Having a marketing plan is essential to running successful campaigns.

Without a plan for your marketing, you are leaving too many things to chance and exposing yourself to emotional swings and paralysis throughout a campaign.

In this episode, I talk about the importance of having a strategy, a plan, and some tactical tips to help you implement this into your own business.

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me

Transcript

What's going on smooth operators, welcome to today's episode, hope you're having a good day hope you're getting after it. And if you're not, man, what are you doing? Go get some, you know, you want to you know, this is what we live for. Run your business, manage it, do whatever you got to do keep things moving forward, because that is the only way to growth. It's that never ending churn that we go through. Man I live for it. I don't know about you like the further I get into this, the more I just love all of these moments. So today is an episode that's top of mind right now. You know, I work with a lot of different clients work with a lot of different types of industries. And I've noticed something that's kind of universal. And I've seen it in multiple industries with multiple people. And it's when business owners, particularly less marketing savvy ones, they get, I just want to call it, they get nervous and they want they that we get halfway into a marketing strategy, or they're, we're just at the beginning phases, you know, and we're maybe two days into a 90 day sprint that we're planning and they don't see results immediately. And they want to change what we're doing.

Am I dude, you got to give this time, man, you got to give it time. And so I want to talk about planning and when a plan comes together and why we talk about all sorts of planning. I'm a planner, by my very nature, I love planning, I love putting things down in sequential order. I love seeing that whole breadth of a project, before I even start, like I know what steps one through 30 are, and just organizing that getting it into place. You know, that's one of my superpowers is being able to see that three dimensionally. And, you know, it's not something you know, I say superpower, dude, like none of this stuff is natural. Can we acknowledge that, like all of this stuff is learned anyone that says they can do this naturally, and it's a natural skill, they're lying. They learned it from somewhere. So if you're like, dude, that AMI got it, it was none of us, we all had to develop it in our own right. So if it's not you yet, first off, give yourself some credit for what you have done. And second off, understand that this is a process. And it's a process to even learn how to do this. So give yourself a little bit of credit and a little bit of forgiveness moving forward that if you haven't screwed it up yet, you haven't tried. First off, I mean, that's part of it. Part of this is screwing up and not doing as well as you'd like to do.

That being said, you know, there's that famous movie and TV show, I love when a plan comes together. I do too. I love when it comes together. And not just with projects, but specifically within marketing, which like, can we be frank marketing is a project. So I treat marketing, the same way I treat major project of product development. The same way I treat a website project the same way I treat anything, everything is a project, everything has inputs and outputs, due date. Suspense is like all those good things that make projects happen. And it's all in a sequential order. Why would marketing be any different if you think it should be different brother, like you got to get into the weeds on this thing. And understand, like, why I make this a system and why making it a system saves your emotional health, it saves your I mean that little thing inside of you that that wants to, you know, go Chicken Little all the time that the sky is falling.

And this is especially top of mind because I'm two clients, very different industries. Like I said, one client is kind of notorious for never seeing a strategy through and the types of strategies we have to do with this client's business. I mean, these are like the three to nine months, you know, perspective where you really have to let something work, you know, and you might not see the results right away, but we're looking for those leading indicators. But so often we want the lagging indicators, what am I talking about, you know, lagging indicators with a marketing strategy is all these sales upsells cross sells down sells? Like, all those things that come on the monetary side? You know, that's marketing. That's part of what we do. But there's also the leading indicators, how many leads are getting what's open rates, what's our traffic look like? All those things where we know we amplify our leading indicators. We're gonna get the lagging indicators on the back end. Well, this particular client like ignores all the leading indicators, and he only focuses on the lagging indicators. Well, when your sales cycles like 30 to 90 days, like brother that don't work, you got to be reliant on those lagging indicators to help you are those leading indicators to help you see the progress that you're making. And another guy was, like really just into a pretty big promotion that he was doing. Whereas like, you know, PLC type, you know, Jeff Walker style launch, which if you've never studied that, like by Jeff Walker's book Product Launch Formula, it's really good. And you'll give you a ton of ideas on how to do this type of content based launch, where it's like leading with content, and then the promotions on the back end of the content. So it's content leading up to promotion. But you see, like, all of these have one very thing in common. It's all a structure. Marketing is structures that we're putting in place putting together nothing is by happenstance, everything is part of a strategy and a plan, right? See where I'm going with this. And the thing is, both of these clients would get like super nervous in the service, because they weren't seeing those results right away. They weren't seeing it on day one. They weren't seeing it within the first couple of hours.

