Create a long term plan
When creating a long term plan, most businesses plan for 5, 10 or even 20 years. But when it comes to planning your online marketing efforts, this is unrealistic. Setting sales, marketing and revenue goals for the next 10 years might work for the business at large, but projecting how those goals will be reached from an online marketing perspective just isn’t realistic for such a long period of time. Time moves at a different pace in the online sphere.
Online marketing evolves so quickly that strategies need to constantly change and adapt. Technology is the biggest driver in this industry so companies need to stay abreast of developments in order to make the most of the online medium for their marketing.
At FairTech, in terms of online marketing, we always recommend having a vision for the next five years, create an overview plan covering a period of the next two years and then a more detailed plan for 6 months. This latter plan should be detailed enough to have your weekly actions in it, so that it helps you stay consistent in your marketing work. It comes in the form of schedules and social media calendars, advertising plans etc. and encompasses everything you will do week by week.
This plan should be re-evaluated every 6 months. Keep a clear scoreboard of your social media stats, your website conversion points and your marketing efforts so that evaluating becomes easy. When re-evaluating, make sure you check-in with your 2 years plan so that you’re sure you are on track with your long term goals. Then break these down into smaller achievable goals.
When creating effective 6-month online marketing plans for our customers, we plan actions that align with each of the pillars in our Online Marketing Mastery Formula. Our original blueprint contains all the elements that need to be taken into consideration for the 6-month plan. Each section in the plan is aligned with a pillar of the Formula. This makes planning really easy and very efficient. Because the Online Marketing Mastery Formula is made of 12 pillars that multiply the results of each other.
This formula has been created and improved through our work with hundreds of projects in the past 20 years. It takes all the guess-work away and makes taking a step forward for each pillar easy. In 6 months you can make huge leaps ahead in your cash-flow. Just by picking the next best step that will make a significant difference and fit in your budget for each of the 12 pillars.. We plan these actions for every pillar and create a weekly marketing plan from that.
This works because the Online Marketing Mastery Formula acts as your master plan, which incorporates all the pillars of the roadmap to online marketing success. The formula also acts as a guide to reflect upon your strengths and weaknesses.
