Okay, so it’s officially planning season for our 2024 marketing! BUT before you decide where you need to spend your marketing budget, I’d like you to take a step back and consider these five MARKETING PHASES.
Understanding them is going to focus your efforts in the right direction.
1 Awareness
This is where you really just want to get your name out there. Maybe you’ve opened up a new location, you’re a new organisation just launching in a market. Or you’re catching up for 10 years of bad marketing from your predecessors!
2. GROWTH
This is where you have all your marketing foundations in place, but you really are just trying to get bums on seats and sales made. This is where you’ll focus all of your marketing budget on getting those sales over the line.
3. BRAND BUILDING
This is where you just want to focus on a few key messages that you want to embed in the minds of your consumers and all your efforts are focused on getting these messages onto various platforms.
You may also want to fix misconceptions in the market or fix the reasons why people aren’t considering you in their buying decision process.
4. RETENTION
This is where you have healthy growth happening, but you’re finding that the churn of customers, especially for service-based organisations is perhaps not where you’d like it to be. You’ll be focusing your marketing budget on changing the perceptions and the satisfaction of your current clients so that they stay with you for the long term.
5. MAINTENANCE
The last phase is where us marketers have it made for us. It’s the maintenance phase and this is where you are doing a great job across the board and have a strong brand presence and market share and you are just looking to maintain that position in the market.
Knowing which phase you’re at is really going to help you to set the majority of your budget towards achieving the right goals. Having that clarity right at the beginning of the planning process is going to give you a super impactful 2024 marketing plan!
