3 Characteristics of a Successful Marketing Plan

All successful marketing campaigns share these three things.

Many business owners, especially service providers, live via a "boom and bust" cycle.

In order to break out of this cycle of doing client, then having to find another client in order to put food on the table, a successful company utilizes a marketing strategy that incorporates three distinct characteristics. In today's article, we're going to discuss each of those characteristics.

First of all, the marketing strategy utilized by a successful business is planned. In other words, it's not a random assortment of marketing efforts with no cohesion. A real marketing plan might consist of multiple, individual marketing campaigns, but they all have a fairly universal message, look, and feel.

The smart entrepreneur is not swayed by the latest slick advertising salesman from the local newspaper, radio, or television outlet to buy ad space that is inconsistent with their plan. Planning allows you to set goals, set budgets, and track and measure the effectiveness of each piece of your marketing strategy along the way.

Second, any marketing strategy, in order to be successful, needs to be consistent. Successful marketers are persistent and consistent marketers, and one of the key things for you to understand is that, as the owner of a business, your first job is NOT the product or service you deliver to customers. Your primary job is to bring in customers and clients. To generate revenue. Because if you have no clients and no revenue, there is no product or service delivery work to be done in the first place.

Therefore, your first job is always marketing, and your second job is always sales. Consistent marketing, rather than starting and stopping, is critical to the success of a marketing plan. Without consistency, you're not really following a plan, as discussed above, nor are you really able to effectively track and measure things, which is discussed next.

The third characteristic of an effective marketing strategy for any tax firm is that the effect of your marketing must be measurable. PT Barnum, the circus guy, once said, "I know I'm wasting half of my advertising dollars. The problem is that I don't know which half." Don't be PT Barnum.

Every marketing dollar you spend must be held ruthlessly accountable for results. Every piece of marketing you send out needs to have an offer that entices people to respond, and you must have a way of measuring that response. This type of marketing is generally referred to as "direct response" marketing, and for any startup that’s either bootstrapped or otherwise running lean, direct response is the only type of marketing you should be doing. Sure, if you’ve taken in hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding, you can probably afford image and branding campaigns. But otherwise, direct response all the way.

What do I mean by measurable? You should be able to track the source of every lead you generate, every free signup or sales appointment that is set, every dollar of revenue generated. You should know key statistics like the Cost of Customer Acquisition (CCA) and Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) of each marketing channel you use. You should know the conversion rate for each step in your sales funnel for each marketing channel. You should know what your most effective offers are — 7-day free trial vs 50% off the first three months, for example.

In short, as an entrepreneur, you want to know where your marketing dollars are best applied, based on statistical comparison.

If your execute go-to-market plans for product launches, as well as your broader, overall marketing plan, with an eye to being planned instead of ad-hoc, consistent instead of hit-or-miss, and measured instead of unmethodical, you’ll enjoy a much better business.