Planning for marketing success, get the tactical marketing plan!

Recently we were asked by a client about a way to organise a couple of activities they had on the go with their marketing efforts. This was outside their planning time and they did not want to write up a full marketing plan.

After an initial discussion we suggested that they use a Tactical Marketing Plan. Luckily we ourselves have used these for years when planning marketing activities – reason being planning works.

In the spirit of sharing we have added the template to our Free Resources section on the Integrati marketing website.

You will find that we have created the guide on writing you own Tactical Marketing Plan on the site and we have expanded the sections to help you get started.

• Planning/Objectives
• What’s the Message?
• What do you want your customer to do?
• How does the activity work? What do you need to do to support the activity?
• The time-line
• Your businesses budget
• Legal
• Outcomes

We have a version of the template available as a Word document and the link is on the page as well as a version loaded to Scribd so you can preview the template and download the tactical marketing plan from Scribd if you like.

As always your feedback will be highly regarded and if we can help you at all with your marketing planning let us know!

Writing a good marketing brief is an art not a science, but process helps!

It has been said that a brief should be exactly that – brief. This in my past experience normally comes from Advertising professionals who are always focused on the “Big Idea” and are time poor. That works well for agency’s with clients that have worked together long enough to know the brand and how to deliver that single creative proposition. but it may not be ideal for enterprise and small business who may not have that deep relationship which some corporates and national and international agency’s share.

But what do you need to do when you a smaller business and you have a million ideas and are looking to start work with a new agency, designer, web developer and internet marketer to create you a great campaign, website or promotion? Well, like any business you can have a million ideas but you most probably will not have the funds to pay for them all! So, a brief is a great way for you, the client, to focus on what you really need and can afford to invest.

Also, a good brief will help you and your supplier get to common ground and understand what your requirements or needs are and how they can best support this.

To create this, firstly you need context, who are you writing your brief for and what are they going to do for you? If this gets you thinking then we know the process is already working!

As a quick step guide I have noted 5 general top areas to cover in your brief which are;

1. Background
2. Objectives
3. Target Market
4. Requirements
5. Budget
6. Learning

OK, lets start to discuss these top 5 categories to include in your brief.

1. Background

What are you planning on doing it and why? Say for instance you are looking at running an email campaign. The agency which will help you create a campaign will need to know what sort of email campaign you want to run and who will be receiving it. For instance is it going to existing customers as a newsletter or are you looking to send to prospects who have sent you?

2. Objectives

This sounds easy right, well sometimes in the rush to get everything in this can be missed. If you do not set objectives you will have issues with the context of what you are trying to create and why. Objectives help you keep in a single frame of reference what you are trying to achieve.

It keeps you and the people working with you on the brief focused to the objective. in this case a customer email which may be communicating a new product to existing customers by email. So there is a general communications objective and potentially also a sales target, to sell more ‘stuff’ to people who read the email.

3. Target Market

The whole point of a brief is to ensure that your allocating your resources to hit your objectives. The best way to make sure that this is a success is to include who will be receiving this email like demographics and customer preferences to make the communications targeted.

You or your company should know who you’re targeting with the communication. The target market can be by interest for instance, customers who have recorded a preference in their customer data with you for a type of product or service. Or, it can be defined by a ‘segment’ of customers which your company looks to target. To ensure the communication is read and acted upon by the customer it has to be relevant. by knowing who you’re targeting this will help with; design, language and the offer to name a few.

4. Requirements

If you do not include your requirements so the agency knows what they have to do and not do for you this can be a confusing and expensive exercise. By being exact with what you need to have created, coded and reported on will aid in the cost effectiveness and success of your activity.

With an email for instance you may require that it is tested before it is sent to ensure it can be displayed properly on email software or browsers, get through SPAM filters or be in a HTML format, Text format or even in a mobile message format. By being precise with what you need improves the success of the communication by reducing errors and giving you a consistent process which you can reuse.

5. Budget

This is the single most important component of the brief for you and your agency. Not because of the cost/investment in itself but because of how the budget will be used. The budget has to be realistic otherwise you will be on the back foot and any ‘extra’s which pop-up along the way will be added in at extra cost. The other important fact is Return on Investment or RoI.

Before you get to the brief stage you should have created a business case or profit estimate for running the activity. This is of course a forecast as when dealing with humans and marketing you can never 100% predict if they will all buy – even if it is free! So you and the agency should have a response rate in mind and a sales rate or conversion rate so you can calculate the success of the activity in real terms.

6. Learning

If you run an activity and you do not take the time to review;

• what went well
• what did not go well
• what we can do better next time

If you do not take the time to do this then really your wasting 90% of the effort. Every time you run a promotion or a campaign you should look to learn from the experience which will add to your teams expertise. If you do not, and many do not, then you are wasting a lot of time and effort. This is the scientific bit, if you create a process and you follow all the steps consistently, with refinements over time. You will be on the way to creating great outcome for your business.

Well there you go, the top 6 things by adding in learning!

Also, if you would like this in an open source word template, then please find one located here. I hope you find this useful.

Till next time, The Integrati team.

What is with those acronyms or three letter acronyms in marketing?

I have been working in marketing and Advertising for over 12 years now and along the way I have picked up some very bad habits.

I have to be honest with you and come clean about one of my worst habits. At first it was a conscious decision to use them when I was first learning about Marketing, but now it seems to be second nature. It is the art of the acronym or a better description, those damn Three Letter Acronyms (TLA’s)!

Recently I have been working with an excellent designer who is up and coming and really skilled in web design and coding. As part of my process of communicating what I wanted in the site I created a briefing document and some supporting documents which are how I want the site to look like wire frames and site requirements.

So, happy with my site brief and bits and pieces supplied I diligently sent off the briefing information to my designer. I sent an email and without thinking added in some of those dreaded TLA’s.

Of course I received a very simple response from my Designer, “Brief all good but what is an RTB, I don’t know this type of business speak”.

I had of course fallen into my old ways without thinking and my designer rightly corrected me. You see the key point of Integrati Marketing is to speak in plain English about Marketing. It is one of the company’s founding principles to speak to our customers in plain English and not to ever think of ourselves as “Guru’s”. I believe, and I am pretty sure that I am right, that successful projects are based on clear and consensual communication. In that both parties involved understand why they are working together and what they are working to deliver.

So when a project fails and is not delivered, well I think a lot of this can come down to communication(s) which have not been agreed by part of the project team. Also, I am positive that acronyms or TLA’s are also a pretty darn good cause of mis-communication issues. And here is why, the term ASP what do you think it stands for… maybe a couple of shared terms? Actually it has so far over 50 cataloged acronyms on a site dedicated to cataloging and supplying explanations for all the different acronyms, site is here.

Also, and to put my sociologist ‘hat on’ as they say, I think that acronyms can be traced back to specialities whereby using the specialist language like medicine, science or even marketing allowed you to speak in a groups lingua franca! Or own language, designed just for the members, maybe this is partly why we have to go to University or Tafe to learn all these special terms and acronyms.

So what was the acronym I used with my colleague and designer, well it was RTB or Response to Brief. This is advertising and marketing speak for the receiver of a brief (the Agency) replying back to the customer (the Marketer) with another brief which is their take on the brief.

Now this is actually a good thing, to have the company doing work for you come back and let you know that this is what they think they are doing should only help with getting things right. Great!

But where it falls down is if there are too many acronyms in either the Brief or the Response to Brief.

Something I will be keeping front of mind for my Briefs and my customers, no acronyms!

Till next time, The Integrati team.