You’ve spent hours poring over every detail of your marketing plan. Your audience is dialed in, you’ve chosen your channels and you’ve stared at laundry lists of business metrics until your eyes felt like they were swimming around in your head. There’s just one question left: How are you going to implement this thing?
How to Implement a Marketing Strategy
Bring Together Everyone on the Marketing Team
Avengers assemble! Only kidding… but also, not really, because you’ll need your team to work together like the fate of the world is on the line if you really want to make the most of the marketing strategy you’ve already spent so much time cooking up. It’s crucial that everyone is on the same page.
Obviously your team includes in-house employees who will be working on or directly adjacent to the campaign, but you may also want to meet with consultants and representatives from agencies handling outsourced tasks too. It’s those third-party players that often get left out in the cold, and your strategy could suffer. Bring them in the fold early and establish good communication and work to ensure that practice continues.
Communicate Expectations
Now that you have everyone’s attention, go into detail regarding what you expect from the campaign and the people involved with it. Does everyone know what the overarching goal is? Are there agreed-upon milestones? Are there project management tools or platforms in place to help encourage communication and track progress? All of these things matter, and it’ll take the participation and engagement of everyone on your time to achieve everything you have in mind.
Bring Everything Back to the USP
Your unique selling proposition (USP) is the heart and soul of your business. In most cases, it’s the very reason you decided to launch a company in the first place. You saw a gap in the market, a need that should be fulfilled or a problem you wanted to solve, and you went for it. Whether you’re running your own campaign or creating one for a client, centering that strategy on the brand’s key differentiator is the best way to all but guarantee every tactic will further that brand’s core goal(s).
Continually Monitor Progress
Once you’ve put your strategy into action, you have to keep coming back to see how it’s performing. That means checking on your chosen business metrics and analyzing that data to see what’s working and what isn’t. Marketing is a cyclical event. You’ll launch, pull back, edit, relaunch, test, tweak, revisit, over and over again. Every assessment will give you more information so you don’t repeat mistakes and are able to dial in your efforts and propel the business forward.
Before you can implement a marketing strategy, you have to construct one. Use the tips from our strategic marketing planning process guide to kick off your campaign like an expert.
