You’ve made the product or developed a great service, now you need to create a marketing plan. Your marketing plan defines the strategies that your organization will use to reach target customers, outperform competitors and position your brand. There are many ways to approach marketing your product or service, but they all share one thing in common— they need an implementation plan. Basically, it’s taking a marketing plan and executing it. That means securing the resources, creating a schedule for marketing activities, and so on. Creating an implementation plan for your marketing campaigns it’s an important step in marketing planning because it ensures that everything goes as planned. That requires work, of course, and a lot of coordination between departments, which can be streamlined by project management software. Before we start learning about marketing implementation, let’s define what a marketing plan is. What Is a Marketing Plan? A marketing plan consists of all the strategies that a company will execute to reach its marketing goals over a period of time. Marketing plans usually outline marketing activities on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. Some examples of marketing strategies that can be part of a marketing plan are online advertising, email marketing, content marketing, social media management, events, etc. Marketing plans vary greatly but they all share these basic elements: Marketing Goals: Define the goals that your marketing plan will achieve, and how those align with the strategic goals of your business. Market Research: Find out who your target customers and competitors are, as well as other characteristics of your market. Target Audience: Who are the buyer personas that you attempt to reach with your marketing strategies. Key Performance Indicators (KPI): Every marketing strategy needs key performance indicators to measure its success. Marketing team: You’ll need to assemble a marketing team to achieve your goals. Marketing Budget: There are resources and costs associated with each marketing activity. You’ll need a marketing budget to pay for those. Marketing Strategies: A marketing plan includes several strategies that can be executed simultaneously. Once you’ve created your marketing plan, it’s time for implementation. What Is Marketing Implementation? Marketing implementation is the process of turning your marketing plan into a reality. To do so, you’ll need a marketing implementation plan, a document that explains the steps and resources that are required to execute the marketing strategies that you defined in your marketing plan. Therefore, you can look at the marketing implementation plan as a roadmap that takes you from the idea to the reality of the marketing strategy. As in any project plan, the marketing implementation plan will define the objectives of the campaign and the requirements to fulfill them. The scope is assessed and deliverables outlined. Every task has a due date and is part of a larger schedule. Risks are assessed and plans to respond to them are created. Team member roles and responsibilities are defined, resource management and communication plans are also developed. Benefits of an Effective Marketing Implementation Plan Marketing implementation is a key step in bringing anything to market. It lets you turn your marketing plan into a set of processes. Without a marketing implementation plan, the timeline is vague and work spirals out of control quickly. It’s like throwing away money. Plus, marketing teams are more focused on their work when there’s an implementation plan. It helps them prioritize their work, so the most important work gets done on time. If all this sounds complicated, it is. Marketing projects involve many factors to manage and ensure they’re all accounted for. To keep track of all of them, you need to use project management software. ProjectManager organizes your marketing implementation from planning to execution. Organize tasks and make assignments from the list view to connect teams and foster better collaboration. Try ProjectManager free today! How to Implement your Marketing Plan in 8 Steps The work on a marketing plan begins once the project has been approved. To start on it before then could be a waste of time if the marketing project isn’t approved as there is a lot of market research involved, as well as defining resources and making sure your team is available. Of course, because a marketing plan is work-intensive, you don’t want to begin creating one too late in the process. The marketing plan is your blueprint and to move forward with the marketing project without one is poor project management. Marketing goals come in all sizes. Whatever marketing strategies you’re implementing, follow these steps to create a marketing implementation plan. 1. Set Realistic Expectations for your Marketing Strategies Start by researching other marketing plans and consulting experts to define goals, schedules, teams and budgets that are realistic. Explore risks that could impact the campaign or other issues such as team availability, delivery of resources, training, etc. It’s important that the client, project team and everyone involved in the marketing plan has clear expectations of the marketing implementation plan. 2. Review your Marketing Plan Make sure that the marketing implementation plan you’re preparing aligns with the overall marketing plan that you want to execute. If there are places where the two don’t meet, then you need to edit your marketing implementation plan. 3. Identify Resources What will you need to implement your marketing plan? Those are your resources. This includes content writers, graphic designers, technical workers, project managers, software and so on. Determine your in-house resources and which external resources you’ll need. Do you have an in-house marketing team and, if so, are they equipped to handle all the work, such as social media management? You might need to contract with an external agency or consultancy that have experience outside your team. 4. Get Project Planning Software Using project planning software helps you monitor your marketing implementation plan and connect teams in and out of your organization for better collaboration. They help you collect and share data, set up schedules, make assignments and provide transparency into the process. 5. Document the Marketing Strategies As stated above, your marketing plan will include several marketing strategies. You’ll need to document all of them so that you don’t miss anything and make sure the information is served to the project team. This creates unity of purpose and profitable customer action. Create a summary that includes the who, what, why and how of each strategy in your marketing plan. 6. Create Workflow Take your marketing plan and turn it into actionable tasks. Then, place those tasks on a timeline. Each of these marketing activities should have a deadline, priority and owner. They can be collected on a kanban board and, if possible, have notifications to alert teams of pending due dates or changes to the work. 7. Manage your Marketing Project You’ve just created a marketing implementation plan for your marketing project, but you’re not done yet. To make sure that everyone is doing what they need to do, there must be some type of monitoring. Creating some form of dashboard to track your progress can be of great benefit. This allows issues to be identified quickly and plans revised to stay on track. 