These days you probably don’t have a lot of time for big grandiose marketing plans or the bandwidth to even accomplish everything you want to do. Maybe you are, like me, a company of one. You need to do things to make money for your company, but you also need to do the things that will grow your brand name, increase your customer base and establish yourself as a thought leader and trusted expert in your industry. You need a simple practice to guide your marketing efforts and make sure they are helping you reach your goals and not just wasting your time.
Thankfully, I have a simple way to do just that.
Marketing plans, when you cut them down to the most basic form, is a set of strategies and tactics, i.e. goals and actions. When I was the communications manager for New Hampshire tourism, I developed a grid system that I would look at and decide if something I wanted to post or tweet on our social media would be effective for us reaching our goals.
The grid was simple. The first column was our top five marketing goals, so it had things like “Increase visitation to New Hampshire”, “Increase revenue through increased rooms and meals taxes”, “Provide excellent customer service”, “Be the authority on the New Hampshire tourism experience”.
The second column was topic buckets. So, for example, “Arts and Culture”, “Food and Wine”, “Hotels and Lodging”, “History”.
Any time I was going to post a new piece of content or had an idea for something to share on our social media, I would first take a quick look at my chart to see if it fit in with one of the goals and could fit into one of our main topic buckets. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t post it or I would think about how I could caption it or write about it to make it fit into those columns. This way my content was always working in tandem with the overall marketing goals and types of things we were putting out in other areas, like the website and print collateral.
When you are working with limited time, you can’t waste a single post or tweet with something that does nothing to further your goals as a company.
By developing this simple grid, based on your top five goals/priorities and the topic buckets that your company or product fits into, you can make sure that your marketing is always working for you, especially when you’re the only one working!
Tai Freligh is the Chief Social Media Strategist for Life Happens In Between, a marketing agency based in Huntington Beach, California. LHIB provides consulting services for social media, marketing, branding, and content creation.
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