Fine Tuning Your Plan

What Does This Mean?

Fine tuning your plan means evaluating its success year on year and making the changes required to continue to succeed with it. Your marketing plan will be tailor-made by you to achieve your goals and objectives. Ideally you will create a new updated marketing plan each year.

Why Is It Important?

Twelve months is a long time and you may find that things change. Your original plans will need fine tuning to work alongside any new or additional priorities. The plan you have created will provide you with a solid and well-considered structure. This may need some flexibility, a contingency fund, or the benefit of trial and error to get it absolutely right.

As you start to implement your plan it will become live and active in the real world. That is where the real learning will begin.

Your Challenge

This may be the first time that you have ever given so much thought to a marketing plan for your business. It may be the one and only time you have articulated and written down all the ideas that you have had in your head for many years. It may have required an effort to do this. Once something of this nature is complete it can be easy to think ‘that’s it now I’m done’. If only it were that simple. Just as the seasons change the needs and desires of your marketplace will too. You will also change how you think and the ideas you have today will have developed further in the months and years ahead. Nothing stands still, and especially not your marketing plan.

How To Fine Tune Your Plan

As you will be actioning your plan week by week and month by month you will get the opportunity to test out some of your strategies. As you see how well they work you may fine tune as you go. Your marketing plan is your working structure that needs to be referred to from time to time. It should not be kept in a drawer out of sight otherwise it will be forgotten. Holding a regular, monthly marketing meeting is a useful way of creating an opportunity to review what is being implemented on a regular basis. Give the meeting a structure that keeps you focused on the key elements of your plan. This meeting can be with everybody who is involved with the marketing of your business.

Sample Marketing Meeting Structure

• Highlights of the month.
• What marketing activities have we implemented this month?
• How well have they worked – what is our evidence?
• What could we fine tune or improve?
• What have we got planned for next month?
• Allocation of tasks and responsibilities.
• Marketing goals.
• Action plan for the month.

Your Special Response Checklist

• How well is the plan working?
• Are we using our resources wisely?
• What if anything is likely to affect this plan over the next 12 months?
• What else do we need to consider or add to the plan?

How To Use This Information

See your plan as a live working document and keep it close to you. Creating a marketing plan should become an annual discipline. It will ensure that you keep committed to the important thought process that is vital to enabling the creation of a profit-making, not a loss-making, marketing plan.

84 Maintaining Awareness And Learning From Experience

What Does This Mean?

Maintaining awareness is about keeping your eyes and ears open and knowing what is going on in your business. It is about being open to feedback, being able to take a step back from time to time and see what is happening. It is about recognising what is needed to move forward. Learning from experience will allow you to stop doing things that are obviously not working quickly and easily.

Why Is It Important?

Maintaining awareness is vital to the ongoing success of your business marketing. Continuous learning allows you and your business to grow. In a world that is continually changing and with greater and greater pressure to be better, faster and slicker, if you are not learning and moving with the times, you will soon get left behind. Your eyes and ears must be open and alert; you cannot afford to assume anything will continue in the same way indefinitely.