5 Easy Steps to a Marketing Strategic Plan
Creating a marketing strategic plan can be intimidating, especially if you have never done it. You may be in a new position of responsibility or be working for a leader who wants a new vision. You need to demonstrate that you have a plan that will help your institution move forward. You may not have the time or resources to employ a full-scale strategic planning process, but the good news is that you can still create an inspiring and effective plan by following a few simple steps.
Step One. Start with the Institutional Strategic Plan
For example, if Goal One in the university’s plan is to cultivate leaders for tomorrow, relevant goals for the communications and marketing team might be helping the university grow leadership among staff, faculty, and students by demonstrating excellence in communication. Another example is how you position university leaders as experts in their field by highlighting their accomplishments and the impact they are making in the world. You might state this goal as “Promote the University as a Producer of Leaders and a Center for Thought Leadership in the Region.”
Step Two. State Your Objectives
Next, break each of the major plan goals down into smaller goals, labeled objectives. Typically, you want between two and five objectives under each goal (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.). These subgoals are the primary elements that will make the goals possible. Creating objectives is a way of breaking your goals into manageable and measurable pieces. At this step, we are not ready to add the element of “how” this will be accomplished, but are focusing on taking the overall goals of the university and making them “marketing-specific.”
Continuing the example of leadership from above, Objective 1.1 might be “Promote Employee and Student Leadership Opportunities.” Objective 1.2 might be “Position University Leaders as Experts.”
Step Three. Name Your Numeric Targets
Every strategic plan needs to include numerical targets for measurement. Once your objectives are identified, include beneath each one quantifiable achievements that represent the definition of inarguable success.
For your team, this might be placement in certain media outlets, changes in rankings, a number of followers, reaching an enrollment goal, or assisting the institution to cultivate a transformative gift. Whatever you choose should be clearly measurable, authentic to your environment, and stretching but realistic. Include each of these success markers as “targets” under your objectives.
Step Four. Add Strategies
Under each objective, begin adding a bulleted list of strategies. Think of the steps that would need to be taken in order for your department to be able to realize the objectives. Who would need to be involved? What significant changes would need to be made? What would you need to realign to get a different result than the one you are getting now?
Continuing the leadership example, if Objective 1.1 is “Promote Employee and Student Leadership Opportunities,” the strategies with it would include specific steps for each of the constituents, providing an idea of what success would look like for each one. For example, “Create an expert database of faculty to make it easy for members of the media to connect with their expertise.”
List as many strategies as you need to in order to mobilize the people and resources needed to meet the objective. For some lists this might only be two or three strategies, while others may need eight or ten. If the strategy is a complex idea that includes multiple parts, feel free to create a bulleted list of sub strategies below it to break it into more specific pieces. These bullets can serve to flesh out the strategies and better describe how they will be accomplished.
Step Five. Plan Timely Action
The final step in creating your marketing strategic plan is to make specific, time-bound action items to achieve your goals. This is the step that is most often overlooked, but possibly the most essential for actually ensuring the success of the plan. Plans most often fail because they do not assign responsibility for results or set benchmarks according to a timeline. Often plan goals are treated as perpetually “ongoing” and the general responsibility of “the institution” or “the leadership.” This is a recipe for a failed plan.
To prevent this, for each strategy and sub strategy, create a specific action item. These should include the person responsible for initiating the action and the expected timeline of completion. In our example, this might be “Director of Marketing to promote new expert database to local media outlets through personal communication by November 1.”
You can even create these action items using active checkboxes that can be filled when the step is accomplished. That makes it easy to quickly see what progress has been made and contributes to the sense of momentum for everyone utilizing the document.
Share It
With these steps complete, you are ready to share your new Marketing Strategic Plan with the world, or at least the audience of your choice. You should now have an organized plan that is in lock step with your institution's strategic plan, provides a roadmap of what needs to be done, and clearly indicates who needs to take action and by when. With your new plan in place, you are ready to help move your institution forward with intentionality.
Let's talk about how 5° Branding can help you meet your institution’s strategic goals.