8. Measure Results Another way to track progress is by getting detailed reports on various marketing project metrics, such as time, tasks and costs. These figures will be valuable to your stakeholders, who have a vested interest in the project and want to have updates from time to time. What Is Marketing Implementation and Control? Marketing implementation is a way to implement your marketing plan through detailed project planning that aligns with the overall strategic goals of the organization. Control is simply the way you ensure that the milestones you set on your implementation plan are being met. For example, if you’re publishing a blog on your website, the goal might be reaching a certain level of traffic to generate leads and sales for your business. You create a marketing implementation plan to achieve this marketing goal and then set milestones of the amount of traffic you want to reach within a week, month, quarter, etc. Control is addressed in the implementation marketing plan through monitoring and tracking progress. This lets marketing managers evaluate the project and ensure it’s meeting the benchmarks assigned in the plan. That might be the clicks on an email newsletter that sends readers to your signup page, a specific increase in revenue or more broadly brand awareness. Marketing implementation and control comes with leadership from management, the coordination of departments in the organization, good communication, the proper application of human resources, organizational resources, structure and good relationships between departments. Keeping the teams incentivized is also key. Marketing Implementation Plan Example Let’s take a look at a fictitious marketing plan, which will consist of only one marketing strategy, say an email marketing campaign. Let’s follow the steps outlined in the marketing implementation plan above and see how it plans out in a real-life scenario. First, you’ll need to define the goals that your marketing strategy will achieve. In this case, the marketing goals of the company might be to increase traffic to the site and with that increased traffic boost signups for the service being offered. This increases revenue, which will help achieve the company’s goal of more profitability. Now you’ll need to document how your marketing strategy will be executed. The email marketing campaign consists in sending out promotional emails to your mailing list, with the expectation that 10% will open and 2% click-through for a free trial of your product. If only 1% of those sign up for the paid version, revenue will increase to achieve the company’s strategic goal for the quarter. How are you going to achieve that goal? The steps for your implementation plan would be to define your target audience, create your emails and find the tools that you need to distribute them. Now that you know what needs to be done, you’ll need to secure resources. Let’s start with a content marketing writer who will be assigned or contracted to develop copy that speaks to the issues the potential customer would like resolved. Additionally, in order to create the plan, manage the work and deliver the email newsletter to the mailing list, planning tools and a content delivery system will have to be used. Once the content is delivered, edited and reviewed it will be able to be sent out to your mailing list. Of course, for all this to happen, a workflow must be designed. An example workflow is two days to write, one day to edit, one day to make sure the email list is accurate and then send off the email. You could make assignments, add due dates and set priorities to make sure everything follows your schedule. Throughout this process, a project or content marketing manager will be monitoring the production of the email newsletter, from when the draft is delivered, edited and okayed for publication, to make sure all deadlines are being met. Finally, the project manager will report on the success of the marketing implementation plan. How many people were engaged by the email newsletter, what percentage opened and clicked through? At the end of the quarter, did revenue increase, and if so, how much of that could be attributed to new customers? Marketing Implementation Tips Using project management software is critical for keeping all the balls in the air, but there are other things you can do to help your marketing implementation plan succeed. For one, don’t rely only on words. Creating a visual representation of the marketing implementation plan can make it more accessible, such as a timeline or visualizing the workflow on kanban boards. Goals should be realistic and aligned with the strategic plan, but also have measurable results and milestones. That means setting a baseline so you have the data to compare your actual progress with the marketing implementation plan. Never forget that marketing implementation plans live or die on communication. Being able to share the marketing implementation plan with your team as well as keeping them connected no matter where or when they’re working is crucial to success. How ProjectManager Helps with Marketing Implementation ProjectManager is a cloud-based software that delivers real-time data to help monitor the marketing implementation plan as it is happening. Managers can monitor internal and external teams to make sure deadlines are being met. Go Agile with Kanban Boards Kanban boards are ideal for creating workflows. You can customize columns to align with your production cycle, such as the creation of content, editing of content, review and publish content. The board view is visual and aligns with a more agile way of working. The content team can see what tasks have the highest priority and manage their backlog, while manages have transparency into their process and can add resources to keep them working at capacity. Switch Views and Plan on Gantt Charts Managers can set up the marketing plan on a Gantt chart, which links dependencies and sets milestones. They can filter for the critical path without any complex calculations, and set a baseline to compare actual to planned progress. Not everyone on the marketing team is going to want to use a Gantt and with our tool they get multiple project views to work how they want. Designers can use the visual board view and content providers might prefer the robust list view. Track Progress on Real-Time Dashboards To keep a keen eye on the marketing implementation plan, ProjectManager’s real-time dashboards automatically collect status updates from the marketing department and any agency you’re contracted with, calculating data into easy-to-read graphs and charts. For more detailed information, one-click reports on workload, project variance and more give you deep insight. ProjectManager is award-winning software that organizes your work to help connect teams and streamline processes. Used by tens of thousands of teams across the globe at organizations as diverse as NASA, the Bank of America and Ralph Lauren, our tool helps you work more productively. See for yourself by trying ProjectManager free today. 10 Email Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Next Campaign 10 Marketing Tips for Small Businesses That Cost $0 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Account-Based Marketing How Marketing Teams Use ProjectManager How to Make a Marketing Plan Like a Project Manager