Most of us solopreneurs just want someone to tell us what our next move should be to get to the next level in our business. Building a marketing roadmap is key to achieving your business goals. A marketing plan gives you a course of action to build brand awareness and target customers that are likely to buy or be interested in your offerings. Creating the plan is easy when you have a vision of where you want to go.
In order to build your marketing road map, you need to have a solid foundation and strategic plan in place
Why?
Because, once you know where your life and business are heading, then you can build the road to get there.
Strategic planning is the single most impactful activity a business can perform to help them grow and achieve their goals. Click here to read my blog on how to create your strategic plan and then download your FREE Workbook here!
Once you have a solid strategy for your biz and know what success looks like, you can layer your marketing plan on top to meet your overall goals.
The key is to not plan on doing everything, just those activities that are relevant to your strategy and to your audience.
Marketing 101: Know the Funnel
Funnel Goals:
Awareness = When someone is aware of your brand
Interest = When someone becomes interest in your offerings
Desire = When someone wants to acquire your brand product or services
Conversion = When someone turns from a potential customer into a purchasing customer
Remember, even before you start planning your marketing roadmap, you need to keep in mind where your customers are.
Consistency
Consistency wins when it comes to any marketing strategy. Your objective is to be ever present in their mind when they are ready to purchase and you can do so both through organic and paid marketing.
Now, let's get to the good stuff that will make you some money!
Here are the 10 steps you Need to do when Creating a Marketing Roadmap:
- Know your brand message
- Identify your target customer
- Know your goals for the year determine what success looks like for that goal.
- Identify the Channels for reaching your audience.
- Have a Solid Style Guide
- Make sure your website is SEO optimized
- Plan your content strategy surrounding each goal
- Plan your email strategy surrounding each goal
- Orchestrate your social media strategy surrounding each goal
- Plan your paid and organic marketing strategy surrounding each goal
1: Know your Brand Message
A brand message is your core business idea. Your brand message should provide a solution to your customer’s problems while providing a sense of who you are. It should make you stand out and also speak to your target customer.
Your brand message is the thread that keeps your business woven together. Knowing your brand message off the top of your head breeds confidence and shows your authority in your space.
When you know you’re what, who and why customers will start to recognize your brand voice and begin to trust you.
It is especially important if your brand (and it should be) on multiple platforms.
Ensuring that your brand is communicating the same message and voice across platforms will build a streamlined message for your customer.
If you get this right you will be ahead of the 90% of companies that do not.
“About 95% of marketers use multiple channels to communicate with their customers, yet only 10% coordinate their messaging and execution across these channels.”
-Postfunnel.com
2: Identify your Target Customer
Knowing your customer is essential in your marketing roadmap. If you break down the time you could spend with the wrong customers, and convert your time into money; you realize how important it is to identify the right customers.
The Two Terms you Should Know: Target Market & Target Customer.
A target market is a group of consumers that you aim to sell and market your products and services toward.
Your target customer is the ideal customer that you aim to sell and market your products toward. One of the easiest ways to identify who this person is for your business is to create an ideal customer avatar.
An avatar is a fictitious representation of your target customer and is within your target market segment.
Understanding your Ideal Customer Avatar (a.k.a. your target customer), is crucial to saving money, time and reaching your customer.
Wanna land the ideal customer for your biz? Click here to download your FREE Worksheet that will help you identify exactly what is right for your business!
3: Know Your Goals
Identify what your goals are for the year. If your goal is to just sell more of the product that you already have in stock, that is a great start. Maybe it is to get more clients this year.
Whatever that goal, make sure that you make it a SMART goal.
- S: Specific
- M: Measurable
- A: Attainable
- R: Relevant
- T: Time bound
Here are a couple examples of SMART Goals to get you started:
- Example 1: I want to sell 20% more of my Daily Planners by January of 2021.
- Example 2: I want to acquire 4 new clients per month within my coaching program in 2020.
4: Identify Your Ideal Advertising Channels
Identify the ideal advertising channels that you have and want to leverage for reaching your audience and selling your product.
A channel is the platform in which you market to your customer.
Some Advertising Channels may Include:
- Website
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- SEO
- Word of Mouth
5: Have a Solid Style Guide
Leverage your style guide to direct the branding that will be used in each piece that your audience sees.
A style guide is a visual blueprint for your brand. It is used to have collective alignment on your brand assets.
Your style guide contains the guidelines for everything that has to do with the look and feel of your brand.
Your Style Guide should include the Following Elements:
- Logo
- Colors
- Typography
- Brand Story / Mood
- Brand Elements / Textures
- Voice
- Signature
To create one for your brand, click here to read my blog post on the 7 Must Have Style Guide Essentials!
Once you have your style guide it will help keep your marketing consistent and your message clear to your audience. Remember, anytime that you create content for your audience it should go through this lens.
