Your business Marketing Plan is important element of any business, it can be foundation building and set the directory forward to achieve real outcomes.
In reality it is time consuming to develop a proper plan, and you have to have deep knowledge of the business, environments in which the business operates in and the target market to truly develop the Marketing Plan to its full potential.
That is why I recommend to marketing people or new marketing managers especially in an established business is to create a FOPA Review. Simply this stands for;
Feedback
Opportunities
Projects
Actions
This approach is extremely powerful in managing your first 30 to 60 days in a new business and having a clear goal to achieve.
So what is involved in each area?
Feedback
The main goal of this review is to gather as much information across the business as you can and especially how it relates to marketing. It is about listening and observing, and not asking biased/leading questions.
What is the team saying to you about the business and marketing?
What is the market saying about the business and the marketing?
What have you identified based on your business experience?
What is working?
What data is available? What does it say?
Is the data set up?
What are the biggest challenges facing the business?
What processes are affecting marketing internally? Are the processes working?
What has or hasn’t been actioned in marketing?
What has been requested of marketing?
What do you see as areas of improvement and opportunities?
What are the biggest lead drivers?
What are the business foundations of sales success?
What product sell and why?
What are the emerging markets?
What sales resources do the sales team have?
What sales resources do the competitors have?
Opportunities
Based on your feedback review, observations and intentional listening. Build out the opportunities you see.
Does the website have high traffic but no leads? Opportunity could be to create more opportunities for the business in lead generations on the website
List all the feedback for that topic and then list all the opportunities under the feedback.
Projects
Based on the feedback, opportunities, now draw up the projects required with the most important projects that need to be done first.
The project section should outline the project in more details, the business benefits and why it is focus.
Actions
Actions sits under your project section, and lists the current and future actions that need to be done. This quickly conveys the next steps to your manager/CEO and also gives you or your team clear next steps to actions.
