Designing an Effective Marketing
Strategy Implementation Plan
An effective marketing strategy implementation plan is the magic blueprint you need to successfully turn your marketing strategies into action. It’s the tool required to meet your business goals and determine which strategies work best for your niche.
Think of it as cooking the perfect steak that will certainly hit the spot.
You have your “secret” recipe plus all of the ingredients that you’ll need and the process of seasoning together with cooking the steak, represent how you bring your marketing strategies to life.
Why is
It Important to Develop a Marketing Strategy Implementation Plan?
An implementation plan helps to
coordinate and integrate the marketing tools and channels needed to execute
your strategies seamlessly.
It outlines:
- What are the marketing activities
- Who is responsible for each activity
- The duration of these activities
- How and when will these activities be executed and evaluated
- When will these activities be completed and which activities will be ongoing
Developing marketing strategies that are designed to be impactful is important for your business, however; these strategies wouldn’t be useful without a solid action plan.
Now, there’s no one size fits all for an implementation plan but the guidelines below will help you with how to develop an effective one.
How To Create an Effective Marketing
Strategy Implementation Plan
Step 1: The first thing to note is to ensure that all stakeholders especially the marketing team are clear on the goals of your marketing strategies. This facilitates cohesiveness and ensures that everyone is on board.
Your goals define the strategic direction you would like to take your brand and can range from increasing sales by 3% in 6 months or to enhance your overall brand image.
Step 2: List out each marketing strategy, its supporting activities, the timeline required for each activity and who is responsible for each activity. For example, let’s say your marketing strategy is to do more marketing and promotion of a hotel brand.
Your supporting marketing activities can be social media marketing by creating daily written and video content on Instagram within a 3 month timeline that will be assigned to a social media specialist.
Step 3: Determine and set how many phases/stages are required to execute each marketing strategy together with the timeline of each phase.
Step 4: Assign each marketing strategy and its supporting actions to each phase.
For instance, increased marketing and promotion- expansion of marketing team in phase 1 within a 2 month timeline and expansion of product and service offerings- food and drink specials in phase 2 within a 3 month timeline.
Step 5: The budget is an important part of your marketing strategy implementation plan. Set a budget that’s workable for each marketing activity and ensure that everyone responsible for each activity is fully aware and clear on the budget.
Step 6: Assign a timeline to evaluate how well your marketing strategies are performing. At this stage of your implementation plan, you and your team will be able to determine if the goals are being met, which strategies are working and which ones require tweaking.
You can assign your evaluation period to the last phase of your implementation plan. Evaluation should be performed on the 3rd month following the rollout of your marketing strategies. Some common evaluation metrics include return on investment (ROI), customer engagement levels and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Should you use AI tools in your
Marketing Strategy Implementation Process?
Marketing has evolved so much over the years to the stage where several marketers are currently experimenting with various AI tools. AI tools are used for so many areas and can be used in your marketing activities to a certain extent.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular AI tools and how you can use them in your implementation process:
1. Chat GPT: You can ask Chat GPT to write anything on any topic of your interest. If email marketing is one of your marketing strategies, you can consider exploring this tool. The tool can also be used in your content marketing strategy where you can instruct it to create content on anything relating to your brand or niche.
Remember to carefully review and edit the content it produces where necessary as you don’t want to stray away from incorporating a personable tone in your content.
2. Mid-Journey: You can use this tool to create graphics to include in your content or even social media marketing strategies. It produces graphics after you state via text inputs exactly the type of image you want.
3. Runway: This tool can be explored in your video marketing strategies to help edit your video content where you can get creative with your videos.
4. Rytr: A content creation tool for creating copy, ads emails, blog posts etc.
5. Chat Sonic: This tool is very similar to Chat GPT and can be used in your content marketing activities of your marketing strategy implementation process. You can collect information relating to your niche and use it as a guide when creating valuable content for your target audience.
6. Well-Said Labs: This is another tool that can be used in your content marketing activities if you going to create video content. It develops voiceovers following text inputs.
AI tools facilitate efficiency and speed, however; I don’t think it can 100% replace the capabilities of humans. Now don’t get me wrong; I do think the capabilities of AI tools are indeed amazing, however; it cannot match the value that humans can produce.
AI tools generates content from information that already exists which hinders the ability to create fresh innovative ideas and perspectives that humans can do.
Are AI tools worth exploring in your
marketing strategy implementation process?
Yes I believe so, however; I don’t think you should rely too heavily on it to the point where you're copying every single thing that it produces. If you’re considering exploring its tools, research, read reviews from current users or even ask around as much as you can. Use it to gain inspiration, ideas and then put your twist into it!
Ensure that it helps you to be more efficient.
In essence, crafting an effective marketing strategy implementation plan is the ideal way for your marketing strategies to produce real impact and results. It involves who, what, when, where and how as it relates to bringing your marketing strategies to life.
Also, you have the option to explore the use of some top AI tools in your implementation process but do ensure that you do your due diligence first.
Always keep in mind that your marketing strategy is like a recipe to a gourmet dish and your implementation plan is how you prepare and cook that dish.
- Marketing
- Implementation