A quarterly marketing plan is one of the most important parts of your digital marketing tasks. Think about it this way, will your audience still be captivated by an infographic that you released a couple of months ago? Does brand awareness stop at a certain point?
It doesn’t. You need to constantly maintain brand awareness. You need to constantly captivate your target market. More importantly, there is a definite correlation between constant marketing and constant sales.
More often than not, we sometimes forget or fail to take advantage of maintaining a certain level of marketing velocity required for consistent brand awareness. We focus our efforts on things that can be done today while neglecting tasks needed for tomorrow.
In this article, we’ll help you build an effective quarterly marketing plan to make sure your brand is always in pole position.
Why a Quarterly Marketing Plan?
Why make a quarterly plan when you can quickly create an annual one? The logic behind it is simple: it’s easier to adapt to inevitable changes on a quarterly basis and planning becomes less of a hassle when taken in smaller chunks.
Before you start out on building you quarterly monthly plan, you should set specific goals that you are trying to achieve through all of this. This could be increasing the number of unique visitors of a particular page, improving bounce rates, or garnering more followers or interactions on social media.
It is crucial that you have some form or a calendar ready so that you’ll be able to get things done on a consistent basis.
The Essentials of a Quarterly Marketing Plan (in Digital Marketing):
Content
Digital marketers are more than a little familiar with the phrase, “content is king,” and this statement forms one of the crucial parts of your planning. You have to remember that content is what you give out to your users. Whether it is videos, infographics, or lead magnets in the form of spreadsheets, you have to have content ready.
Content has to be prepared and planned, it has to be relevant enough for the time, and its release has to be timed correctly. Proper content selection and production aids in conveying a company’s message. It provides value for the consumers and potential customers, and you can use it as a tool to maintain brand loyalty.
Related: Content Intelligence: Leveraging Data and AI to Create Smarter Content
Instead of struggling with your email outreach, you should aim to automate your email marketing campaign. Whether you are using it as a tool to announce new content or using it as a method to reach someone “coldly,” email should be set up in a way that is automated.
This cuts response times and helps with conversions, and frees up the resources of the marketing team.
Related: We’re Halfway 2018; Your Email Subject Lines are Subject to Change
Social Media
Social media is one of the best ways that your company can communicate with its existing customers and it’s a great way for your business to have a voice. As with email automation, there are a lot of tools available for you to automate your social media posts and what not.
Plan ahead and integrate IFTTT protocols if you have to, there are a lot of programs out there that can syndicate content with all social media profiles and plan the release of posts.
Related: Social Listening: The Power to Gain Business Insights and Increase Sales
Website Optimizations
Website optimizations should also be done on a regular basis. Search engines are constantly updating, company information and offerings change, and you should always be able to keep up with the changing demands of the people who interact with your web properties.
If you’re engaged in improving your off-page optimizations, then you should also place close attention to this part.
These optimizations and checks should be done on a regular basis. Keep your website constantly fresh, and you’ll thank us for it later on.
Related: Essential Components of a Lead-generating Website
Tracking and Feedback
The most important part of having a quarterly marketing plan is tracking your key performance indicators (KPIs) and keeping up with feedback from your customers or focus groups. This allows you to adapt properly, conduct split testing and ensure that you are always on-point with your releases.
Tracking can be related to anything from measuring the improvement in bounce rates on your analytics platform, tracking the performance of keywords that you have been trying to rank for and strategizing based on buyer intent. Social media metrics should also be a factor in this stage if you’re trying to improve in that area.
At the end of the day, your next plan is going to be primarily based on what results you’ve had in the last period.
Related: The Math Behind A/B Testing: A (Simplified) Visual Guide [INFOGRAPHIC]
A quarterly marketing plan does not have to have all these factors, but if you’re trying to get your digital marketing plan off the ground, these are probably most of the particulars that you need to get you started. So pull out that calendar and get cracking!
