Writing Your Plan

Using the Marketing Plan template, this is where you finally document the goals (WHAT), your strategies (HOW) and your marketing activities (HOW).

WHAT, HOW, HOW

While yes… we use terms like objectives, strategies, and tactics… however, it is really about building a plan answering these simple questions:

• WHAT do I need to do?
• HOW will I accomplish that?
• And HOW will I accomplish that?

WHAT

These are your Goals. What you want to accomplish. You’ve got these picked out. As we mentioned in an earlier lesson, we suggest making your WHAT… your Goals… SMART!

HOW

This first HOW asks, “How are we going to achieve our goal?” The first HOW describes the intermediate steps to meeting that Goal. Put these items in your Marketing Plan in the “strategy” column.

For example, a goal to fix a “decline in transactions by 5% within the next 90 days” may have HOWs such as:

• Build Awareness,
• Drive Traffic, or
• Increase Frequency.

HOW

This second HOW takes the planning into more detail. So far, we only have ideas, not solutions. How will we build awareness? How will we run advertising? How will we install signage? In fact, you can keep asking HOW as many times as you want until you get to the individual tasks.

For example, a few HOWs to “Build Awareness” include:

• Advertising,
• In-Store Events, and
• Signage.

Now, we’re going to take the plan to the next stage, creating Project Plans. Let’s head there now…