Creating a marketing action plan is crucial to building authority and attracting clients. As a business owner or marketer, you must have a clear strategy outlining your target audience, your goals, your messaging, and your tactics. In this article, we'll explore how to create a successful marketing action plan to help you build authority and attract clients.

Essential Elements of a Marketing Plan

If you want your marketing to be effective, make sure you include the following elements:

• Audience
• Offer
• Goals
• Marketing Channels
• Marketing Strategy
• Marketing Plan Results

Strategic Marketing Planning Process

Know your target audience

Before you can attract clients, you need to know who you’re trying to attract. You might have a good idea who it is you want to attract, but you need to be crystal clear for a few very good reasons:

1. You must speak your ideal client’s language - if your messaging explains who you are, who you help, and how in your words, it’s not going to be successful. The only way to stop the scroll in today’s world is to use the exact language that your ideal client uses to describe what it is they most want or the challenges they face regarding the thing you help them with.
2. You’ll be wasting your time and effort creating a marketing plan that isn’t crystal clear about who it’s for because it’s not going to work the way you hope it will. Better to take time up front and get crystal clear on who your ideal client is. 
3. If you put something out there that attracts just anyone, you’ll potentially create more work for yourself down the road. When we take on a new client who isn’t ideal, it creates more work for us, and the chances of getting them the result you promise are greatly reduced. If you’ve ever worked with a less-than-ideal client, you know what we mean.

What will you be marketing?

Most business owners have more than one offer. Each offer is geared toward a specific segment of your audience. Make sure that your marketing speaks to each offer individually so that, again, you’re attracting the right people. You can promote more than one offer in rotation or as part of a strategic marketing methodology.

Define your goals

What are the goals of your marketing campaigns? You most likely will have multiple campaigns as a part of your overall strategic marketing planning process; the goals of each campaign need to be clearly defined in your marketing action plan.

To define the goals of your campaigns, you need to map out your customer journey or funnel. 

The widest part of the funnel is the top of the funnel, and that’s where people who are just learning about you hang out. After they become aware, they begin evaluating you. Depending on how their evaluation turned out, they enter the consideration phase, where they’re considering how well you might meet their needs. From there, they convert! Before you get too excited, opting into a lead magnet is a conversion as much as making a purchase is, so that doesn’t automatically mean they become a client. The final stage is when they have made a purchase from you.

Taking into consideration your stage of business and the stage of leads and prospects in the funnel you want to market to will help you determine the goal for each campaign. We need to create campaigns for the top of the funnel as well as for the bottom of the funnel and everything in between. We always want our leads and prospects to know how to take the next step.

You might have a mix of offers you’re marketing:

• Free opt-in or challenge/workshop/master class
• Low-cost offer or challenge/workshop/master class
• High ticket offer or mastermind

You will need to define your goals for each one keeping in mind that it should lead to the next step in your customer journey.

Define the marketing channels you’ll use

Where will you focus your marketing efforts? This can look different based on the type of business you own:

• Business-to-Business
• Business-to-Consumer
• Online Only
• Local Brick & Mortar
• Local & Online

When your business serves other businesses, chances are they aren’t hanging out on social media to the same extent consumers are. This means you might want to focus on utilizing email marketing, direct invitation, or paid advertising.

Local brick-and-mortar businesses will want to ensure they utilize their local publications and associations to spread the word.

Online-only businesses will rely on social media and/or online paid advertising.

Knowing which specific channels; social platforms, publications, or advertising methods will work best goes back to knowing your target audience and showing up where they’ll see your marketing. If you don’t know them well, you’ll be guessing, and that’s not part of a solid marketing strategy.

Define your marketing strategy

We’re big fans of creating things once and then using them over and over again. This rinse-and-repeat method allows us to go deep and delight our audience because each time we run a campaign, we’re able to gather data that informs how we might want to tweak or optimize our process next time. Each iteration is better than the last.

• Will you host events? 
• Will they be free or paid? 
• How often will you run them?

Your answers to these questions and others will help you define your marketing strategy. 

We built Encore Empire by creating a Facebook group that we go live in each and every week, providing value that answers questions our ideal clients have and hosting free workshops every eight weeks. Our marketing action plan looks like this:

1. Create content that answers the questions of our ideal clients (blog, podcast, live video, and workshop)
2. Connect with our audience on an emotional level using their language.
3. Nurture our prospects through direct messages, video calls, and email.
4. Promote our offers on a regular basis.
5. Collect testimonials to use in our content.

Track and measure your marketing ACTION plan’s effectiveness

We love business, but we’re not going to say that it’s easy. The goal is to fine-tune your process so that everything you do maximizes your results. When you dial it all in, business is FUN!

Dialing it in boils down to tracking metrics and reviewing your results to see what’s working and what’s not. We recommend running things long enough that you collect accurate data. Running something once isn’t going to tell you anything. Whether the campaign you ran one time bombed or exceeded your wildest expectations, you can’t use that data definitively. 

If it bombed, why did it bomb? 

• Did nobody show up? 
• Was there no engagement? 
• Did you receive negative feedback? 

Whatever the reason, choose one thing to improve and run it again so you can collect more data. We recommend you run things, at a minimum, for six months or six times to ensure you have a clear understanding of what’s going right and what's not. Indeed.com has a great in-depth article about how to measure the success of a marketing campaign.

Another positive about running campaigns and events multiple times is that you become known for something. This builds authority faster than splitting your focus into multiple areas. We’re known for hosting The Marketing Methodology Workshop, and you’re cordially invited to experience this wildly successful and powerful event.