The last day of 2007. The day before a whole year of possibilities! Did you spend December planning out your marketing? Or is that your first order of business come January 2nd?

Well, I know some folks hate, loathe, and despise doing marketing plans, so let me suggest a very easy one (just 3 steps!), inspired by my lovely wife and business partner.

In looking back over the year, Lani discovered that we:

Wrote 15 articles…

Sent out seven press releases…

Recorded 10 ADD Info Summits…

Landed 10 speaking engagements…

Attended five high-profile business events…

Created six information products…

And wrote this, our 100th blog post of the year!

We asked ourselves if, had written these out verbatim at the beginning of 2007 as our goals for the year, would we have believed we could pull this whole shebang off? The answer, in all honesty, was a resounding “No way!”

Which leads me to the easy 3-step marketing planning thing:

Step 1: List everything you did for marketing last year.

Step 2: It’s likely that 20% of those activities brought in 80% of your revenue last year. Which activities are they? List the top 3-5 that gave you the best return on investment.
Step 3: Do more of (and spend more on) those biggest-bang-for-the-buck activities next year than you did last year.

At the risk of bogging you down in more percentages, here’s a good guideline from Greg Stuart, co-author of What Sticks. Initially given as advice for allocating advertising dollars, the concept works just as well for the broader marketing picture:

Spend 70% of your marketing money on what’s already working; spend 20% tweaking things that you like but aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped; and spend the last 10% trying something entirely new.

I’m calling this the Monday Morning Marketing Plan because it’s like the concept of Monday-morning quarterbacking - analyzing and making judgments on the basis of hindsight. As marketing plans go, it doesn’t get much simpler. Do more of what worked, and less of what didn’t.

Now on behalf of Lani and myself, we wish you a wonderful, joyous, and prosperous New Year!

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Posted in Fun With Marketing |

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.