E=MC2 Marketing Communications (Internal & External) involves Everyone!
E=MC2
Marketing Communications (Internal & External) involves Everyone!
Most of us are familiar with the basics of creating an annual plan:
- Identify the 3-4 objectives that will have the greatest impact to your organization’s success.
- Identify the tactics that best help drive your business toward meeting each objective.
- Think organizationally, internal process and external communications
- Whittle down to 3-4 of the tactics that are likely to have the greatest impact for each objective.
It is the NEXT 3 steps that most people seem to need help with:
- You now have 9-16 tactics. Prioritize them based on importance of objective achieved and likely impact.
- As you plan your year, phase each tactic in one-by-one with enough time to measure impact.
- Measure, measure, measure.
This is particularly important to your marketing plan. Most think of the “arts and crafts” side of marketing. But, when done correctly, marketing is a science. And as in any good science, it should follow the 6 steps of the Scientific Method that we all learned in school:
- Ask a question
- Do background research
- Construct a hypothesis
- Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment
- Analyze your data and draw a conclusion
- Communicate your results
Your planning should follow the same steps:
- How do we achieve this objective
- Research: current performance, historic trends, competitive messaging/perception/success
- Construct your tactical hypothesis
- Implement your tactic*
- Measure results
- Continue, tweak increase or eliminate tactic
*It is this scientific method that leads me to recommend small changes, one-at-a-time if possible. If we want to fully understand what is working and what is not, we need to eliminate as many variables as possible.
If our objective is to increase direct auto loans, and simultaneously, we implement: 1) an employee incentive, 2) provide a gas card per new auto loan and 3) communicate the message in new media; we may indeed increase loans, but what worked? Could we have similar results without the employee incentive? Could we drive new business without giving away the gas cards? What do we repeat or eliminate?
Today’s plan should not only impact tomorrow’s results, but next month’s, next year’s and everything moving forward. Use your plan as an opportunity to learn, scientifically, and reproduce positive results.
To make your 2015 planning ROCK, check out these other links:
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