5 Tips to Help Ensure Your Marketing Plan Implementation is a Success

How many times have you heard a savvy CEO or sales and marketing director frustrated that the well-done marketing or public relations plan has landed in a drawer with minimal implementation? Twenty, thirty and 100-page docs tend to get lost on drives and in drawers.

There are five tips for increasing the chance that your strategic marketing and PR plan will not only be implemented but also be measured for outcomes on a regular basis. While the tips may not be new, they are often forgotten or overlooked while writing the strategic plan. The best-made plans require some extra tender loving care to get others engaged in the implementation. Try these five tips before you deliver your plan to the team:

1. Visual. Visual. Visual. While words are critical to a thoughtful strategic plan, visual graphics and the use of infographics take the plan out of your desk and onto the walls as a reminder. If you don’t have a graphic designer, there are numerous free applications that make it easy and visual to include infographics in your marketing plan.

While co-teaching a University of Minnesota Technical Writing class with Professor Joe Moses, the students changed their cybersecurity communication plans to include infographics and a 1-2 page timeline with milestones and persons responsible. Our work with successful plan implementation exceeds 90% with the use of visual strategies and timelines.

2. Make sure that each goal has a measurable result with milestones. (Reminder: include the baseline of the measurement within the executive summary as you may not remember a year from now what it was before the plan was implemented.) There have been too many occasions where people have overheard executives remark on their success with statements like “we haven’t done anything differently. It just happened.”

3. Identify who “owns” the responsibility for the follow-through of the tactic. Name the role and marketing teams or the person, once you identify their strengths and weaknesses.

4. Set realistic and stretch goals as a part of your organization’s plan.

5. Deliver outside the box marketing tactics that reflect your brand persona. If you can make it interesting and add a bit of fun, team members are more likely to be engaged and focused on the results of your marketing plan.

Use these five tips in the creation and rollout of your strategic plan to leadership and teammates. Then, let us know in six months if it helped the launch and implementation of your plan and what the results were in the marketing of your products or services.

Published on: July 23, 2020