How to implement a marketing strategy

If you’ve got a marketing strategy ready to go, firstly, well done! You’re ahead of the vast majority of small businesses who are unfortunately shooting blind with their marketing activity. However, the more important part is then the implementation of the strategy itself, and all too often marketing strategies sit gathering metaphorical dust in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder on someone’s laptop. Let’s get into some ways you can ensure that’s not the case and your strategy is implemented and starts working for your business.

Firstly of course, you need to ensure you have a well thought out strategy to begin with. And a well planned strategy includes actionable recommendations which are going to guide the implementation. Paired with SMART goals this will set you in good stead to get cracking.

When I say actionable recommendations, I mean a direct action you can take as a result of an informed insight. Let’s say for example as part of your strategy you reviewed your previous Google Ads performance, and you found you received a lot of clicks but very few conversions. We could hypothesize that potentially your landing page experience wasn’t compelling or clear enough. Therefore an actionable recommendation in your strategy would be to create bespoke landing pages well optimised according to best practices.

Aligned with your SMART goal to increase Google Ads conversion 1% over the next quarter you can then action the recommendation and track its performance to prove the hypothesis.

To ensure actions like the above are implemented you also need to assign clear roles & responsibilities as part of your strategy. It’s important to take your time on this section to find the right people for each action and to assess if you have the in-house capabilities or may need to bring in external resources for certain tasks. 

Once you’ve identified who will be doing what it’s then vital you communicate to them very clearly each of the requirements they are tasked with and your expectations in terms of delivery, communication and timelines. This should then be all tied together from someone like yourself overseeing the strategy's implementation so you can link campaigns together across different marketing channels and assign budgets etc. accordingly.

One thing to note when setting the schedule for each persons responsibilities is to make sure you’re assigning a realistic cadence they can stick to amongst their existing workload. There’s nothing worse than having a great plan all worked out only for those who are in place to deliver it to get behind and fall out of sync with everything else. More often than not in those cases it never gets back on schedule and sometimes the whole strategy falls apart. It’s better to be consistent with less tasks than overwhelmed and reaching a stand still with a long list of actions.

Then a crucial part of reviewing the implementation of your marketing strategy is to setup accurate tracking and reporting information. This could be data such as follower growth on social media, email subscribers and numbers of clicks and conversions on your websites. Making sure everything is tracked before you set about implementing your strategy means you can genuinely know if your recommendations are delivering the desired results.

The power of doing so means that firstly if certain actions or marketing channels/campaigns aren’t hitting expectations you’re aware and can do something about it. But also if certain channels/campaigns are doing particularly well you can assign more resources and budget to them to maximise your results.

Ultimately a marketing strategy is nothing without implementation. Taking all the hard work you’ve done and then converting it into actionable steps with clear objectives, roles & responsibilities with the ability to track performance is what will set you up for success.

Very few people even create an effective marketing strategy let alone ensure it’s implemented well so if you can do so you’re most likely streets ahead of your competitors.

As always if you’d like help creating your marketing strategy you can request a consultation call with me today.