Time your tactics for maximum results 

The well-conceived, well-implemented integrated marketing communications plan always includes a well thought out schedule. Make sure your newspaper ads, direct mailings, publicity, Web site home page postings---whatever tactics you use---are timed to reinforce your selling points. Here are a couple of simple tracking tools. 

Annual Master Calendar Sheet: List your tactics in a column at the left. Place an X for each tactic planned under the appropriate month.  Gives you a same page, big picture tool to share and review with all agency associates. 

Monthly Calendar Sheets:  List each tactic to be used during the month with specific information.  Examples:  “Mail Home to Auto cross-sell postcards to 400 homeowner customers on November 18”; “Ad, Home-Auto account savings, Smithville Bugle, November 19.”   Management calendar sheets should include

(1) budget figures for each tactic;

(2) “results box” for comments and use in measuring success of each tactic later;

(3) other specifics that you deem helpful in tracking your programs.  

NEXT ELEMENT:  Contact management 

What your communications tactics will cost 

We recommend that plans that have many tactics should include a written budget summary early in the plan document.  Your plan should clearly explain, line by line, what tactics will cost. 

An example:  Full-color Jumbo Postcard mailing to 2000 prospects…. $1400 total (70 cents per prospect). 

---Creative development: $350.00

---Printing: $650.00

---Mail Handling and Postage: $400.00 

A well-conceived communications plan explains and merits its budget in terms of its objectives.  It does not justify objectives in terms of the budget.  We call this approach, “The Task Method” of budgeting.  

NEXT ELEMENT:  Your Communications Schedule 

How your program will be evaluated 

This is an important point:  what is measured must be directly related to your communications objectives!  Is one of your objectives “to increase favorable awareness of the agency name?”  You should conduct before-and-after research.  What was the awareness level before you initiated your program?  What is the level awareness after a year of newspaper/TV advertising, direct mailings and personal sales contacts?  Be sure to survey the SAME people in the community that you did your benchmark survey with. 

Is one of your objectives “to produce x number of direct referrals from customers?”  You should track the number you receive from direct mailings, personal contacts that are designed to solicit referrals.   

Direct Mail can perform two communications objectives for your agency:  (1) increase name recognition; (2) produce leads. 

NEXT ELEMENT:  Your Communications Budget  

Specific actions required 

Your communications tactics are the SPECIFIC actions that are needed to put your communications STRATEGIES  to work. Be sure to make clear when the actions will take place.  Here are examples of well-stated tactics. 

“Prepare advertising for the local Jonesboro homeowner market and place a one-quarter page ad in the Community Bugle newspaper every week during the April 1 – June 30 period.  The ad will emphasize our home-auto account discount; the headline and illustration will feature the possibility of saving 20% or more with this program.” 

“Prepare a full-color Jumbo Postcard mailer that features our home-auto account discount; the headline and illustration will point out the possibility of saving 20% or more with this program;  send the same postcard in April, May and June to 2000 Jonesboro homeowners with home assessed valuations of $300,000 or more.”   

NEXT ELEMENT:  Your Communications Measurement 

Strategies---messages and positioning 

Your communications strategies are the keys to HOW you will meet your communications objectives.  They define the MESSAGE theme of your communications programs and the agency POSITIONING (image) you want in your market area.  Here are examples of how they might be expressed in your marcom plan: 

“Advertise ways customers benefit by buying both their home and auto insurance from our agency.” 

“Improve our business processes for rounding out single policy customers---auto to home, and home to auto.”  

NEXT ELEMENT:  Your Communications Tactics 

Objectives---what you want to happen 

This is where your marketing communication plan begins—the fountainhead.  Make sure you state what you want your communications to accomplish in a specific time period. Remember, they are not sales objectives. They must be related to what communications can do to SUPPORT your agency’s sales objectives. 

Make sure each communication objective is specific,quantifiable and measurable.  For example: 

“Increase customer awareness that our agency sells life insurance from 10% to 40% in 12 months beginning January 1, 20XX.” 

“Obtain a minimum of 100 referral leads from existing customers in a three month period beginning  April 1, 20XX.”  

NEXT ELEMENT:  Your Communications Strategies