STEP 4. IMPLEMENTATION:

The myMarketing Cafe free training tutorial Small Business Marketing 101: How to Build a Powerful Marketing Machine and the Small Business Marketing Toolkit are tools to help you create a powerful marketing plan.  The toolkit includes a marketing plan timeline using an excel template.  Simply populate the template fields with your content.

Let’s review our sample goal, objective, strategies, and tactics below, and create a timeline.

Goal: To provide a world-class customer experience for ABC company (your company) customers while increasing market share and raising annual revenue.

Objective 1: Increase customer engagement with a focus on digital media platforms by 75% by June 30.

Strategy 1:

  1. Select and develop three social media platforms to create awareness about our business and increase customer engagement.

Tactics: (For Pinterest platform)

  1. Create a Pinterest page with the following boards: New products, Customer testimonials, Customer resources and Support.
  2. Promote the Pinterest page through other social media channels.
  3. Send email invitation to existing database of customers announcing the Pinterest page and its benefits.
  4. Add product whitepapers and how-to ebooks to the Pinterest customer resources board.
  5. Add a FAQ photo and link to the Support board.
  6. Add photos of the many uses of our products to the customer resources board.

Let’s assume we have six months to meet our objective to increase awareness about our organization by increasing customer engagement by 75% by June 30.  Below is how we might develop our Implementation Timeline.

  • Research the three social media channels selected to increase customer engagement deadline January 30.
  • Determine Pinterest engagement tactics, Facebook engagement tactics and YouTube engagement tactics by February 15.
  • Develop our various messages by February 20.
  • Implement tactics by May 30.
  1. Pinterest tactic one – February 25.
  2. Pinterest tactic two – March 1.
  3. Pinterest tactic three – March 30
  4. Pinterest tactic four – April 15
  5. Hold Facebook event – May 1
  6. Pinterest tactic five – May 15
  7. Launch YouTube Channel  – May 30

The above is a very general timeline example. You can see that actually launching one of your Pinterest tactics will take several activities that also need to be added to the timeline. Your timeline is the tool you will review daily to ensure you are staying on track. Additionally, you will include periodic evaluations in your timeline where you review performance toward your objective and make changes to help you reach the objective. With a longer term objective like six months, at a minimum, you would review your performance on a weekly basis.  For shorter term objectives you may be looking at your performance on a daily basis.


STEP 5 – Evaluation – Assess your plan performance