DEVELOPING & EXECUTING A MARKETING PLAN
A review of the steps involved in developing and executing a marketing plan from product and strategies to branding and budget).
The marketing strategy is your approach to achieving a competitive advantage
MARKETING STRATEGY
Purpose |
Timing |
Components |
|
The purpose of a marketing strategy is to capture the marketing goals — what needs to happen for you to reach the right people. Strategy keeps the team aligned around those shared goals by helping everyone understand who will get the most value from your BZP programs. You will want to discuss marketing strategy with your leadership team. |
A marketing strategy should be created before you do any actual work. It lays the foundation for all your campaigns and activities. But you do not need to craft a new one for each new campaign. To make a real impact, your marketing strategy should not change significantly in a short period of time. Instead, reevaluate it quarterly and make adjustments as you see changes in your community, team, and budget. |
|
The marketing plan contains the activities that align with your strategy.
BUILDING A MARKETING PLAN
PURPOSE |
TIMING |
COMPONENTS |
|
The purpose of a marketing plan is to describe and visualize for the team when and how you will accomplish your goals. Plans establish the timeline and themes of your work — your campaigns and programs — and allow you to prioritize the activities within each based on your strategy. This makes it clear how every activity connects to both the marketing goals and overall BZP community goals. You will want to share your marketing plan with the rest of your team so you share how they can help and what dependencies exist. |
A marketing plan should be created once you have an established marketing strategy- a clear understanding of why you are doing the work. You might create a variety of different plans over a quarter. Each plan should be time-bound and include key dates for when a given activity needs to be completed. |
|
Community Marketing
- Traditional marketing is solely focused on getting new customers.
- A community marketing strategy is about connecting and engaging with people to build long-term relationships.
- Community marketing seeks to engage with and attract prospective customers (or in our case community participants) on a very local level, through their neighborhoods. The most common way of doing this is to leverage community events
3 Components of a Community
When beginning your community-building marketing journey, it’s incredibly helpful to understand what three components thriving communities have in common and the precursors needed to get to them:
Precursor: Having a common interest.
Key Community Component: Who cares about each other…
Precursor: Coming together over their shared interest.
Precursor: Working together to achieve goals related to their common interest.
BREAKDOWN THE COMPONENTS
- What is the purpose of your marketing?
What do you want your community members to know about with your event?- What constitutes success or a win to your team?
- An actual experience of a community member
- What motivates the BZP to offer what they do
- The BZP Story
- How BZP transforms communities (People/Policy/Places)
- What is the problem our audience has that we can solve?
- What issues in their business or personal life can we make easier?
- Consider all essentials needed for success and the dependencies your team will require to be effective. Will you require a certain amount of staff support, external vendors, volunteers, etc.
- Research and knowledge of your community will help shape an idea of where to reach your audience.
- Focus on the top two or three platforms that will provide the most engagement by your specific target?
- Facebook, Instagram, Email, Media, Print, Community Outreach
- Determine costs, both monetary and otherwise.
- Include employee time, advertising costs, and the budget for other resources.
PUT THE PLAN INTO ACTION
Step 1: Plan
Account for supporting sector implementation goals in terms of marketing and engagement (i.e. if Policy is working on a food policy initiative accounting for marketing support on that).
BZP Strategy
BZP Goals
Step 2: Execute
Now that your plan is created, it is time to execute. Here are a few tips to help:
- Breaking things down into “sprints” with specific projects and tasks.
- Block time in your calendar to work on your marketing projects.Treat that time as you would a meeting.
- Plan your day the night before– Reviewing what you got done today and planning what you are going to work on tomorrow (and block time to do it) will help you stay focused.
- Keep a two-week action plan visible to keep reminding you of what you committed to work over the two weeks.
Step 3: Track
- Having a way to measure your activities to ensure they are working and worth continuing is an important step.
- New Communities: as your community goes through the Foundation and Planning Phase of you will work closely with the People product manager, as well as your BZP Operation Lead to track engagement activities to ensure your activities are working towards your goals.
Step 4: Measure
- Measuring your marketing is key to seeing what works and what doesn’t.
