How to quickly develop a marketing plan from 0 to 1

After years of development, with the emergence and continuous development of new marketing phenomena such as private domain, mobile Internet, short video marketing, performance marketing, and big data marketing, the trend of marketing operations has become irreversible. The essence of marketing operations is refinement. "Refinition" is based on big data, with digital technology as the main enabling means, and is carefully designed based on the customer's full life cycle value journey.

"Marketing operations" are composed of the following elements: users, activities, content, and media. Users are the objects of operation, and activities and content are the subjects of operation. Media is the means and medium of operation.

How to formulate an effective annual operating plan? You can start from the following aspects: 3W+1H.

01WHY

It is important to clarify why you need to make an operation plan and what the operation goals are. Many people are not particularly good at making plans. They think that the direction of digital marketing changes so quickly, so why should they make plans? In fact, making plans is the best way to coordinate the overall situation and strategize. Any marketing strategy requires a systematic review of the main body of your marketing, that is, your business, to clarify the operation goals and solve the problem of why.

Secondly, plans are not set in stone and cannot be put in place once and for all. Plans need to be adjusted in a timely and flexible manner based on actual conditions.

It can be said that whether you have made a plan for the next year at the end of last year directly determines whether all your operations in the second year will be successful or not. Therefore, do important things three times and be sure to make a plan. The subsequent execution process and results of a good plan will exceed expectations.

First of all, I usually spend two months brainstorming with the team. The first priority is to conduct a comprehensive review of the current operating status and the results achieved in the year to date. The purpose is not to evaluate whether the operation is good or bad this year. What is more important is to gain insight into the meaning behind the operating data through this "ritualistic" review.

Secondly, it is meaningless to look at the absolute values. You should pay attention to the changing trends of the data. For example, how the customer profile of your operation has changed, how the regional concentration has changed, which pages of the website have increased in views, and how the bounce rate and dwell time of the website have changed. Then, analyze the reasons for the changes in these values. Connect data and marketing behaviors. The logical relationship between these connections is data analysis and insight, which is also the first step in formulating the second year's operation plan.

02WHO

Clarify the operation target. The key to this step is still data. Your customers are not determined by you, but by the results of the operation in the previous year. What characteristics does the user portrait of the target customer show? Where is it from, age, gender, industry, department, job function, whether it is a decision maker, what are the product application points of interest, when was the project established, how much is the project budget, what kind of traces they usually leave in your digital marketing channels, what meetings they attended, and what information they downloaded are all part of the user portrait.

There is not much meaning in frequently analyzing user portraits. Generally speaking, user portraits will not change much in the short term. Analyzing user portraits on a quarterly basis is a sufficient frequency.

Through these data, you can clearly identify the characteristics of the customers you want to operate and serve, and then finely classify users (customer segmentation) based on their behavioral characteristics and user portraits. The premise of classification is to clarify the classification dimensions in combination with business attributes. For example, it can be divided by region, industry, function, or a combination of different classification dimensions. It requires special customization of business characteristics and customer attributes.

03WHAT?

Develop growth factors for operations in the coming year, that is, how you can drive business growth brought about by operations and solve the problem of What, which is the core of operations.

This brings us back to the components of operations: users, activities, content, and media.

Consider a few questions:

At the user level, users can be divided into several categories. Why are they divided like this?

What kind of personalized marketing method can gain users’ attention and improve marketing conversion efficiency?

Different user groups want different operational experiences. How can this be achieved?

At the activity level, what kind of activities would users be interested in and willing to participate in?

What kind of results do you hope to achieve after the event, collect user information, cultivate customers or sign orders on the spot?

At the content level, what kind of content has the highest click-through rate, can attract users' attention, and make users more willing to interact with you, like and comment?

At the media level, what channels do users want to communicate with you through? Is it the Tik Tok live broadcast room, leaving a message on the website, calling back through a 400 number, or watching your ad through a paid channel?

The above series of problems require team brainstorming, spending a lot of time thinking of many ideas, and then prioritizing and making permutations and combinations. The answer to any of these questions is made up of countless details. This series of details constitutes the user experience, which leaves a deep impression in the minds of customers over time.

04HOW

This involves two aspects. First, how to implement the details of the above growth factors? Second, how to measure and evaluate the results?

The question of how to achieve this involves the operating budget and organizational personnel provided by the company. Therefore, it is crucial to make an operating plan in order for marketing personnel to obtain resources from senior management, including budget resources, headcount, etc. It is also a very good opportunity to listen to the opinions of senior management. Senior management will tell you the business focus from different perspectives, and give you the general direction of operations based on extensive market research, market environment, customer needs, supply chain, and competitor conditions. They will then help you determine the rationality of growth targets in the operation plan and the priority ranking of growth factors to avoid missing the direction at the beginning of the plan.

The second point is to link the evaluation results with the operational goals. Combined with the operational results of the previous year, a growth ratio is formulated. This ratio can be reflected in absolute values ​​such as the number of users and the number of retained information, or in the conversion rate of each step in the marketing funnel. For how to formulate KPIs and how to evaluate the results, please refer to my previous article:

How can marketers cleverly set KPIs to achieve business growth?

Then break down the KPI goals into stages, which can be quarterly, monthly, or even weekly, and check the goal achievement status according to the set frequency. Analyze the reasons for over-achieving or under-achieving targets and how to make further improvements. These insights will remain in the company as valuable marketing assets for future generations to learn from.

This is very important, helping future generations avoid following the same old path, making the same mistakes, and falling into the same pitfalls. Sometimes, if you are starting a new business or taking on a new position, it is more useful to spend time researching what the previous people have done, how they did it, and what lessons they have learned than to start from scratch and make a completely new plan. Early learning can make the formulation of subsequent plans more logical and more efficient.

Formulating the marketing operation plan for the second year is of great importance and requires the brainstorming of different experts in the team. So in the end, this comes back to the issue of organization, how team members can effectively collaborate to jointly complete the formulation of the plan and achieve these goals through effective execution.

When formulating the above operational steps, involve sales as early as possible if conditions permit. They understand customer needs, feedback, and business scenarios best, so brainstorm with the sales team as early as possible and get their opinions so that you don’t just talk about it on paper. Instead, you can better integrate it into actual business scenarios, understand the meaning behind the data, and develop an operational plan that meets actual business needs.