A well-prepared marketing plan can improve the consistency of your responses. If implemented correctly, your marketing plan can ensure your leads are both manageable and steady. Think of it as your strategy for success! Below are the four stages of marketing plan preparation:
Choosing Your Campaign
To begin preparing your marketing plan, you must first establish what type of campaign you would like to pursue. Perhaps you are interested in wholesales, short sales, leasing options, or something else entirely. Your target audience will develop during this initial stage.
Once your target audience is established, you can select the mail pieces you would like to send and the manner you would like to send them in. Maybe you will choose to set-up an ongoing campaign that will mail automatically. Perhaps you would rather focus on a mutlti-touch campaign so your name is in front of a single mailing list more than once. You may even decide to send a mixture of both. Whichever way you decide to send your mail pieces, you should have a clear intent. What are the results you are aiming for? How will your results affect your year’s goals? It is important to plan on your end goal so your campaign can build off of a solid structure.
Securing Your Mailing List
Once the target market has been chosen, you can begin assembling a list of potential clients. Consider including a filter for the purchase date, date of birth, and owner type when creating or purchasing a mailing list. Filters help weed out anybody that may not fit your campaign’s needs.
Selecting Your Timeline
After determining your mailing list, you can begin to create a timeline for your mail piece. For example, if your campaign mails out on a Monday, it may take a few days for your target audience to receive your mail piece and start responding. Depending on the response rate and the chosen area, it may take some time to close a deal.
When creating your marketing plan, you must prepare for this waiting period between your mail date and response time. Staggering your mailings will help reduce these down times because it will also stagger your response. Keeping this in mind, you can better plan for the amount of time between touches of a multi-touch campaign or between each new batch of an ongoing campaign.
Evaluating Your Results
Finally, you should determine if your campaign was fruitful. If you had a high response, you can plan on sending another similar campaign. If your response was lower than expected, you can adjust your future campaigns. This may mean choosing a different mail piece, adjusting the filters on your mailing list, or targeting a different audience. Your evaluation of your campaign will help correct what did not work and leverage what did work. This means each campaign can improve!
Start preparing your campaign by browsing some of our yellow letter, typed letter, and postcard templates. To learn more about how to prepare your marketing plan, call us at 1-888-294-0780.