Have you created your marketing plan for 2009?

Still hard to believe its 2009 already. Hopefully your years is off to a productive beginning and you are embarking upon your new marketing plan. You have created your new marketing plan, right? If so…

• what are the objectives?
• what is your expected ROI?
• What tactics will you implement to achieve your objectives?
• How will you measure your tactics to ensure success?

I posted this same question on the Linking Indiana group of LinkedIn and Michael Seidle asked the same question back to me. So, I thought I would blog my response…

We are launching our new marketing campaign this month to guide the growth of Three Hats Marketing. Our campaign is broken down into two primary categories – Branding/Awareness and Lead Generation. We are still a young company so our marketing focus at this point is on awareness and lead generation rather than client retention, staff recruitment or to demonstrate our community involvement. All of which we will use marketing for, but in due time.

We are utilizing social media and networking as our primary tactics to support our objectives. We are utilize tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Smaller Indiana and Facebook to increase our brand awareness and establish relationships with vendors & partners. The measurement of brand awareness is tough, but we use tools like Twitter Search, Technorati & Google Alerts to measure how many conversations we are a part of, and our total impressions on the targeted sites/communities. Additionally, we’ll measure the effectiveness of our brand awareness by the amount and level of quality with our partners and vendors relationships.

As for lead generation, we’ve found that in selling marketing consultation is all about building a relationship and trust. To accomplish this, we’ve identified 5-6 organizations we invest our time in via general attendance and board memberships. The monetary cost associated with networking is relatively low but the time commitment can be high. Keeping in mind that our time has a worth, we have expectations of how much time we invest in each group and measure that against the leads and relationships we are able to establish. Each account manager has a target for active leads and projects and we hit each month.

For Three Hats Marketing, the chase is not found in gaining the most leads/clients but rather the right ones! Our cost per sale can be high – sometimes up to 4-5k, but we are working to build long term relationships and most of our clients are repeat or have annual engagements.

To make sure we stay the course, we are measuring our primary activities monthly and performing more frequent spot checks occasionally. We have some ambitious goals this year and look forward to executing our plan to achieve them!

Have you created your marketing plan for 2009???