Today's email is about a crucial step in your marketing that many of us miss out – and it costs us big time.

If you've followed my “soup to nuts” emails so far you'll know we've touched on identifying our ideal, target clients. We've built deep understanding of their needs and figured out what makes them tick.

We've developed a compelling value proposition and identified what marketing approaches are the best to get our message across to them.

Time for action then?

Not quite.

Almost all of the strategies we're going to use require planning. Even something as seemingly simple as networking needs you to identify the right events, to develop a simple benefit-focused introduction and a set of questions to ask.

And you'll need to figure out what your follow-up approach is going to be.

Without planning, even the most effective marketing will fail to deliver results.

Case in point: when I first started up on my own I decided I wanted to use speaking & seminars as a way of getting in front of potential clients.

But for over a year it just didn't happen.

The reason: wanting and wishing aren't the same as planning and doing.

But once I'd set myself a target of 12 presentations or seminars to audiences with at least 10 or more potential clients I was spurred into to action.

I broke down the target into months and planned the activities I needed to do to hit that target.

I brainstormed potential events & venues, thought through the topics I would focus on that would be likely to lead to potential clients engaging with me, and identified the resources I would need to achieve my goal.

Once I had my plan in place, I became more aware of possibilities for offering my services as a presenter.

And by reviewing the plan and progress initially weekly and then monthly, I kept the pressure on myself to hit the target.

And it worked. I beat my target after only 9 months.

Simple stuff. But I hadn't done it the year before, because I hadn't taken the simple step of setting a target and making a plan.

What Makes an Effective Plan?

An effective plan is not just about the details of activities and milestones.

What's more important is to think through the objectives and deliverables – and what are the critical success factors – the “must do”s that will make sure you achieve your objectives. The things you can control.

In my case I set a goal of getting at least 6 clients from my talks during the year – and I reckoned I'd need to do 12 talks to audiences of at least 10 potential clients to do it.

That was my final goal. But in order to achieve that goal I needed to develop a high quality talk, and to find the right events to speak at.

I also needed to develop a follow up system to identify who in the audience was really interested in the topic and to then convert them into clients.

Those were my critical success factors.

They may seem obvious now in retrospect, but it took a few minutes of brainstorming to make sure I really understood what they were and had prioritised them above all the other things I could have been doing.

That led me to create a simple plan – focusing first on getting a compelling topic and doing a brief synopsis.

Then working in parallel on developing the talk itself while finding the right events to speak at and speaking to the organisers to get booked.
Then I worked on creating the talk itself and the follow-up system just in time to deliver the first one.

Do I really need to do all this planning?

Absolutely yes.

I've seen so many professionals who think they can wing it. That once they've identified their key marketing approaches they can just make them happen and hold all the details in their heads.

They can't. They fail.

Or worst of all, they experience minor success – so they keep on doing it, not realising how much more effective they could be if they planned properly.

If you haven't got a written plan that you're reviewing week-in, week-out for the key marketing approches you're going to use to bring in clients then inevitably you'll be distracted by the day to day pressures of client work and running the business.

Don't fall into that trap. Get planning.