Having a solid marketing strategy is essential for any successful business. A good plan requires thorough research and a strong team to execute it. However, even with the best intentions, brands can still fall short in their efforts.
We asked the experts of Forbes Agency Council how to ensure that a company’s marketing plan is executed as smoothly as possible. Here are some things that can go wrong during the planning process, and how Council members recommend avoiding the issues. Here’s what to watch for:
Members discuss a few things to watch out for.
Photos courtesy of the individual members
1. Making It All About You
So many companies are focused on talking about themselves and their products or services in their content. They think people are going to automatically love it, share it socially and link to it from their own websites. Little thought is put into the idea of “what’s in it for them” when thinking about the reader of the content. To combat this, we look at the questions being asked in the industry and the problems people are having. We ensure that the strategy is built around answering questions and solving problems and generally being useful in all content that is created. Only then does content distribution happen in a friction-free manner, attracting social shares and links. – Aaron Agius, Louder.Online
2. Not Getting Full Alignment And Buy-In From All Parties
Creative reviews can be very subjective, so make sure that the strategy is sound and agreed upon well before the creative is presented. This ensures that the agency team and the client team are aligned, making the plan more strategically grounded and less subjective. – Blair Brady, WITH/agency
3. Failing To Connect The Plan To Larger Business Goals
The greatest challenge of marketing plans is that the marketing team is often not in sync with the organization’s goals. Thus, how the marketing team measures its success does not coincide with the metrics that are important to the business. This can be solved in part by opening lines of communication with the CEO and other C-level executives to fully understand the organization’s goals, and then creating a marketing strategy and plan to achieve those goals. – Janet Driscoll Miller, Marketing Mojo
4. Right Message To Wrong Audience
Watch for misalignment of message, channel and audience. I’ve developed a system of categorizing and optimizing messaging, themes and content type across a rubric of archetype, communication channel, and KPI. This relatively simple yet thorough graph ensures content type, channel, audience sector, theme, and KPI are consistent across the entirety of a campaign. – Kirk Westwood, Glass River Media
Read more in 13 Scalable Ways To Reach Your Audience In A More Personal Way
5. Coming Up With Too Many ‘Good’ Ideas
It’s easy to come up with too many good ideas. This can make the plan feel like a fount of ideas–some viable and some pipe dreams. In our experience, it’s better to focus on realistic goals with timelines in order to gain traction, while still capturing the other, bigger ideas in a separate category for future consideration. – Katy Boos, Remix
6. Not Leaving Enough Room For Flexibility And Changes
Never assume that the initial plan is absolutely correct. Too often clients come in with a set budget, seeking a set plan for the next several months (or year). They sign a scope of work and expect that the agency will follow it as precisely as possible, committing to the letter of the law as documented in the plan. Unfortunately, the most effective marketing doesn’t always abide by the initial roadmap you created or the ideas you had at the beginning of the year. We try to teach our clients to embrace iterative, learning-based planning and “always-on” analysis that leaves room for change. – Jack Spaulding, Planit
