Before you start a marketing project, one of the most important steps is creating a plan. 📝

This is a simple type of marketing plan that can break down your marketing initiatives into items in a checklist (and who doesn’t love crossing things off a list?)

Let’s go over into more detail about what it is, why you should use one, items to include, and our personal tips that you can follow to make it as effective for you as possible 👇

FIRST OFF, WHY SHOULD YOU USE A CHECKLIST?

✔️ Breaks down a complex marketing initiative into simple items in a checklist
✔️ Guides you into creating a comprehensive plan for marketing initiatives
✔️ Helps you keep track of important marketing activities
✔️ Execute marketing strategies more effectively
✔️ Reduces the chance of you missing an important step

WHAT SHOULD BE IN YOUR CHECKLIST?

Now these checklists can look different for different companies and industries, but there are a few key components that everyone needs to include:

1. TARGET MARKET RESEARCH

You need to know who you’re selling to. Understand your demographics – where do they live, what gender are they, how old, where do they live, what do they do for work?

You also need to establish who your customer persona is (or as we call it your “avatars.”) This is a character that you can “design” to represent the traits of your target customers. At 12 Creative, we do this all the time to help build a marketing strategy with the needs of our target customers in mind.

2. SCOPE OUT THE COMPETITION

You need to know who you’re competing against. The best way to do this is by gathering the information about your competitors and completing a competitor analysis. This is when you analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your company’s competitors, which helps you to pinpoint the aways that your company can improve to compete with them. A good competitor analysis usually includes analyzing your competitors:

• Products
• Pricing
• Customers
• Brand Awareness
• Resources
• Objectives

3. MARKETING OBJECTIVES

When you have your marketing objectives laid out, this helps your team create strategies that align with your main objectives. In this list, you can also include the key performance indicators (KPI’s) for each objective.

*For example, some of our clients’ KPI’s usually include revenue, conversion rates, and social media engagement.

4. MARKETING STRATEGIES

You need to know how you’re going to accomplish your marketing objectives. This section of your checklist can include strategies like creating new customer programs, special offers, bonuses, introducing new services, a new Instagram Reels strategy, a giveaway – and so much more that we could list but we already know this is a long newsletter. (Feel free to book a FREE consultation for ideas for your business)

5. MARKETING TACTICS

You need to know how you’re going to make the strategies happen. Sometimes people get confused between the difference of strategy and tactics, and the best way to describe them is; strategies are the action plans that take you where you want to go, and the tactics are the individual steps and actions that will get you there.

Tactics are often more specific and involve smaller steps. For example, a few of the marketing tactics we do a lot of the time as 12 Creative are:

• Creating print and digital advertisements for our clients
• Influencer marketing where we work with our clients to pay social media influencers to promote their products or increase their brand awareness
• Direct marketing through email campaigns

We want you to make your checklist as effective as possible.
So when it’s time to create yours, here are some tips:

✔️ Make sure your checklist works for multiple scenarios
✔️ Stay focused on your target audience
✔️ Consider your company’s mission, vision, and values
✔️ Download our 5-step Roadmap to set your business up for success