Marketing Planning 101: Part II, What a Marketing Plan Is NOT
This is the second in a series of articles on creating a strategic marketing plan for your business. Part I, “What Exactly IS a Strategic Marketing ...
November 20, 2018
Our name says it all.
Effective marketing is clear, strategic and focused. It tells your unique story in a compelling way. It’s focused on goals. It delivers results. That’s where we started in 2003, and that’s still our core philosophy today.
Approach
When president Brenda Murphree founded the agency over 11 years ago, she saw a missing link in the marketing options available to small businesses. Without an in-house marketing department or much budget for agency support, most small businesses were susceptible to the ‘latest and loudest’ method of planning – choosing tactics from the most persuasive providers, instead of finding providers that supported their plan.
So Brenda decided to create a small agency focused on small business goals, providing a suite of integrated marketing communications – public relations, creative services, print and web design – with a clear focus on strategy.
Process
From the beginning we’ve had the annoying habit of asking the unexpected. Instead of starting with ‘What would you like us to do?’ we ask ‘What goals do you need to meet?’
Today our work is more technical and data-driven, with the rapid expansion of digital marketing, and our clients face an even bigger array of options, but our process remains pretty much the same:
- Using the ClearPoint discover process, we find out where you want to be in the next 12 to 24 months, using metrics that matter for your business.
- We create a strategy to get you there.
- Then and only then, we select the specific tactics best suited to carry that out.