Tactical Marketing Plan

What is a Tactical Marketing Plan? A Tactical Marketing Plan is an aggressive, measurable plan to increase your leads, improve your sales conversion rates, and increase your annual revenue per customer so that your profits increase exponentially.

Why is a Tactical Marketing Plan important? Very simply, a TMP is not just important but critical to every business. Death of a business is defined as having no new leads so unless your business continually creates leads without any cost or effort on your part, you must have a TMP. There are so many different types of marketing strategies and tools that can be implemented so you have to have a plan to focus on the few that best apply to your business. The TMP does not stand alone; it is synergistically tied to the Ideal Customer Profile, the Unique Sales Proposition and Guarantee and the Sales Management System.

To truly understand the importance and power of the TMP, you need to first appreciate what an effective TMP can do for your business revenue. I use a simple and powerful spreadsheet I call the Profit Equation to demonstrate this very effectively. Here is the best part of the Profit Equation; it works for every size and type of business and the numbers do not lie. Here is the next best part of the Profit Equation; by adjusting only five different metrics or Key Performance Indicators of your business that you should already be tracking, by as little as 10% each over the course of a year or less, you can double your net profits. Again, this is not some ridiculous claim or smoke and mirrors – it plays out in the numbers. The TMP does not directly address all five of these metrics, but it does massively impact the first three which have a huge knock-on or compounding effect to the other two. Those three metrics are the number of leads you generate, the conversion rate from lead to customer and the average revenue per customer.

If you would like to work through the Profit Equation using your numbers from your business set up a call with me and we can do it together. What is even better is I can show you how to incorporate the Profit Equation, marketing plan, marketing spend and marketing results into a simple and trackable form and fashion.

The primary objective of your TMP is to drive high quality leads to your business. The higher quality the lead, the easier it will be to convert and the greater potential there is to increase the revenue per customer. This means it is critical you focus on following a process to create your full TMP. These are the things that must be considered as you create your TMP,

  1. How many tactics should you include in your TMP? There are literally hundreds of specific tactics you can use; I recommend you start with a list of between 5 and 10. Note that there is a difference between a marketing category and a marketing tactic. Advertising is a marketing category and Facebook Ads is a specific tactic. Within the Advertising category you could even have sub-categories like Digital Advertising or Print Advertising. Don’t get confused by the jargon – the focus is to identify a total of 5-10 specific tactics you want to use.
  2. Hunting or Farming? These are terms used to describe what approach you use with a specific tactic. This is a bit of a simplification but Hunting typically refers to tactics which focus on finding new clients whereas Farming tends to refer to developing relationships with existing clients to make more sales. As an example, getting referrals is a Farming tactic (it is really hard to get a referral from a business or person that does not know you or do business with you now) and Direct Mail is a Hunting tactic. Depending on the maturity of your business, the number of existing clients you have and the repeat sales you already receive, you may choose more farming than hunting tactics. For most small businesses trying to grow dramatically, you should focus more on hunting tactics.
  3. Cost of Tactics. This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. You must establish a budget for your TMP and then allocate that total budget against your selected tactics. There can be a tendency, especially when the budget is relatively low to being with, to only work with one or two tactics but this is not the best approach. Some tactics require little to no direct spend but rather can be accomplished with so-called sweat equity. Social media posts are a great example of where you can do this yourself or within your team at no direct spending cost, but never forget the value of your and your team’s time and effort vis a vis other things you or they could be working on. Stick to the 5 – 10 tactics you initially selected and apply the budget judiciously to start and scale it up as you get the data and results to backstop the changes. I recommend using the measure, manage, adjust and adapt philosophy to drive this process.
  4. Speed, Control and Autopilot. In determining which tactics to use, also consider these three tactic attributes. How fast can they deliver results, how much direct control do you have once launched, and can they run on their own once launched? As an example, you have total control over your social media posts but they tend to work slowly and they require constant updating and refreshing. On the other hand, digital advertising on Facebook or Google Adwords can generate results quickly and can be on autopilot once optimized once launched you really have very little control and have to wait to determine their effectiveness and ROI.

In truth, committing to and launching a TMP is really a bit art and a bit science and a lot of trial and error. In the words of Dean Graziosi, you must have Marketing Stamina. You must closely measure everything about your TMP based on each tactic or campaign from the input costs to the results and ROI. You might be shocked but many small business owners know how much they are spending on marketing but no idea if it is working and if it is what specifically is working and what is not. Bottom line is you must have a TMP tracking system so if you need help with this let’s have a conversation.

To learn more about how to put together your TMP and how it is a key component of lead and revenue generation book a call with me at your convenience by clicking on the button below.