how to use the best industry tools will usually deliver the best marketing results for your business. They will stay up-to-date on platform capabilities via ongoing training — so you don’t have to.

4. Determine If Their Price Delivers a Positive Marketing ROI

You like their work and their team — now what? It’s time to determine if the value they can deliver will be worth the cost. According to a recent HubSpot survey, the average digital marketing contract can set a small business back anywhere from $500 to $10,000 (or more) per month, depending on how many services are required and the project scope. For most small businesses, that is a huge commitment.

That means whatever agency you work with should have a plan to help you make this value determination. The best way to do this is by tracking all of the traffic, leads, and conversions they generate. If they don’t have a plan for this, don’t sign the contract! Without one, you’ll have no way to know if all of the money you’re spending is worth it.

Your agency should be able to look at your current state and determine how much they can increase your brand awareness, prospects, and/or sales. From there, you should agree upon a unique value for each metric so that you can determine the ROI, or return-on-investment. You should calculate this number overall and for each service channel, individually. This will allow your budget dollars to be more effectively allocated toward higher-performing channels down the road. This process is as much an art as a science, but at the end of the day, the exercise will give you a clue into how wisely you will be spending your marketing dollars.

5. To Find The Right Marketing Agency Ensure Your Work Cultures Align

The final step is often overlooked in the agency search process. Your digital marketing agency will be working closely with your team for a long time (hopefully) so it is critical that their work culture aligns with yours. We have clients that want their hands held through every step of the process. We also have others that just want the bottom line at the end of the month. Neither is right or wrong, but your agency should be able to meet your expectations — not the other way around!

Check out some of their clients. Are any in your industry? As the first digital marketing agency in Reading, PA, we have the experience to recognize that how we work with our financial services clients needs to be very different than how we work with our clients in manufacturing or healthcare. Do your homework, ask around, and make sure the values at the prospective digital marketing agency reflect your own values. And if after all of that you still have questions, we are always here to chat!

Schedule a meeting to talk about how we can be the best digital marketing agency for you.

What Are Your Digital Marketing Priorities for 2020?

November 21, 2019 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

What are the key digital marketing trends for 2020 that your business needs to consider to generate more traffic, leads, and revenue? What should be a priority in your digital marketing strategy? Here are a few digital marketing trends that suggest where savvy managers should invest their time and resources next year:

Capture the Zero Position in Google Search to Get Found
Content Marketing, Creation, and Distribution like a Rockstar
Customer Retention with Marketing Data & Segmentation to save money
Use Artificial Intelligence with Digital Marketing for efficiency

Now, let’s dive a little deeper into what we mean and why you should care.

Optimizing for Zero Position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

The zero position refers to the first Google search engine results that appear above the organic search (SEO) listings. It’s sometimes called a featured snippet, rank zero, or P0. By optimizing for the zero position on the search engine results page (SERP), you can steal relevant traffic from your competition and appear above them in the top SEO results.

It sounds really easy, right? Not really, the content you create should be part of a bigger content marketing strategy. You’ll need to consider the intent, keywords, difficult to rank, search volume and customer experience while providing content that dominates the zero position. The most common types are content are:

Answers to Questions (Who, What, When, Where, and Why)
How-tos or instructions
Definitions
Comparisons
Price/Cost Breakdowns
Best of Lists
Frequently Asked Questions

Don’t forget to add a call to action to the content.

Changing of Content Marketing, Creation, and Distribution

Content Marketing will continue to evolve in 2020. User and search intent will drive content creation and development with data being collected to provide better results through machine learning or artificial intelligence. Customers want to receive content tailored to their interests and needs. Your competition is going to focus more on catering to voice searches via mobile and smart speaker devices.

The creation of content should be in different formats to accommodate the user’s intent, personalization, voice search, and to increase your chances to appear in the featured snippets. Use the content that is delivering results and distribute it across platforms in a way that is helpful to your audience.

Improving Customer Retentions with Data & Segmentation

It takes less money to keep your existing customers happy so we recommend more effort into the middle and last stages of the buyer’s journey. Happy customers tend to tell their friends and provide referrals to help increase revenue. They are also more likely to give your direct and honest feedback about issues to improve your brand.

