3 Key Elements That Must Be In Any Marketing Plan

3 Key Elements That Must Be In Any Marketing Plan

I've shared many times the six step template that we use to create a simple, effective 90 day marketing plan. It's very actionable and tactical, but today I want to go a little bit higher level tool and talk about three key elements that must be in any marketing plan. They've got to be top of mind.

Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. But you've got to remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to grow your business consistently and predictably. I appreciate you taking the time to tune in. Thank you so much.

I'm going to do my best to make this well worth your while. This is going to be a short episode for me today, but when it comes to marketing planning, there are three critical elements that have got to be top of mind if you want to be successful. And guys and gals, I did not come up with this. I was first exposed to this concept by the marketing genius of Dan Kennedy. So he talks about this all the time. I want to dig into these three elements and here's what they are.

One, lead generation. Two, lead conversion. And three, retention and referrals. Okay, so lead gen, lead conversion, retention and referrals.

So let's break this down a little bit. I just want to give you my thoughts on this to try and help kind of hammer this point home. But you've got to keep these things top of mind with your marketing planning if you want to be successful.

Lead Generation

So when we think about lead gen, referrals alone are not scalable. There are a lot of businesses that have gotten to a certain point on referrals. It is a great way to initially start generating leads, but they're not predictable and they are not scalable. I don't care what anybody says. You are in a very vulnerable place if your business is only generating leads from referrals. Think about it like this. All your leads are coming from referral, or the vast majority of them are. You're riding a unicycle, okay? If that tire goes flat, you're hosed. But if you take more of a multi channel approach to lead generation, you're riding a three wheeler or a four wheeler, right? Or you're riding a three or four wheeler and you've got an extra set of tires, right? If something happens, you can pop a new one on and you're in good shape, right? But even if you're riding a three or four wheeler and one tire goes flat, you can still get to where you want to go. It may take a little bit longer to get there, but your business is going to be much more consistent and predictable and much in a more stable place. Okay? So with lead gen, we want to think about taking a multi channel approach to lead generation. When I think of the marketing channels, I view them as there are eight main marketing channels strategy is at the middle. Your ideal clients, your message to attract those ideal clients, it's at the center because if you don't have it, you're building a house without a foundation. Right? The strategy is your foundation. Very important. But from there, there are seven other main marketing channels. One, your website. Two, offline marketing. Really important. A lot of marketers focus strictly on digital. But gosh, if you overlook offline marketing, you're overlooking at least half of the picture here. So with offline marketing, what does that look like? It could be networking, speaking, print advertising, strategic and referral partners. Right? There are so many different elements of offline marketing. Really important. Next one is content marketing. Are you creating blogs or do you have a podcast, a YouTube channel? All those things are examples of content. Then you've got search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is helping your business get found. When people search for words that are relevant to your business. Then we have social media. We're all familiar with social media. What social media channels are you going to be a part of? To get in front of, stay in front of, build trust and credibility with your audience. Email marketing and then pay per click advertising, online advertising, google ads, Facebook ads, anything like that. Retargeting ads. Any tactic is going to fall into one of these channels. I have seen people break down the marketing channels into ten to 15, sometimes more. I just think it's going a little bit overboard and it's so much easier to understand when you break it down into those eight channels. So my question to you is from a lead generation standpoint, where are most of your leads coming from? Are you susceptible and heavily reliant on one main marketing channel? If you are, marketing channel, marketing tactic, if you are, how can you start to expand so that your business is going to be more predictable and consistent?

Lead Conversion

Let's look at lead conversion. Once I'm generating those leads, how am I actually converting those leads? Do you have a consistent path that you are leading people down to get a more predictable result to increase your conversion rate? I can guarantee you right now, if you do not have a consistent path, you're leading people down. Your conversion rate is suffering as a result of it. Okay? So winging it is not going to cut it. Okay? So if you don't have a process, think about the process that you want to lead your leads down. If you do have a process, take a look at that. Are there gaps in it? Right? Are people falling out of that path or veering off the path? And what can you do to optimize your lead conversion to increase the results? Okay. A lot of times people say, I want to grow my business. I need to generate more leads. That's not always the case, right? If you can increase your conversion, you can increase revenue without having to generate more leads. So increasing revenue is not always about increasing leads. You can do it by increasing your conversion rate. And the way you're going to do that is by leading people down a very consistent path that you've optimized completely.

Retention and Referrals

Once I'm converting them and now they're becoming clients, what am I doing to retain those clients long term and what am I doing to generate consistent referrals from those clients? Really important part of the process. It is much easier and much cheaper to continue to work with, to work with existing clients and to do more business with those existing clients. Generating new leads is incredibly expensive. It is much cheaper, much easier to do more business with the existing clients that you have. So what are you doing to retain them and continue to do more business? Do you have a system in place or a process in place to retain clients? Right, the question you need to ask here, there's all kinds of different tactics you can use to retain clients. But I think the easiest thing to place to start is to ask yourself, what are we doing to continue to nurture and build these relationships and encourage people to stay with us? What are we doing? This is not a one time event. It is something that is consistent over time. So what are you doing there? If you can't answer that question, you're not doing anything. Okay? Because just serving people well is not a system that you can depend on. That is a given. People expect that those are table stakes at this point. What else are you doing over and above that? And then from a referral standpoint, do you have a process or a system in place for that? I can't tell you how many times I asked somebody, great, you're generating a ton of leads from referrals. What are you doing to make that happen? And people just say, oh well, we just do a great job for our customers or our clients. Gosh think about how much more you could get from that. If you actually ask people consistently identifying where the best opportunities are in your customer journey to ask for referrals, and then you put a system in place so that you ask for them all the time, how many more referrals do you think you could generate if you did that? What if you put a referral program in place that really encouraged and incentivized clients to give you referrals? So many people don't have these things in place and they're still generating a bunch of referrals. I guarantee you if you put those things in place, you're going to generate significantly more. So let's put a process in a system in place. Look at a referral program that you could put in place to maximize your opportunities there. Okay?

Conclusion: 3 Key Elements That Must Be In Any Marketing Plan

So I hope this has helped. Marketing planning is so important. If you don't have a plan in place, you don't know what your priorities are, which means you don't have clarity. And guess what happens when you don't have clarity? Your stress goes up. And none of us as business owners need additional stress. So planning is so important. And planning also helps eliminate distraction because I know it is very easy to get fall prey to information overload when it comes to marketing. But if you have a plan in place, it helps you to just eliminate that information overload, block out the noise, because you know exactly what you need to focus on to get where you want to go. When you're putting your plan in place, certainly there are going to be very tactical elements, but at a higher level, start to think about what you're doing with your plan, to improve your lead gen , to improve your lead conversion, and to increase your attention and your referrals.

I hope you found this helpful. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. If you need to get clarity on this, hop on over to our website, rialtomarketing.com. It's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com. I would be happy to chat with you and give you some clarity on what your next step should be with your marketing based on where you are and where you want to go.

If you want to get access to the 90 day marketing plan template I mentioned in this episode, head on over to Growthmarketingplan.com. At growthmarketingplan.com, I've got an instructional video that breaks down the template. We'll give you the template samples plans so that you can kind of plug in by numbers and start working on getting your plan in place so that you can see much more consistent repeatable results today.

Thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Until next time. Take care.