End of Year Planning: Creating A Successful 2022 Marketing Plan
ChicExecs Co-Founder and Co-President, Nikki Carlson, shares seven steps to creating a successful 2022 marketing plan that will help you reach your goals quickly on Newsweek. Below is a highlight from the piece.
1. Review Your 2021 Plan First
Did you write a marketing plan for 2021? Dust it off and review it as a team. Although we aren’t out of 2021 just yet, you should have enough data from Q1, Q2 and Q3 to make educated decisions.
What did you do well? Which tactics gave you the most bang for your buck? What didn’t work so well? Did you meet your goals or did you come up short?
2. Define (or Redefine) Your Audience
Marketing should revolve around your audience’s needs. If you haven’t already, define your audience with buyer personas. Even if you already have buyer personas, use this as a chance to review them as needed (you might even need to add a new persona to the mix).
3. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
Your SWOT analysis will definitely change from year to year, if not month by month. Be sure to include an up-to-date SWOT analysis in your 2022 marketing plan. This will help you identify internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats.
4. Set SMART Goals and KPIs
After reviewing your 2021 plan, learning more about your audience and conducting a SWOT analysis, it’s time to set goals for 2022 marketing.
Instead of choosing a vague goal like “I want to bring in more customers,” set SMART goals. This will make it much easier to understand if your marketing team was actually successful.
You should also set key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of these goals on a per-team or per-individual basis. KPIs are metrics that are in service of your SMART goals and they will hold your team accountable over the course of 2022.
5. Choose Your Tactics
What marketing tactics will support your SMART goals? For example, if you need to see a 20% lift in brand awareness by February 2022, which tactics will get you there most efficiently?
6. Create a Budget
You can’t measure your return on investment (ROI) unless you know how much money you spent marketing yourself. That’s why it’s so important to create a budget annually as well as per-channel or per-tactic.
7. Hold Yourself Accountable with Project Management Tools
At this point, you’ve probably documented your marketing plan on paper. That’s all well and good, but a Google Doc isn’t nearly as actionable as project management software.
