It’s the easiest thing in the world to find you are spending half you time marketing your business and precious little actually doing any business! What with updating your website, writing pithy articles for the local press, attending networking meetings, sending newsletters to your client base and heaven knows what else, customers will need to form an orderly queue – you’re far too busy!

In our experience, businesses often lose their way with their marketing as they have no real confidence in what they are doing. So they end up taking far too much time trying to do a bit of everything in the hope that something will work. This is not only a flawed plan with regards to creating marketing traction, but it is highly time-ineffective too. Hence results are diluted and confidence wanes further.

Balancing act

Getting the balance right is both an art and a science, but one made all the easier by having a structured – and detailed - day-to-day, month-on-month program of activities that will ensure you execute your marketing plan. Having a master plan allows you to prioritise your daily activities; no doubt every marketing opportunity could be beneficial to some degree, but the activities that bring you closer to your defined goal must always take precedence.

However, too many businesses mistake the concept of a tactical marketing plan for the activity of ‘building a website’. The issue is not the web build itself – it’s what you do with it once it’s built. Of course, the website needs to be built so that it can deliver the functionality your marketing needs – can it collect data from prospects, for example? Or will it ‘blog’ your articles out into the internet using RSS feeds? But if you don’t have any tangible plans or processes to use the data collected, or if you don’t add any articles, then the plan has simply failed.

Consistency, consistency, consistency!

For most businesses operating in the B2B sector, there is no ‘magic bullet’. It’s about being consistent in doing the right things week in week out. And if you wake up on a Monday morning with no clear idea about what you need to be doing next, you’re compromised before you even start.

Once you have a clear vision of where you want your marketing to take you, and you’ve defined the major tools and activities that you want to use to get you there, it’s much easier to define a monthly plan to roll out the activities and measure their effectiveness. Embracing a ‘just do it’ mentality will add considerable leverage too.

Don’t be woolly!

For as long as the plan remains conceptual and woolly, you’ll never really know the answer to the key question ‘what should I be doing today?’ Move from ‘woolly’ to ‘specific’ – it doesn’t need to be more than a 12 month rolling plan on an Excel spreadsheet with the next one to three months in detail – your stress levels will visibly reduce.

A defined marketing program allows you to set aside a limited amount of your (or someone else’s) time – eg. a half day per week – with a clear idea about what you should be doing with that time. Combine this with simple measurement devices that will tell you if your plans are bearing fruit and you will soon have the confidence and momentum you need to make your marketing truly powerful.

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