Your Simple Guide to a 2023 Marketing Plan
As we’re wrapping up 2022 (and wrapping our holiday gifts!), thoughts naturally turn to our goals, hopes, and dreams for 2023. When it comes to 2023 marketing planning, taking a look at the progress you’ve made in 2022 and setting out a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) plan for reaching your 2023 goals should be top of your end of year list. This can seem daunting – especially when you’d rather be relaxing with some eggnog – but we have some tips and simple steps to get you started.
Evaluate Last Year
Now is the time to revisit 2022’s goals and really evaluate your results. Hopefully, you’ve been monitoring this throughout the year, but now is the time to get a complete picture of the year’s progress. Take a close look at the goals you set for 2022 and do a deep dive into what you did to meet those goals, what worked, and what didn’t work.
Here are a few things to pay particular attention to:
- How much has your company changed/grown in the last year? What does this mean for your goals/strategy next year?
- What channels really drove value for you in a meaningful way last year?
- Are there any trends in customer feedback over the past year? What can you learn from that?
Take Advantage of Reporting Tools
At The Simple Department, we love a good report. We’re just cool like that. Monitoring your own performance through regular reporting is crucial. A report that can give you insight into what your competitors are doing and how it’s working is icing on the reporting cake (delicious!). That’s why we offer (free!) custom reports that offer insights into your competitors’ marketing performance and how you stack up. Consider it a holiday gift from us to you.
This report provides you with unique insights into what your competitors are doing well when it comes to social content, giving you the inspiration you need to come up effective creator campaigns and engaging social content that drives real results for your company.
The Explore report is a social listening report, meaning it allows you to check on your brand, competitors, and industry media coverage. You can benchmark your performance against competitors’ PR, SEO, and social media activities, as well as gauge customer sentiment – aka how your audience perceives your brand in relation to competitors and the industry.
Get 2023 Marketing Planning Started with SMART Goals
You’ve looked at your 2022 performance. You’ve looked at your competitors. Now it’s time to really dig into your 2023 marketing plan. If you weren’t using the SMART goals framework last year, you’re likely kicking yourself now, because your 2022 goals were poorly defined, hard to measure, or too ambitious. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Thinking about these parameters during yearly planning helps you make sure that you’re setting goals you can actually reach in a year, eliminates the risk of setting vague goals, and sets and makes tracking progress much simpler.
Here’s an example of what a SMART goal looks like:
Our goal is to [quantifiable objective] by [timeframe or deadline]. [Key players or teams] will accomplish this goal by [what steps you’ll take to achieve the goal]. Accomplishing this goal will [result or benefit].
For example, our Creative Director’s holiday goal is: My goal is to stay sane until January 3rd. I will accomplish this by taking frequent walks alone, stress-baking gingerbread, and hiding my toddler’s advent calendar for a couple days when I need some extra sugar. Accomplishing this goal will result in happy holiday memories and not overspending on Boxing Day.
Make Sure You’re Tracking the Right Metrics
Setting SMART goals should help you ensure that you are setting goals you can measure – but choosing how to measure your goals is also key. Deciphering what metrics really relate to what goals can be tricky, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of paying attention to vanity metrics. What does that mean?
What is a Vanity Metric?
In essence, there are two types of metrics– vanity metrics and actionable metrics. Actionable metrics provide actionable information about business performance, whereas vanity metrics might make you look good, but don’t reflect real performance, and don’t provide any data that informs marketing strategy. Marketing agencies are notorious for relying on vanity metrics because they’re exciting to share, and easy to get.
Dig Into The Data
When looking at your data, ask yourself: how does this number relate to your actual goals? If you’re looking at an increase in social media followers (a classic vanity metric), are you also seeing an increase in traffic to your website from social media? And are those social media referrals leading to purchases? How much actual revenue can be tracked back to social media?
Any metric can be a vanity metric if it’s surface level and not relevant to your goals. But conversely, vanity metrics can become actionable metrics with a little more digging. All you need to do stay focused on your goals, and search for the context and nuance in your data.
Start Your 2023 Marketing Planning With the Simple Department!
No matter what your 2023 marketing planning looks like or what your objectives are, we have one main piece of advice – keep it simple! Agencies can make setting and achieving your marketing goals seem complicated and difficult with their unnecessary processes, pointless ego trips, and general noise that getting in the way. That’s how they stay in business! The Simple Department is different. We think marketing relationships are at their best when they’re simple, and we love using our knowledge, experience, and capabilities to help you get awesome marketing stuff done.
If you need help with any aspect of your marketing plan, let us know!