How to write your 2020 Marketing Plan

It's 2020… the New Years celebrations are over, holidays are wrapped, everyone is back in the office, and you still haven't started on your Marketing plan for the year… well not to fear, we're here for you!

If you haven't started drafting your Marketing Strategy for the year, now is the perfect time to get going! Everyone knows how important a solid marketing plan is for your business, but that doesn't make the task of writing it any easier. We know this, and so we've put together some key tips to help you get started!

1. Define your Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)

There are a number of different ways to set-up objectives/goals for your team, but there is only one that really matters and that is Andy Grove's OKR system. The simple goal setting system called OKRs—objectives and key results—propelled Google, The Gates Foundation, and Bono to exceed all expectations, and it has become very popular amongst marketers in recent years.

Objectives are what you want to accomplish at a high-level. Then Key Results are how you're going to do that. Your objectives should be bold and aspirational, and should be supported by key results that are aggressive, but always measurable. It is your key results that your team can use to monitor progress and see how far off you are from accomplishing an objective.

An example for applying this in Marketing:

Objective: Significantly improve email marketing

Key Results: Increase Email Open Rate to 25% by Q2, Increase Clickthrough Rate to 15% by Q2, Decrease 'unsubscribes' to 0.5% by Q3

Challenge yourself and your team, but be realistic about what you can accomplish in the time allotted. And most importantly, if you haven't read Measure What Matters by John Doerr, drop everything you're doing and go pick up a copy now… it will change your life.

2. Define your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience, who they are, what they want out of your product or service, is the next step in developing your marketing strategy. It is extremely important to have this information, in order to prepare your buyer personas.

Buyer personas describe who your ideal customers are and details where they're from, what they do, where they work, what are their pain points and challenges. This exercise will help you map our your audience's decision-making process, where they consume content from and what influences them when making purchases.

3. Understand Your Product / Service Inside Out

This may seem like a very obvious step, but it's incredibly important in Marketing. Not only do you need to understand what your product or service is, but you also need to understand what problem it is solving, what makes if different from others in the market, what are the pros and cons. Once you understand your product or service inside out, you will be able to market and sell it more effectively.

4. Focus on what matters

One of the major challenges people face when tackling marketing, is they don't know where to start and with so much going on, from social media, to search engine optimisation, blogging and pay-per-click advertising, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Our advice would be to pick a number of marketing strategies that you know are going to directly help you reach your goals and start with these. As time goes by you can start to experiment with different marketing strategies, and get lost in the world of content marketing, experimental marketing, video marketing and so on. Start with a solid base and build from there, don't commit to too much in the beginning.

5. Prepare your 2020 calendar

You may not know exactly what the next 12 months looks like right now, but you have to start somewhere. Draft a marketing calendar for 2020, including campaigns, product launches, and key events. More detailed planning can include content mapping, for example include that you will post 3 social media posts per week in February to promote a specific service. This will be especially beneficial to teams that are new to marketing, as it creates structure and gives your team something definite to work to.

6. Track your progress

It is important that you monitor the success of your marketing strategy as you go, in order to see whether or not it is effective or if you need to make any adjustments. Not every marketing strategy or technique will work for you and it’s ok if you need to make changes to your plan, but you will only understand this if you are keeping track of your progress using your OKRs. Keep an eye on your key results and make changes where relevant.

7. Get Started!

Finally… stop talking and start doing! Many of us are guilty of developing incredibly complex and promising marketing strategies, but never actually get to putting them in place. Strategy and planning are incredibly important, but the next step is to get out there and execute on your plan.