Stale marketing plans are way more common than you may think. Even the most experienced marketers can be subjected to this fate. Inevitably, you may eventually reach a point where your content starts to seem stale. You may notice a gradual decline in new traffic to your blog, or an initial indication that leads you to the conclusion. Bottom line, stale marketing plans are less exciting or less intriguing than they used to be, and you’ll notice you need to make a change in order to see results. Luckily, stale content can be “fixed” with a series of actionable steps. Start discovering the root cause of your stale marketing plan and make smart decisions in order to refresh your future campaigns.
So… you may be wondering, what are the 4 phases of a marketing plan?
The first and most important step towards resolving stale content is defining your business goals. Defining objectives and long-term goals are essential to a strong marketing plan. Then, once your business goals are defined, there are four steps of a successful marketing process:
1. Discovery
During this phase, you should be thinking about what's going on in your marketplace. You can’t make any changes unless you know exactly what needs to be changed. The discovery phase is meant to be a stepping stone of finding out what the issue is. After you suspect that your content is becoming stale, the first step is to audit your current content marketing strategies as objectively as possible. It may be tough to do this by yourself, but adding other perspectives can allow you to analyze objectively.
2. Strategy
Now that you’ve completed the discovery phase, the next step is to strategize. Creating cohesive and clear strategies will allow you to allocate sufficient resources to individual marketing activities and measure whether you’re hitting your objectives or not for the future. Once you have a clear idea of who your target audience is and their needs, it’s time to come up with a plan for the year. For example, will you focus on using online tactics or a mix of offline and online efforts?
3. Implementation
In this step, you should start putting ads into place and moving forward with your marketing efforts. After you’ve understood how your brand differentiates itself and stands tall among the crowd, your brand is ready to make those strategies come alive. It’s important to take the time to create content that actually solves pain points for your target audience. You’ll want to ensure that your content is excellent and attracts your target audience. Don’t just throw something up on social media just because you want to get a post up. Implementation includes taking the time to carefully create collateral needed to reach your objectives.
4. Measurement
Arguably one of the most important phases of a marketing plan is to analyze what you’ve done by measuring the right metrics. Metrics will show you whether or not you’re hitting your goals and possibly indicate the issue behind it. To keep your marketing from growing stale, you should constantly try new tactics and measure them respectively. Make it a habit to study the results of every campaign. Then you can lose what isn’t working and replace it with new strategies. As time goes on, you’ll gain a strong following online and offline that’ll help with word-of-mouth marketing. Start embracing new ideas and watch your promotional efforts win.
At JonesHaus, we pride ourselves in delivering great work while partnering with our clients collaboratively on budgets and fee structures that meet our mutual needs. We take time to fully understand the client’s objectives, timing and deliverables and can execute such without the large agency overhead and a flexible business model. It’s better to constantly analyze the metrics to measure your brand's performance.
The JonesHaus four-step process is to discover, define, create, and execute.
How confident are you in your marketing plan?
Interested in analyzing your marketing plan and evaluating your current marketing strategies? At JonesHaus, we offer monthly content marketing services to help businesses meet their goals and avoid stale marketing plans. We recently created a Social Media Roadmap to help small businesses audit their own social media accounts so they can implement stronger marketing strategies that consist of cohesive brand strategies and social media posts! Grab yourself a copy for everything you need to know on how to audit your platforms, sharpen your branding and establish a consistent social media presence.