How to Get Your Game Plan (And Budget) Ready for Marketing in the New Year

2019 has arrived faster than we can imagine. The thoughts on everyone’s mind is preparing the game plan for the New Year. It’s imperative to be on top of your marketing planning already unless you’ve been waiting to see whether your Q4 would be as good as you hoped. If that’s the case, or if you just haven’t had the time to devote to your 2019 marketing plan, you better get rolling.

Some introspection might be needed as well as an evaluation of how you did in 2018, to put an effective marketing plan in place. If you’re wondering how to get your game plan (and budget) ready for marketing in the New Year, read on:

Evaluate the Success of the 2018 Plan

The first step in creating a new marketing plan is revisiting the old one with a focus on evaluating its success. You should probably have a clear view of what you did right marketing-wise, and where you might have gone wrong. If it’s not immediately apparent, get into the specifics. Look at your 2018 goals and evaluate how well you did with leads, sales, and revenue.

Crunching the numbers will give you some perspective that you might use when creating a new marketing plan. If any marketing activities didn’t give you the necessary results, you could aim to improve in that area for this New Year or focus on something else that might work better. And if something worked better than expected, keep the same budget for it, or even consider increasing it.

Set Your 2019 Marketing Goals

In the second step, planning your marketing can become more elaborate, especially if you approach setting your marketing objectives wisely. Keep your capabilities in mind, and remember to limit your priorities to no more than five key goals. Your ultimate goal is to have laser-focused marketing and to only expend your time and resources on what’s essential for you to accomplish.

Once you set the primary goals (for example, to increase your customer retention), break them down into smaller, actionable goals. If improving customer retention is the focus, your first goal would be to identify the issues you’re having with it, and coming up with ways that can help you improve it. Make sure that your goals and subgoals are easy to track, and come up with metrics that can help you determine whether you’ve been successful.

Set Your Budget for 2019

Setting your 2019 budget will depend on many factors: your revenue, marketing goals, etc. However, if you need some guidance, the average marketing budgets have been around 11% of the company’s revenue in recent years, according to Gartner. Make sure you do your evaluation of the resources you’d need to accomplish your marketing goals, including the necessary infrastructure, outside experts you might hire, and any special projects you might be planning to undertake.

Conclusion

To be ready for this year, you’ll need to plan meticulously. Start with the basics and work your way up to specific details, so you’ll have a marketing plan in no time.

For more information on setting your marketing goals for 2019 and sticking to them, feel free to visit our website or contact us directly.