5 Ways to Know Your Marketing Plan is Brave Enough
Your marketing plan for the New year should scare you – at least a little bit. Here are five ways you can determine if the marketing plan you’ll use to pursue your business goals in the coming months is brave enough to get the job done.
Five ways to know if your marketing strategy is brave enough to get your business from where it is today, to where you want it to be this time next year.
Say the words “Lucille Ball” and chances are you get an immediate visual image of the comedic icon who set the standard for women in comedy. In a career spanning decades, she made countless numbers of people laugh and continues to delight audiences who see her in movie and TV reruns today. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she once said this:
“I’m not funny.
What I am is brave.”
Lucille Ball
Explaining that she was willing to do things that a lot of her contemporaries, as she called them “the really beautiful girls” in Hollywood were unwilling to do, she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty and her hair messed up.
Are You Brave Enough to Do What Your Competitors Are Not?
Sometimes all that it takes to succeed is being brave enough to do what your contemporaries find distasteful or beneath them. Think about Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs,” a show devoted to talking about jobs that most of us would be too afraid to do because it’s messy or smelly or downright – well – dirty.
If you are in the process of setting business resolutions for the new year or working out the details of how you’ll make your New Year’s business goals a reality, it’s important for you to ask yourself whether your goals are audacious enough, your strategy is big enough, and whether your marketing plan is brave enough to help you get the job done.
5 Ways to Tell If Your Marketing Plan Is B-R-A-V-E Enough to Get the Job Done
B – Bold
If your business resolutions for the New Year aren’t bold, they aren’t good enough. You’ll know if they are bold because while they are attainable, you can’t get there overnight or without innovation and change. You’ll know they are bold enough when they require you or your staff to challenge assumptions and the way you’ve “always done things.”
R – Revenue Enhancing
Results matter! If your business resolutions for the New Year sound good but do nothing to make your business more profitable by increasing revenues, decreasing expenses or otherwise making your business more efficient or effective then they are just so many pretty words. Your business resolutions for the New Year, and the marketing plan you develop to achieve them must be accompanied by specific and measurable goals, markers and benchmarks. Otherwise how will you know when you get there?
A – Action Oriented
Your business resolutions for the New Year must inspire action not only on your part, but should be inspirational to all of your staff. They should be clear enough so that everyone on the team can easily envision not only the benefits of achieving them but the part they can play in getting there. With the goal clearly in mind, your marketing plan should become the playbook that you’ll use for the journey.
V – Viral
Inspirational business goals produce buzz! They should get other people excited inside and outside of your business. They should give customers, investors, vendors and even the media something to talk about before, during and after the goals have been achieved. Even the tactics you deploy as part of your marketing plan can become talking points you can use to engage audience members, increase brand awareness and position your business as an innovative leader in your industry.
E – Ennobling
I touched on this idea in an article I shared on LinkedIn, this idea that what we do in business isn’t about the good of the business or its officers or employees. What a business does – what they sell and how they do business – is about how they will impact the future of their customers. Every transaction and every interaction is an investment in the customer’s future, and serves to enhance it or diminish it in some way.
Your marketing plan should be ennobling, which means to “give someone a noble rank or title” with synonyms such as dignify, exalt, elevate, raise, and enhance. Your business exists to make your customer’s lives better, and the goals you set for the New Year should reflect that.
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If you’d like help developing a marketing plan that is brave enough to get your business from where it is today, to where you want it to be tomorrow – we can help! Reach out for a free, no-risk consultation to see if working with our team might be right for you.
