Planning Your Marketing

6. Marketing Action Plan

Your action plan takes each element of your marketing strategy and allocates detailed budgets, responsibilities, targets and deadlines.

6.1 Include a calendar that prompts you to contact each customer regularly.

• Most businesses need to do this at least once every 90 days to maintain 'front of mind awareness'. This excludes the actual sales process and routine communication.
• Keep asking your customers for feedback on your performance and on any new developments in the marketplace - including their own news. Ask them for ideas to improve your products and your customer service.

6.2 Focus on being visible to your hottest prospects.

• With your best customers (and potential customers), you might want regular meetings, or at least regular phone contact, as well as doing mailshots.
• Your less important customers might receive mailshots by post or email.

6.3 Get to know the purchasing cycles of your customers.

• For example, customers whose new budgets start in April may plan the budget the previous October, so you would need to approach them before then.

6.4 Plan your promotions for the year.

• For example, what mailshots will you send to which market segments? Who is responsible for implementation, including the fulfilment and measuring the results against your budget?