An annual marketing campaign is a comprehensive blueprint that your marketing team can follow throughout the year. While you can adjust the strategy many times before the 12 months are up, the backbone stays the same and helps your team make important decisions.
A well-built annual marketing strategy helps you set the right budget, align marketing goals with business objectives, obtain the necessary marketing resources, build the right partnerships, and much more.
Let's take a closer look at the ways to plan an annual marketing strategy:
1. Review the Previous Year's Marketing Performance
Evaluating last year's marketing performance guides your upcoming marketing initiatives. By learning what worked well and what didn't, you can make data-driven decisions about next year's strategy.
When you designed a marketing plan for the previous year, you set metrics that helped you monitor the campaign's performance and evaluate the results against benchmarks. Today, you can use these metrics to see how well your campaign worked last year and figure out which goals to set for the next 12 months.
If you are just starting out and don't have any data from the previous year of marketing, you need to focus on defining business and marketing goals. These objectives can help you come up with metrics and guide your annual marketing strategy.
2. Define Your Target Audience
The key to creating an effective marketing strategy is knowing who is at the other end of your efforts. Defining the target audience and building buyer personas helps you identify:
- How to communicate with the audience
- Which channels to use for touchpoints
- Which marketing strategies work the best
Identifying the target audience and breaking it up into segments can help you build an effective and personalized campaign. For example, using buyer personas can make your website up to five times more effective.
3. Set Goals and Objectives
By setting marketing campaign goals and ensuring their alignment with business goals, you are creating an informative guide for your campaign.When implementing Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals, you don't just put everyone on the same page about business and marketing objectives. You provide valuable tools for meeting them.
SMART goals are especially important for companies that don't have data from the previous year of marketing. Along with metrics, they become the backbone of your annual strategy.
4. Identify Your Budget
Your marketing budget defines many elements of your marketing strategy including:
- Marketing tools
- Marketing team
- Advertising channels
Knowing how much money you have can help you figure out which tactics you can fortify, and which elements need to be reduced or eliminated. Without a marketing budget, you risk spending too much money on one strategy and losing an opportunity to leverage others.
Most businesses spend around 10% of their annual revenue on marketing. However, this figure can vary from industry to industry.
5. Choose Your Marketing Channels
Once you identify your target audience and set a budget, you can make a list of the most effective marketing channels to use throughout the year. It may include:
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- PPC ads
- SEO
- Content marketing
When choosing your channels, you have to decide whether the objectives you set for the year match the target audience you are trying to reach. Their goal is to improve the quality of the journey these people take when engaging with your brand.
6. Monitor and Measure Your Results
Using the metrics that you identified when creating SMART goals, you can track and measure the results of your marketing campaign throughout the year. Tracking these metrics and KPIs can help you identify problems and make adjustments to the campaign before small errors turn into expensive mistakes.
When it comes to marketing, consistency is vital. Even if you don't see impressive results immediately, you need to keep going. However, it doesn't mean that the strategy is set in stone. If you see an opportunity for improvement, you can always adjust the plan.
7. Collaborate with a Full-Funnel Media Partner
High-quality marketing doesn't just require careful planning. It demands time and experience.
By outsourcing marketing tasks to a full-funnel media partner like Mid-West Family South Bend, you don't just take the weight off your internal team's shoulders. You are gaining access to efficient resources and impressive expertise.
Mid-West Family South Bend can help you design an effective annual marketing strategy with your customers' value journey in mind. Even if you have a large marketing department, you can still benefit from working with Mid-West Family's strategists who help with setting goals and optimizing your annual plan.
Leveraging an Annual Marketing Strategy for Your Business
Building a robust annual marketing strategy sets the stage for the entire year. It doesn't just make it easier for your marketing team to achieve its goals. It also encourages brand consistency and provides growth opportunities.
By implementing a comprehensive annual marketing plan, you are contributing to the company's bottom line and staying ahead of the competition. Contact Mid-West Family South Bend today to get started planning your annual marketing strategy!
