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No matter how much energy and focus you put into marketing throughout the year, developing an effective marketing strategy first will always help you bring in better results. As the year starts to come to an end and we begin our Q4 reviews, time is still marching forward, and 2023 is ready to get started. 

If you’re reading this and feeling unprepared, don’t worry. There’s still time to develop a powerful marketing plan for 2023 that continues to grow your business and earn you new sales. We call ours the MC Greenprint.

Here are your steps to creating a marketing plan:

• Assess Where You’re At

• Renew, Evolve, or Define Your Goals

• Acknowledge Possible Obstacles

• Define Your Next Steps

Assess Where You’re At

Define your company’s mission, developments, and/or changes within the last year

It’s common for people to pause and look back over all their accomplishments and failures as the year ends. The new year should be a time for reflection for the sake of looking ahead and preparing for your next journey around the sun. This means reviewing assets like your company mission statement, core values, goals, and struggles. Do your mission and core values still align with your vision? Are things like your brand voice and target audience helping you achieve the goals you have set? Taking some time to fully assess where your company is at and where you want to go will bring some clarity to whether or not you need to make some changes in these areas for 2023. 

With the MC Greenprint, this is one of the first steps. In order to develop a plan that works for your unique company, we need to understand the whole story. We need to know what has worked in the past, what hasn’t quite caught on, and your overall goals for who you want to be as a company.

Renew, Evolve, or Define Your Goals

After taking a look at how this year has played out for your company, you can begin to analyze and set the foundation for your next strategy. Think about what you’re trying to accomplish within the next year, three years, or five years. Some of these goals might be ones you’ve carried over from last year. Some can be adapted to fit the current status of your business, and others can be newly created goals.

Goal setting is your guiding compass as you construct the next steps in your 2023 marketing plan. Goals are some of the main footholds that hint at where you’re headed and who you are as a company. You can be focused on growing a specific area of your business, kicking off a new social media practice to better connect with potential customers, hiring employees that fit your company culture, and of course, increasing your sales. None of this can occur until it’s acknowledged and strategically laid out in a specific plan- like the MC Greenprint. (If this were a video, we’d be winking and nudging).

Acknowledge Possible Obstacles

Competitive analysis & SWOT

Powerful insights come from research in the market you serve. That applies to your company, your desired buyer personas, your competition, and the industry (as a whole). Simply put, this is an assessment of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Performing a SWOT analysis highlights your strong suits and your weak spots. A SWOT is proof of why you need a plan and sets your plan up for success.

Have you checked on your competition lately? A competitive analysis grants you incredible insight into what you want to change and what you should keep the same going into the new year. If your competition saw great success in their recent marketing efforts, there may be something you can learn from the steps they took. If they’ve been consistently trending on socials, maybe they’ve found a brand voice that really connects with their audience. You can do the same by developing a voice of your own that caters to your target audience.

Define Your Next Steps

Michigan Creative offers a marketing plan that covers all of this, from company mission and core values to goal setting, competitive analysis, and more! The MC Greenprint gets to know everything about your company and the industry you’re in, and most importantly, set actionable steps for your company to take over the next year. It’s the best way to develop a marketing plan for 2023 that fits your company and achieves your goals. We can help you get there!

Give us a call, or send us a message by visiting our contact page. 

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