The Importance of Writing Down Your Quarterly Marketing Plan

You know your business inside and out, and you have a pretty good idea how to market it.  It’s your baby after all.  You know what the sales should look like and what your customers expect.  You also have a good picture of what the next few months should bring. You know where the marketing challenges are and where the greatest opportunities will come from.

If you haven’t already, now is the time to take all that great knowledge and write it down. There are several important reasons why:

First, for some strange reason research has shown that you’re more likely to achieve a goal if you put it in writing.  Call it a quirk of human behavior, but it often works. The physical act of writing crystallizes the goal in our minds and seems to lend it more importance. 

The second reason for writing down your marketing plan is to use it for a baseline. You may have a pretty good recollection of what your thought process was like a few months ago, but there’s no substitute for the written word. It not only allows you to go back and compare your initial goals to the end results, but, even better, it gives you a measuring stick as the quarter goes along. 

While having goals is important, you also need some way to evaluate them. How do you know whether a particular marketing campaign achieved the results you wanted? You’ll want to create measureable goals so you can track how you’re doing. This type of monitoring keeps you up to date on your progress and allows you to intervene if things aren’t going your way. After all, you can’t change what you don’t know about.

What metrics do you need to look at?  Like a lot of things, the answer is: it depends. Each business is different, and each industry will want to track different things.  At a minimum, you’ll want to track how your marketing content is being received. You’ll also want to know who’s viewing it and what percentage of those views are translating into actual sales. You’ll want to know which of your marketing channels work best for you, so you know whether to invest more of your time into your social media, to put a greater emphasis on in-person marketing events or whether it’s time to update your website. Here are some other marketing metrics that you may want to pay attention to. 

However you go about achieving your goals, make sure you put pencil to paper (or fingers to keyboard as the case may be.) As legendary Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca once said: “The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.”