Be sure to keep them informed on your organizational changes or processes that would impact your relationship through email marketing or engage with them on social media. By collecting data and segmenting your customers, you have an opportunity to save costs while delivering on your products and services.

Leveraging of Artificial Intelligence for Digital Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used in digital marketing going back to 2013 with Facebook. Here is a list of the most common uses of AI in digital marketing:

Voice Search
Programmatic Media Buying
Ad Targeting
Re-targeting
Marketing Automation
1:1 dynamic emails

Prioritize from the list and develop an action plan to implement. Using one or more of these could help to increase relevant traffic to your website, get more leads, and improve your overall revenue growth.

Don’t have the time or expertise to keep up! We keep up with the digital marketing trends so you don’t have to. Give us a call to learn more about 2020 digital marketing trends that will impact your business.

Conclusion

The 4 digital marketing trends for 2020 is not a complete list. You will be on the right track if you start by optimizing for zero position, use content marketing more strategically, improve customer retention, and use artificial intelligence with digital marketing when the opportunity is available.

We wanted to identify the trends that would improve your site traffic, help you to generate more leads, and increase your sales within budget. It’s also important to understand the digital marketing trends and how they will impact the competitive landscape.

Want more information on the top 2020 digital marketing trends? Check out the list of references:

4 Major Marketing Trends for 2020 and Beyond on Entrepreneur

What’s new? What’s next? 6 essential marketing trends for 2020 – Smart Insights

Top Marketing Trends For 2020 – Forbes

[Video] How to Create a Marketing Plan

April 3, 2019 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

We publish videos every 4-6 weeks about the latest Digital Marketing news, analytics information, and industry-related topics.

Read Transcript

Good afternoon. This is Danny Laws of DaBrian Marketing Group. We tried to go live earlier this morning. For whatever reason, ran into some technical difficulties, so we kind of want to try this, kind of take two, on Wednesday Wisdom. So for today, for those of you that didn’t catch it earlier today, kind of a follow-up on the last conversation in terms of business plans. So, today what I want to speak to and kind of give some information and some resources on, very much so, marketing plans, which in theory and in practice roll up into … excuse me. The business plan.

So, with that being said we’re going to talk a little bit about marketing plans. I have my notes over to the side here, so if you see me glance over, that’s what I’m looking at. So, with the marketing plan, the whole goal of this is to kind of outline … it’s a document that outlines what marketing channels you’re going to use, your approach to marketing, those types of things. In general, it gives you goals, objectives, your target audience, what is it going to cost you, and what type of marketing you’re going to use in order to acquire new business.

So, one of the classic examples when we talk about what types of channels or tactics or those types of things, we’re talking about social media, we’re talking about direct mail, we’re talking about perhaps a video, those types of things that would help you get in front of that target audience. And as I said to you before, it’s usually something that consists of a time, very specific time period. Some marketing plans are one year, some marketing plans are three years, that roll up into the business plan as I mentioned before.

One of the other things that you want to take into consideration is the marketing plan is not something that is static, that you create and it doesn’t evolve over time. Your marketing plan should evolve over time based upon your products, your services, your geographic footprint, your audience, your competitive landscape, those types of things periodically will have you adjust your marketing plan to the appropriate folks and to see improvement in results. So that’s definitely something you’re going to take into consideration.

So the purpose is really to align and give direction to your business goals and objectives, which many of those pieces are going to be inside of or are in the document that is often referred to as the business plan. So, again, forcing that alignment and making sure you’re staying focused on the high-level business goals and objectives, generally around revenue growth, promoting a product, launching a product, those types of things are going to be a part of that and actually flow into the marketing plan as well.

So, the benefits. Clear direction in terms of what kind of customers you’re going after, that new customer acquisition, and direction and guidance in terms of messaging to your target audience. So when you look at your marketing plan at a high level, who, what, when, where, how, why, what products, what service offering, those things, once you identify those elements, you can customize your message to speak to the appropriate folks.

So the same marketing tactics that you use to get in front of a teenager at this point in time are going to be uniquely different than someone who is in the business landscape, who is a business owner entrepreneur, and the way in which you would talk to them are going to be completely different dependent upon the product offering.