And so they would panic, and either think, Oh, chicken, little The sky is falling, or I was wrong. Or immediately start to look for exits, like, Hey, should we change the strategy? No, Hey, should we do this different? No, you just started brother, you got to let your marketing work, you got to let it go through its paces. And like when you don't do that, not only a like you imagine being that kind of a business owner where you are constantly acting on that type of emotion. Like, dude, I get exhausted thinking about it. Because I've been in high intensity marketing campaigns, high intensity launches. And the last thing I need is the negative energy pulling me down, like I need every ounce of positive energy that I can possibly muster, when I'm launching something like this. Because to be perfectly frank, and perfectly honest, I'm a firm believer that whatever energy you're bringing to a project, whatever energy you're bringing to what you're doing, especially in marketing, like it can be felt by your target audience, they can feel desperation, they can feel when things are amiss, they can feel when you are a mess, it's just weird thing, I have no scientific evidence whatsoever to back this up. So you just got to kind of trust my experience on this. But whatever energy you're bringing into a promotion can and will be felt by your target audience, and will result in your sales either going up or going down. You know, the best product launches I've ever done are the ones I've been the most excited about the ones I've been the most positive about, and being able to carry that energy through a promotion. And the ones where as long as I fair, or quite frankly, just didn't give a shit. You know, for whatever reason, like I was caught up in something else is kind of like, hey, we just got to run this promotion, because it's Friday, and we're running a weekend promotion. Like those were I didn't have any, like positive emotional investments, they didn't do so well, either. So like, what kind of energy are you bringing to your marketing strategy to your campaign, I mean, that all sounds a little bit pie in the sky. But like, I just seen it too many times, to doubt what I'm seeing, you know, and not say like positive energy is gonna solve the world, like you got to do the work to But the plan is doing the work, the you know, creating a plan, going through all the steps to put together the plan that's doing the work.

And so what I like to do is I always like to work from templates, where I create the template once and I'm just recycling it as I go. And so I created kind of like a master promotions template that covers absolutely everything you can imagine doing during a promotion that we tend to see for online products to include, you know, back end phone sales, webinars, you know, Facebook Lives, all these things are built into this template. So all I'm doing when I'm creating a marketing plan, in my project management system, first off, I never started the project magnetism I start on paper, that's how I tend to do things I start on paper, I actually map things out in a visual way, using kind of like content boxes, where I'll do like PLC box and main offer box and down sell box, you know, and I just kind of box it for so I can see things at that 10,000 foot level. And then I start to break it down into individual tasks. When I'm working within my project management system that lets me think see things from that three dimensional level and break it down into into the individual tasks

that have to be done to bring that thing to fruition. But the reason that I start with that template. It's because I have to physically remove something for it not to be done. Okay, there's a barrier in the way of not doing a follow up email to clickers. For example. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's basically like anyone that clicks on an offer link, it's a follow up email, you might have seen that before. Like, that's in every single templated email or marketing sequence I've ever done in my entire life. And it will be for the foreseeable because I've seen it work so darn well, that I'm gonna have it in every single template, but I'm working from that framework, the framework that I know from my experience, gives me the best chance of success. And it doesn't mean I have to do everything every time. But it does mean I do have to make the decision to either include that marketing asset within a campaign, or remove it.

And when we remove it, we making that that conscious decision. So what does that prevent you from doing it prevents you from missing opportunities, it prevents you from not seeing the whole picture, not seeing all the possibilities. It also prevents you and this is men, the thing I see the most is people just not following through with their marketing strategy marketing plan. You know, they see things not going right on day one, and they may want to change things, I'm like, all the other numbers are good. Getting the opens, were getting the clicks. Maybe they just need more time to consider the offer. People don't necessarily buy right away. That being said, I am so guilty of hitting go on an email marketing campaign and immediately opening, you know, Google Analytics to watch the first leads come in, you know, I'm very guilty of that. I would never recommend that to anyone emotionally, it's draining. Unless you know, you're gonna get a sale in this first five to 10 minutes, then it's kind of fun. But I like I said, I wouldn't recommend that to anyone. So this that whole thing I just said last 30 seconds, just delete that from your memory. Don't watch them come in, watch them at or check on the results at predetermined increments, once or twice a day, if you're watching it.

