5 Simple Ways to Update your Marketing Plan in 2022

Just as a business plan outlines the objectives and strategies of the company, a marketing plan – the basis to execute your marketing strategy – sets out clear marketing objectives and helps define ways to achieve them. A marketing plan is one of the critical tools a business should employ, and it should align with the goals you have set for your company.

According to Investopedia, a marketing plan is an operational document that outlines an advertising strategy that an organisation will implement to generate leads and reach its target market.

With marketing methods changing now and then, the beginning of the new year or the first quarter of the year is a perfect time to reevaluate your marketing plan and tweak it to ensure it helps you keep up and stay ahead of the competition, and to reach your customers efficiently.

For a business to succeed, its marketing plan has to be up to date. However, there is no golden rule to updating your marketing plan, but it’s strongly advisable to consider what worked and didn’t work in the previous year. Your marketing plan can be adjusted at any time based on the results from the metrics.

If you’re not sure where to start, these 5 simple steps will tell you how.

1. Have a responsive website

With more people using their mobile devices for daily activities, it will be a great disservice to your business if your website does not cater to the needs of your customers. A responsive website is a website design that allows your website to automatically adapt and deliver the best experience to users, whether they’re on their desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Here are a few benefits of updating your marketing plan with a responsive website:

• Helps you reach more customers
• Increases conversion rate and sales
• Provides your customers a seamless user experience
• One site for every design, thereby saving time and money
• No need for redirects
• Lower bounce rate
• Enhances offline browsing experience

2. Do a social media audit

Are your Tweets relevant to your target audience on Twitter? Do your customers on Instagram or Facebook engage with your posts? Are you aware of what your followers are interested in? Do you get the most response when you post photos or videos? 
A social media audit is a process of assessing your business’ social media presence to understand its current performance on each social media network and the areas that need improvement. It is a fundamental part of developing or updating your social media marketing, and it helps you know if your social media marketing aligns with the marketing plan for your business.

Your social media audit should include:

• Profile details (name and URL)
• Publishing metrics
• Audience demographics
• Engagement metrics
• Referral traffic
• Channel-specific metrics

3. Repurpose ypur content

As a small business owner, creating new content on a regular basis can be challenging and time-consuming, but repurposing your content is a great and smart way to drive traffic to your site while saving you time and energy.

“Work smarter, not harder” Here are a few ways to repurpose your content to upgrade your marketing plan:

• Turn a podcast into a blog post for your site
• Create social media content (stories, videos and captions) from that blog post
• Create a podcast from a popular blog post and publish it on iTunes or SoundCloud. You could also turn the blog post into a series of social media posts.
• Turn IG lives into IGtv stories.
• Repurpose a blog post into an infographic.
• Create a transcript from a video or turn it to a blog post.

4. Integrate your online and offline marketing

The best marketing strategies combine offline and online marketing activities to create a single campaign that’s centred on the same message. In doing this, the purpose of the campaign remains the same, though the medium differs. This is to enable the business to reach target customers across different audiences both online and offline, delivering a clear and consistent message to them about your products and services.

Here are a few ways to unify your offline and online marketing efforts to upgrade your marketing plan:

• Bring offline events online
• Hashtag your events
• Bring offline sales online
• Send offline consumers to online channels
• Promote your social media offline

5. Identify new trends

With the tastes and wants of customers constantly changing, it is important to be abreast of emerging marketing trends that are relevant to your business and you can take advantage of. Think of new ways to reach your customers. That could be through hosting webinars, multichannel influencer marketing, newsletters, website sales, USG (user-generated- content), brand accountability, etc.

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