Wanna create yours? Here is a FREE template below to get started!
6: Make Sure your Website is SEO Optimized
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Making sure that your website is SEO friendly is so important to gaining organic traffic (meaning the traffic to your site you do not pay for).
Here are some easy ways to make sure that your website is SEO friendly:
- Head to https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer/ for a free tool that will analyze your site and any opportunities to fix your SEO.
- When uploading images to your website be sure to add ALT Text to your image (describes what the image is (google cannot read images) to create greater SEO.
- If you have a WordPress website, make sure that you are using Yoast SEO.
- WordPress is the most SEO friendly platform. They provide SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO to assist in ensuring each page on your website is SEO friendly. With Yoast you will be able to see the keywords necessary to ensure that Google and other search engines can easily rank your site.
- Use a keyword search when you are creating your campaigns. Check out Google’s free tool, Keyword Planner. If you need generic keyword ideas, this tool is a gem.
- Improve your site speed with this free tool https://tools.pingdom.com/
7: Plan your Content Strategy Surrounding Each Goal
A content strategy is planning creation and delivery of your strategy to your audience. Your content is the message that you are delivering and the way in which it is presented.
Ask yourself, “what are you creating, why are you creating it and where are you putting it?”
When it comes to the type of content you create, it needs to correlate directly back to your goal.
For example, remember the example I shared above: if your goal is to sell more journals this year, then your content creation should:
- Topic: Journals
- Message: Show the customer benefits
- Formats: Multi-Channel
- Meet your customer on the media channels that your customers interacts with.
Second Example: If you are trying to acquire more clients this year
- Topic: Appealing to Customer Acquisition
- Message: Types of services you provide and your key message + the customer benefits
- Formats: Determine if you will be using cold and/or warm advertising methods as well as other more organic methods and then format to those channels. i.e.) paid advertising, organic advertising and social media.
8: Plan Your Email Strategy Surrounding each Goal
Email Strategy is leveraging your email list to entice your followers to buy your product or services.
Creating an email strategy should be formatted in such a way that you are leveraging a drip campaign method:
“a form of automated sales outreach. It’s comprised of a series of emails automatically sent to a specific audience after they take a specific action”
Hubspot.com
Here is How to Plan your Strategy for your Email Drip Campaigns:
- Identify the goal for your drip campaign
- Determine how someone ends up in this campaign
- Determine what they need to know to make a decision (this will be priming information)
- Decide how many times your drip campaign will go to your potential customer
- Create the content (make your content authentic, appealing and scannable (a.k.a. your customer will get your drift by scanning headlines and bolded words))
- Measure it (take a closer look at open rates and conversion, if something isn’t working, fix it)
So, what should you put in your emails?
How to Write the Email Sequence for a Drip Campaign
Here are a couple of approaches that help bring the customer along in a NON-Spammy way: cause no one likes that shit and you will get unsubscribers REAL quick if you get all salesy.
I use Convert Kit, they have an awesome platform and make a few great recco’s for email drips:
- Welcome – Introduce yourself
- Teach- Tell em’ something they don’t know
- Story – Give them insight into something entertaining and prime them again on your brand
- Life Update – Talk about a change, decision, adjustment, and how they can help support you.
- Objections – FAQ’s on your product or service, testimonials that fight those objections and benefits you can provide with a CTA to buy.
For more approaches and more ideas on drip campaigns check these resources out:
9: Plan your Social Media Strategy Surrounding each Goal
A social media strategy is your plan of everything you plan to do across social media channels and when. All of these interactions on social media should serve a purpose and layer up to your goals.
Social Media Strategy Example:
| Goal | Social Media Goal | Metric |
| Drive Brand Growth: Get More Brand Recognition | Awareness: (shows current and potential target customers / followers) | Followers, Shares |
| Drive Sales: Sell 20% More Journals = addl. 2500 journals | Conversion: (demonstrate the effectiveness of your engagement with your followers) | Website Clicks / email sign ups etc. |
| Drive Customer Loyalty | Engagement (shows audience interaction) | Comments / likes and mentions / reposts |
| Improve Customer Retention | Consumer Empathy (feeling and thoughts surrounding your brand) | Testimonials and ongoing sentiment of your social platform |
Use the S.M.A.R.T. Goal framework as we talked about above to create goals for your strategy.
For instance, are you looking for a certain number of new followers or is the goal to have customer click through to your website?
Is the goal to have customers convert directly on Instagram?
Think about the following when planning your social goals:
- Acquisition – Acquire more customers
- Retention – Retain Current Customers
- Win-Back – Customers who haven’t shopped with you in over two years
More Social Media Goal Considerations:
- And will it require a budget for paid ads?
- Does your strategy differ from paid versus organic?
- Typically, yes. A paid ad still needs to be authentic, but the CTA is often more pronounced where organic results will come from daily positing which may not have a such a direct CTA approach.