I'm telling you, you're gonna drive yourself crazy. But when we have that plan, when we have that roadmap that you're working from, we free ourselves from the emotional side of marketing and let ourselves live better in the moment we let ourselves be free, be more open to our team, be more open on to the follow through because people aren't going to be buying and how are you going to greet them? Well, if you are an emotional state of wreck, and people are meeting you for the first time through an email or through a live call that you're doing whatever engagement that you have to welcome people to your product, or to thank them for buying the product. If you're doing it from a state of anarchy. You think people can't feel that their Oh, what the heck did I just buy, you're giving yourself the permission to do that I would even go so far as to say you should have, you know, 99% of your marketing assets created before we click Go on a campaign. It's been traditionally how I've done things where I will write all the PLC, I'll write all the Facebook copy, you know, order up the email, copy it, we'll get the landing page done the down sell page, the upsell page, like all these assets that we need for our marketing campaign. You need it, you're really doing yourself a big favor, by having those things in tow ready to go all tested out. Before we click go. We get all the stressors out of our way. So we can focus then on fulfillment during the actual campaign because people are going to be buying along the way. So that frees you up yet again, to have that emotional reservoir that you need to fulfill on the back end.

That being said, I know that's not always possible. That's a big ask for a lot of campaigns to be drafting everything up ahead of time. It's not always possible especially if you got a freelancer or someone else that's helping to write any of this stuff. That's okay though. here's going to be something I said that you're going to look at me kind of funny, but just follow me on this. If your plan is chaos, at least plan for chaos. You can plan for chaos. A plan does not mean necessarily that everything is always done by x h our on D Day. A plan for chaos means when this is done, do this. When that is done do that is expected time between day and day. So if you have something that you know, you're going to send out somewhere between Wednesday and Friday. And when that's done, it's followed up by the next task, at least plan for that chaos. This really especially makes sense if you have teams that are helping you that are working with you. You're accounting for that you're giving them that expectation, you're giving yourself the expectation that it's going to be chaos. Have you ever had one of those moments where, like, everything goes wrong, but you expected it to go wrong? It's telling you're at peace with it. Versus the times when you need everything to go right. And it doesn't go exactly perfectly awesome. Super great. Right? But it's like 98%, right. But where we focus on that 2% Wrong. The expectation of chaos. It's quite powerful. And it can be planned for and I've ran a lot of very successful campaigns, planning for chaos. We would almost always do Black Friday, based on chaos. Because Black Friday, you know, you know, biggest shopping holiday of the year? When are we going to run out of something we don't know? Well, there's, you're you're introducing chaos. But we knew it. And so it's okay.

It seems a bit contradictory. But I think if you try that, I think you're gonna find yourself in a much better position. So I would just ask you to look at the campaign's you've ran to this point? Have you been working from a strategy? Or are you leaving things to chance? Are you leaving yourself to chance? Are you introducing possible like, for real emotional stressors in your life that you may not need? To be totally honest. If you're doing that, first off, forgive yourself. And try your next campaign, your next big marketing push. We're working from something a little more more concrete, something a little bit more stable. And then do an honest analysis after the fact and be like, Man, how did that feel, to run a campaign like that? To run it based on a system or a strategy, I think you're going to find yourself in a much better position, I think you're going to find better sales as well. Because we are operating from that place of knowing. And when we do that, we're more prone to see the opportunities that come up in front of us. So notice, I never said never amend the plan. But when you're operating from a place of panic, we don't look at things strategically. We look at things, I had a good idea. We're operating from a place of stability, and structure. We take a moment look at the data and make the right decision. Versus the first decision that comes up to our mind like we're doing when we're in a panic mode. Because what's our brain saying Oh, in our panic mode, solve this, solve this, solve this, solve this solve this, our brain is screaming at us to solve it. And when we don't have that brain screaming at us to solve it, we're still going to solve it, we may come up with the same conclusion. But we're going to come at it from a place of data from strategy and from things that are actually based on what's happening on the ground in real time right in front of our eyes. I hope this helps. I think you'll find that once you start doing this, you'll love it and you'll be hooked on it.

That being said, if you're like dude, I have no idea how to create a marketing strategy and marketing plan. What are you talking about? Bro? Let's get on a talk. Let's Let's talk this out. Let me help you create a marketing plan. So you can see the difference when you're executing that plan in your next promotion. Until next time, guys, look Have a good one. I can't wait to see you on the next episode.