7 Easy Ways to Actually Stick to a Marketing Plan

7 Easy Ways to Actually Stick to a Marketing Plan

The marketing team is the real revenue generator of an establishment, which is why marketing plans affect the growth of the entire brand. Watching a marketing plan fail is equivalent to watching a train derail. Everything goes out of control and things become unmanageable very quickly.

Speaking of derailing, why is it so hard to stick to plans anyway? I did a little digging, and reached some conclusions:

Committing to a plan also means that you are committing to your team. Even when you are using the right marketing tools, you may reach a point where abandoning the plan altogether will seem like a good idea. And, though sticking to plans isn’t easy, it is required and it is necessary. As Johnnie Dent Jr. very aptly said in his book, Great Reflections On Success:

“You are too important to the bigger picture to just fall off the canvas.”

As a leader we must find ways to keep our team focussed on the project and engaged to keep working on the best outcome. I have compiled a list of 7 easy ways to actually stick to a marketing plan, all of which have proved beyond effective for my team without fail. Take a look at them and see how they can help you:

Every task needs initiation. A plan will not move forward until you do. But when you want to stick to a certain path, it is good to map out the whole journey before you act on it. With a to-do list, or even better, a workflow, it becomes easier to view the timeline of the whole plan and how it will unfold.

I know when I am attempting a task, I like to know what is next on the agenda. This acts as a driving force to achieve more while sticking to the plan. You can determine how to pan out a to-do list by stating everything that you want to see done.

For example, for a content marketing manager, the to-do list would say:

Once you have the list, you can easily focus on the most important tasks and take necessary steps to stick to the plan.

It is hard to move forward and often easy to deviate from the plan when the steps leading you to the goals are borderline unrealistic. This is why we break the steps we made in the to-do list into smaller doable tasks.

For instance, using a task management software platform, you could easily map out a workflow with all the steps and break them into various smaller tasks. The best part of using such tools, in this case, is that you will be able to further break these tasks down to subtasks and track the progress of the whole plan moving forward.

For example, for my marketing team, this is what my tasks and subtasks would look like:

If you want your team to stay on topic, keep talking about it. Visualize goals, celebrate small victories. Bring together people to state the achievements they have witnessed rising from the plan and how it will benefit the whole team, and subsequently, the whole establishment.

Here are some simple steps that you can take to achieve this:

Nothing is more motivating than watching yourself win. So, another way to save yourself from swaying from the path of your ambitious marketing plan is to mark milestones in your timeline. Milestones are nothing but checkpoints in the journey of a well-thought-out plan. These represent small achievements.

In our example for baking a cake, our first milestone would be getting back home after buying all the ingredients. And the second would be when we are done assembling the ingredients in the cake pan.

Achieving milestones is a great motivation booster because when we celebrate these milestones, it eases the pressure and also encourages the team to achieve more by trusting the plan.

Sticking to a plan is easy when we have reminders telling us to stay on the path. Automating the process can help you in the following ways:

The best way to stick to a plan is to maintain a place where morale is high. Now, we gave the team a list of tasks, told them when to do it and how to do it, we are using technology to streamline the workflow a step further, and are celebrating whatever success comes our way. Now, we make sure they are happy following the plan.

We need to motivate the team so they can feel engaged and hopeful. Here’s are the best ways to inculcate these 2 values:

If you never want to slip from the pathway of your marketing plan, you need to make sure to make every day count. For example, when you start following a diet plan, you will have several opportunities to cheat, but you make conscious efforts not to.

Here’s what you can do to replicate the formula for your team:

Following these two points will help you make sure your team is on track to follow the marketing plan.

Plans and strategies would mean nothing if we couldn’t follow through with them. When we are working on a marketing campaign, so much depends on it to work. So we must do everything in our power to make sure that the team is on board and ready to stick to the plan.

The key is to make sure that people in the team are motivated enough to go ahead with the tasks. So take my advice and follow these 7 tips to make the plan more manageable and effective at the same time.

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