Automation and Systemizing of Social Media
First, don’t kill yourself, if you are the only one doing marketing or a solopreneur then you need to AUTOMATE RIGHT NOW!
It’s no secret that keeping up with Instagram and Facebook is also a full time job, so I highly recommend that you batch your work and use a free service such as buffer to schedule your postings.
That way your postings will go out when you want them to, and you don’t have to get caught up in the distraction of social media daily.
As far as planning your SM strategy, I currently use Trello to plan my social strategy and blogs. Both of these are free resources.
10: Plan your Paid and Organic Ad Strategy Surrounding Each Goal
Display Ads:
Display advertising is usually a paid advertisement that is an image with copy, graphics or video used for commercial purposes on a third-party site. You can either recruit an agency to help with this or try to rock it yourself.
These can be affordable you certainly can contact your preferred third-party site directly or you can use a service like Google Display Network to help you distribute your ad and filter the audience of your choosing based on demographic, geographic or behavior types of targeting. Here is an example below.
Paid Social Media Ads:
Social Media advertising is a great way to effectively and efficiently target your audience. All Social Media outlets offer paid advertising options. Be sure to look at where your audience naturally gathers traffic as this will be your more obvious choice to invest in.
Paid Social Media ads can come in all shapes.
Facebook Ads
Facebook photo ads for example include 125 characters of text, a headline, link description and call to action buttons. Here is an example for your reference.
Facebook Video Ads have a multitude of options and range from short mobile video ads up to 240-minute promoted videos designed to be watched on desktop.
Facebook also offers carousel ads, story ads, Slideshow ads, instant experience ads, messenger ads, lead generation ads, and collection ads.
Instagram ads
Instagram features four types of ads:
- Photo
- Video
- Carousel
- Collection
These types of photo or video ads look like a regular post but will have sponsored on the upper left corner. Below is an example of a sponsored post on Instagram.
Carousel ads are a grouping of photos that viewers can swipe right to see more. If and when using this method, be sure to create a cohesive campaign through keeping the same theme of photos and visually similar.
Collection ads feature a cover image or video and several product shots for an experience. They also don’t include a headline, but they do allow up to 90 characters of text.
There are so many other options across social media networks. For more information on other social media sites click here.
How and Where to Post:
You can prep these ads yourself or go through a social media agency to help you with these types of ad buys.
For business to business social media ads your best bet is to use LinkedIn or Instagram.
When working to reach your customers, there are multiple options as well. For display ads and top of the funnel (meaning cold audience) ads, you can use Facebook Marketing.
For warmer audiences, you can target your audiences on social media where your customers hang out:
- Google+
- Tumblr
- Twitter etc.
Retargeting
For warmer audiences that already know about your product or service you can remarket or retarget to them.
Retargeting is leveraging a recent marketing campaign to retarget or remarket to individuals who have visited your website. It is a great next step in converting awareness to a sale.
- The type of re-targeting that applies the most to this instance is pixel-based retargeting.
- This is when a user visits your website, leaving it before making a purchase. Click here to find out more on how to do this.
For more on paid advertising check out this great resource.
Next Steps
So, you have a plan, now how to manage it…
Business changes, ebbs and flows. Things happen, so although you created a goal 3 months ago, there may have been changes that alter your strategy, budget etc., so you should plan on reviewing your marketing road map every 3 months.
Think of it like reviewing your business quarterly, something that you should do, anyway right?!
That said, 4 times per year look at your goals for the year and ask yourself the following questions:
- Am I still on track?
- If not, what do I need to do to adjust?
- What do I need to do in the next 3 months to hit my milestone goals?
It is okay to pivot, and as a savvy business owner you should make changes when it is the right move for your business.
Final Thoughts
If there is one thing you take away from this, then do this: Create a Strategic Plan for your biz prior to layering in a marketing roadmap. It is the most commonly missed step among business owners.
Think about it…
Would you road trip across North America without any sort of map? No, so then why wouldn’t you do the same for your business.
Hey and P.S. if this feels foreign to you, I would love to help you craft your strategy.
I specialize in helping businesses create strategic and marketing road maps to grow their biz. I offer a 45-minute free session to make sure we are the right fit and understand how I can help you grow your business and make more money this year!
To recap, the 10 steps you need to do when creating a marketing roadmap are:
- Know your brand message
- Identify your target customer
- Know your goals for the year determine what success looks like for that goal.
- Identify your channels for reaching your audience.
- Leverage your style guide to direct the branding that will be used in each piece that your audience sees
- Make sure your website is SEO optimized
- Plan your content strategy surrounding each goal
- Plan your email strategy surrounding each goal
- Orchestrate your social media strategy surrounding each goal
- Plan your paid and organic marketing strategy surrounding each goal
If you can become versed in these 10 things, you will be well on your way to growth this year! Best of luck and if you need a little help, give me a shout!
