This year Turnkey took on a project to develop a marketing plan for one company. That ended up turning into four projects, designing plans for four different companies. Marketing firms were something that each of these customers had looked into and then not pursued. When they spoke with the firms, they felt like each team was very skilled at what they did but they couldn’t communicate to those teams exactly what they were looking for. Since they weren’t sure how to direct any team in a way that made them feel confident, none of the companies I worked with had hired a marketing firm. But that didn’t alleviate the real pain: they knew they needed to be marketing and generating awareness, there was still no one working on that, and no clear plan for what to do about it.
Turnkey has also felt the pain of this, so we decided to approach it from another angle: we dreamed about what we wanted to be able to accomplish for every company, then we created a plan to help us do that, and we tested it ourselves. Turnkey’s Marketing Plan Template is 12 steps that challenge you to dream, require you to plan, and then reveal what to do. We felt that if we could make something simple enough for any company to build their plan from, (even us!) those companies could appropriately value marketing and be able to direct the teams performing it. To be honest, we found that the plan was pretty easy to come up with, and very easy to go through with other companies, or even individuals. In fact, Turnkey’s weekly newsletter is one thing that came from us going through our own plan!
Once those plans had been established, there was a clear amount of work to be done for the ROI expected. It actually turned out that a couple of those companies DID need outside help with their marketing in order to achieve the goals they had set out. Those firms of talented people now had clear value and these companies could work with them! At TKC, we also have someone working on the marketing, someone who has clear goals and expectations, and our plan made this easy.
The challenge this week is to move beyond knowing that you “should be marketing” and to create a plan for what will happen. If that seems overwhelming, we built a template to help you, and we’d love to share it with you! Connect with us on LinkedIn or visit our website and let’s move you from dreaming about it, to doing it.
You can see this on my LinkedIn if you’d like