Beginning a marketing plan is one thing. It involves throwing many ideas at the wall, brainstorming, and getting excited about the prospect of potential leads and sales that could come from it. But once you’ve put your marketing plan into practice, it can easily feel as though you’re unmoored and you’re not sure what went wrong.

It helps to review your marketing plan regularly to make sure that it continues to work the way you wanted it to. This way, no matter how trends change, your marketing plan stays solid and continues to deliver results. Here are a few of our tips for strengthening your marketing plan:

#1 – Compare Your Marketing Plan To Your Performance Trends

Ideally, you want a marketing plan that yields results, right? So, when reviewing your marketing plan, hold it up to your year-to-year performance trends. How well did you stay within budget overall? How many sales did you make, and how much of that was directly pulled from your marketing plan? Your performance trends can help you identify what marketing strategies paid off and what cost more than they were worth.

#2 – Make Room For Change

You can’t anticipate every sudden change. For instance, most brands couldn’t anticipate the COVID-19 pandemic back in 2019. They likely wouldn’t have worked this into their marketing plans. But when COVID-19 hit, suddenly, any marketing plan that ignored it would have been very tone-deaf.

It’s important to accept that you may have to make room for unanticipated change. Be flexible. When something changes the landscape of your target audience, make sure that it is reflected in your marketing plan. This will also make your business more relevant and dynamic to your target audience.

#3 – Review From the Perspective Of Your Audience

If your audience was reviewing your marketing plan, what would they say? Sometimes marketers can get caught up in the industry trends and numbers and they forget that, first and foremost, their marketing plan should reach their customers.

Try to get into the minds of your target audience. It may help to create audience profiles so that you have a character on hand. What issues are they facing? What pop culture do they resonate with? Then, look at your marketing plan. Does it speak their language? Or does it feel a little cheesy and contrived?

#4 – Figure Out Your Marketing Metrics

How do you measure whether or not your marketing plan is working? You have goalposts to work towards. Maybe it’s a certain number of lead conversions. Maybe it’s the number of sales per quarter or per month. Without metrics, your marketing can feel aimless, and it may be hard to tell whether you’re doing well or poorly. Take time to write down your marketing metrics and then measure your progress against them. Are you moving along at the pace you hoped? Faster? Slower?

#5 – Dedicate More to Content Production

Over 90% of marketers have expressed finding success with content production, which is why so many prioritize it. As the internet becomes more dynamic and diverse, there are more and more ways to create content for your marketing:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Videos
• Infographics
• Live feeds
• Ebooks
• Whitepapers
• And more

It may help to put a handful of personnel on content marketing duty for your brand. Encourage them to develop different kinds of content marketing and adhere to the best SEO and algorithm practices to ensure that your content gets seen by the right viewers.

#6 – Use Social Media

It’s likely your brand already has social media, but it’s possible that in the rush to do everything else, you may have neglected it a bit. It’s time to be active on those accounts again. Not only does social media give you more avenues for content and boosting brand awareness, but it also helps you better understand your target audience.

The most popular social media platforms — like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter — all have searches and tags that allow you to scan through posts with topics relevant to your brand and your target audience. If you engage with these enough, they may appear in your “For You” tab, an algorithm-generated feed based on your past interactions. This “For You” feed will automatically give you more posts from your target audience based on topics you’ve searched before.

Social media is a great way to gain insight into your target audience to better market to them. Once you understand what’s on their minds, you can more easily reflect that in your posts.