So that’s a classic example of how knowing the who, what, when, where, how, why and marketing tactics will allow you to tailor that message to the respective audience. So something you definitely want to take into consideration as you’re going through the process of creating a marketing plan.

So, give you a couple of things on how to create a marketing plan is often one of those questions, and so, with that, I’ll walk through a couple of questions that I have here on my side in terms of things that you want to take into consideration. What are the goals and objectives for 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, what does that look like, right? That’s something you’re going to want to answer.

What types of marketing are going to resonate or connect with your target audience. So, is that social, is that direct mail, is that video, and what are the goals of the marketing pieces? Like, what are you trying to accomplish? Is it simply an awareness piece, is it something around generating leads, is the intent at sales and promotion? Those types of things. What’s that look like? And what kind of challenges are you having getting or acquiring new customers and getting them to purchase or getting them to become involved in a promotional component or something along those lines, right?

And lastly, how are you going to measure it? And measuring that against the cost of what you’re talking about from a marketing perspective. So, what kind of returns are you looking to get and how are you quantifying success? Is that going to be new customers, or is that going to be something that you’re going to speak to in terms of revenue, you just want to have growth and x amount of revenue is what you want to achieve with the marketing plan over the next 12 months, right?

So, these are some of the things that are going to be important to crafting a marketing plan, right?

And then let’s talk about a few resources. So, what I have here is, again, full disclaimer, we don’t have any relationship with any of these folks that I’m about to name. We’re not getting any kickbacks or anything along those lines, but I’ll name them and feel free to use them, and give us some feedback on what you think on them as well. One of which is HubSpot, who has a marketing plan template generator that I’ve looked at in the past and seems to be fairly useful for someone that the marketing plans are not necessarily their area of expertise and walks you through that process, makes it a little bit simpler for you. So, I would definitely take a look at that tool and how it might be able to help you.

The third one is Mplans. So, Mplans is a paid service if I’m not mistaken and it has the same parent company as Live Plans that I mentioned the last time when we were talking about creating business plans. So, that’s something that I personally used in the past when I first started DaBrian Marketing Group and looked at, so I would encourage you to perhaps take a look at that one and whether or not it’s worth the cost, only you would be able to justify that and make that determination, but definitely something I would recommend you take a look at.

The other one is Smart Sheets, which gives you an Excel breakdown and an Excel template for marketing plans, so you can use that piece as well to pull some of those items together to frame your thoughts so that it makes it a little bit easier for you. And take a look at some of those items that it’ll give you an opportunity to kind of clean some of that up.

The last piece here that I’ll get into in terms of actions, you know, actionable tips for marketing plans. Number one, create one, and if you’ve already created one I would allocate some time to review and revisit that marketing plan. Number two is measure success and failure, and on top of that, learn from those successes and failures as far as what works, what doesn’t work, what gets people coming in, what gets people calling, what gets people filling out forms. Those types of things are definitely elements where you’re going to want to take a look at the marketing plan and look at what is working for you, what is successful, what is not successful, and being able to pull those pieces together.

So, that’s one other actionable takeaway that I would have for marketing plans in terms of a recommendation.

The last piece is, in terms of actionable recommendations, actionable tip, is to revisit that marketing plan on a quarterly basis so that you’re able to see what’s happening, make adjustments based upon those successes and failures, and the learnings from those success and failures to be able to sell more products, get in front of the appropriate folks, build up the business, however you see fit in terms of aligning back to the marketing plan and the business goals and objectives.

So, with that being said, wrapping it up, I would say if you’ll give us some feedback in terms of these Wednesday Wisdoms if you will in terms of what your thoughts are and how we might be able to improve upon the videos, it’s definitely new we’re taking a look at. Follow our Facebook page, you’ll get free tips and information there. Subscribe to our blogs, there’s always a whole bunch of information there as well as downloadables, and continue to check us out on social media across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and we’ll be loading some of this stuff up to YouTube as well.

Appreciate your time. Good luck, and don’t hesitate to give us feedback. Have a great day.