A plan outlines all the elements of how you intend to achieve a particular goal.

When it comes to creating a marketing plan an engagement strategy is one of those essential elements that you employ to help achieve your business goals.

So, let’s take a step back so we know where our engagement strategy sits in the scheme of our overall marketing plan, and we’ll start with the structure of a marketing plan.

You just need to google ‘marketing plan’ and you will find hundreds of excellent templates and explanations of how to create a marketing plan.

In my experience the key to success, as is the case in most areas of life, is to KEEP IT SIMPLE! There is no use in having a big, beefy 150-page marketing plan document that is too overwhelming for anyone to ever refer back to.

Do your research and then take the time to work out a simple outline of your marketing activities (be prepared to be a flexible too – as you measure your plan’s activities you may need to tweak your plan based on what works and what doesn’t).

A marketing plan for your business should include:

1. Research your industry, your market you are operating within, and your product or services. Research will help you define your market and positioning of your business. Spend the time here to put in the work. It can make life so much easier in the long run when you have an intimate understand of what you do, where do you it and who your customers are.
   
   
2. Define your target market (yes, you can have more than one!) – break down your target customers into segments. Segment are groups of your customers who share the same characteristics. For example my ‘bingo player’ target in a club may be dominated by 60yrs+ females, they visit the venue mostly earlier in the day and frequent the café and take advantage of the seniors meal discounts earlier in the week. The customers who I target for my cocktail bar however may be a 25-40yr old female professional market who come in only at night, prefer higher end wines and tapas.
   
   It’s important to make this distinction as these markets will be responsive to different offers and different modes of communication.
   
   To define these segments you’ll want to understand:
   What are they interested in?
   What needs they have?
   Do your competitors meet these needs?
   How can you do it better?
   
   
3. SWOT – an exercise that helps you work out your:
   Strengths
   Weaknesses
   Opportunities
   Threats
   
   Strengths and weaknesses deal with the internal side of things and opportunities and threats deal with the external e.g. A strength may be that you are renowned for the best Club roast in the area, a threat may be that a venue nearby has installed a new kids playground. A SWOT is a great activity to carry out with a cross section of your team – there may be a stunning idea or opportunity that comes out of the exercise!
   
   
4. Set your business goals and objectives – this is where you outline the strategies that will get you to your goals!
   
   Engagement is of course a strategy that everyone should have in there. Why? Because engaged customers BUY from you, you don’t have to SELL to them. Your engagement strategies may include the promotions you run to certain segments, how you interact with your customers on social media, times of the day you send out messages etc. We will go into this in more detail in a future episode of The Engagement Gurus!
   
   
5. Marketing budget – work out what you have to invest in your marketing budget. You may want to run a national campaign but do you have the funds to back it up? Prioritise what you think will give you the best bang for your bucks!
   
   
6. Measurement – you’ve probably heard ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it’. Measuring your activities before you roll out the next campaign is so important. Maybe you aren’t getting the results you want. Your offer might be off target, your messaging might need to be tweaked or your delivery may be missing your audience. Measure what worked and what didn’t and refine your planned activities from here.

For more tips on how to engage your market listen to The Engagement Gurus podcast, a series to help hospitality venues better engage their market to create successful businesses.