Over the past eleven episodes of this podcast, we have gone through the various stages of preparing a great marketing plan. Now we’re going to discuss how to put your plan into action.

Do it!

At this point, you’ve spent a good deal of time conceptualizing, planning and strategizing. If you’re happy with everything you have put in place up to this point, there is only one thing left to do: go ahead and do it! The plan is in place, and it just needs to be implemented. Some people can get a bit nervous at this stage, though. One way to move forward is to get clear about what resources you have to hand, what your budget is and how it can be allocated.

You don’t necessarily have to implement your marketing strategy at full throttle right from day one. There is a process to getting a marketing plan going, and you can progress cautiously at first as you test your strategy. For the first couple of months, you put the plan into action, gather data, see what works, and adjust where necessary. Within about six months after you first start drawing up your strategy, you should have everything running optimally, with a really clear idea of what works. To a certain extent, your campaigns will have gathered momentum on their own at that stage, as you have adjusted, corrected and optimized as needed. It’s then that you can start scaling up, increasing spending where necessary, and allowing the strategy and tactics to roll forward and do what you intended them to do.

The number one thing that businesses do wrong, is to get impatient in the early stages of implementation. Be careful of agencies that promise big results in the first month. The best digital marketing plans are those that roll out gradually and are adjusted and optimized according to real data.