If you’ve been following our blogs, you know that we’ve been talking about strategic marketing and communication plans.  We’ve given basic definitions and defined and discussed marketing and communication, and explained how a strategic marketing and communication plan can boost your bottom line. Now, let’s make a plan for your business. If you haven’t already, be sure to click here and download our FREE Strategic Marketing and Communication Plan Worksheets and follow along.

Build Your Strategic Marketing and Communication Plan in a Few Simple Steps

First Things First – Set Your Goals

What are the goals of this plan? As a rule of thumb, goals that have the biggest impact tend to stem from the reason you started your business in the first place.

Goals should answer your WHY.

Author Simon Sinek has written a great book that I would recommend, Start with Why.

Goals should also be SMART:

• Strategic
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. It all starts with clarity. When belief enters the equation, passion exudes from the salesman.”
– Professor, author and motivational speaker, Simon Sinek

State your goal simply and broadly

My goal as Your Marketing Mama is to help you improve your marketing and communication skills. Simplifying your strategic marketing and communication goals is also a good opportunity to remember your brand promise. Be sure your promise is reflected in your plan.

Know your audience

Knowing your audience is key to creating a strategic marketing strategy. Who are they? Where are they? Write down their stats. How can you best communicate with them? Choose the top two or three most relevant channels – whether that’s social media or the postal service – and decide on the message(s) and/or imagery you’d like to send. Write these down and make sure they’re in the finished plan.

Next – Choose three broad methods of achieving your goal.

Once you’ve set your goals, let’s look at ways to achieve them. These ways or methods are strategies. For example, sharing tips and knowledge is one strategy I employ to achieve my goal of helping you improve your marketing and communication skills.

A strategy is the foundation for your marketing efforts.

And, a strategic plan is several strategies linked together in an ordered way to achieve SMART goals.

Your strategic marketing and communication plan will guide your communication, your engagement with customers, clients and prospects and your overall marketing efforts.

Lastly, think of two specific actions to take for each of your strategies.

These specific actions are called tactics. This blog post, for example, is one tactic of my strategy to share my knowledge. Tactics should be

• Feasible
• specific
• and include reasonable deadlines.

Take your time in developing your activities.  Review them with a colleague or friend. Schedule them and check yourself.  Are you giving yourself enough time to get them accomplished?  Are you procrastinating?  Write it all down, and guess what?

Your strategic marketing and communication plan is now complete!

 Be sure to check back soon and we can talk about implementing your plan.

Your Marketing Mama,

Cheryl McCants – President & CEO, Impact Consulting Enterprises