How to Make Marketing Plan Revisions

When’s the last time you revised your marketing plan? Here are some helpful thoughts to optimize your marketing plan revisions for higher enrollment results.

Every marketing plan comes with an expiration date. 

Unfortunately, the last thing anyone wants to do after creating the document is think about making marketing plan revisions. 

As a result, many marketing plans fail to deliver the results promised at the beginning. 

Your strategy should be considered a living document that needs marketing plan revisions and reviews every so often. 

This allows you to be nimble, quickly pivoting to meet the ever-changing demands of the marketing landscape. 

So, with that said, here are some helpful thoughts on making your marketing plan revisions. 

Set up a recurring marketing plan revisions meeting.

Don’t want to forget this important step? 

Get it on the calendar.

I personally recommend marketing teams meet once a quarter to look over their marketing plan.

This way, you’re not meeting too often, but you’re also not waiting too long to where you can’t make changes in time to meet new challenges.

Clear your mind.

When you get to the marketing plan revisions meeting, be open to anything. 

Don’t come with pre-conceived notions. 

There are no sacred cows! 

Anything that is not helpful to the end-user, the prospective student, parents, alumni, donors, or whoever your audience is, needs to go.

Change is not easy to implement. 

But it’s pretty much impossible if you come to the table closed to any new ideas.

Ask the right questions.

Asking the wrong questions can lead you in circles so that you never end up solving the real  problems facing your school.

There are certain questions that will lead you directly to the problems your marketing plan revisions need to solve. 

Here are some questions that have proven highly effective for me in the past.

• What is best for our customers (students, prospects, parents, alumni, etc.)? 
• How can we make it better, easier for them? 
• Are we getting a good return on our marketing investment? 
• How are our KPI’s (key performance indicators) working?
• What is breaking down in the funnel? 

KPIs will show you some things that are working well, but you’ll need to also get an understanding of what is not working.

If your KPI’s are knocking it out of the park, perhaps it’s time to raise them.

But

…if you’re nowhere near your marketing goals, consider whether it’s your tactics that need changed or if your goals simply are not realistic.

  

Review your marketing plan alongside your performance reports.

Marketing plan revisions should be more data-based than feelings-based.

J.P. Spagnolo of Capital University shared his experience with using data to revise his marketing plan on The Higher Ed Marketer Podcast:

I started asking, “What are we doing to let students know about orientation?” And so I started asking about the data behind it. I started asking questions about how many people are opening up our emails, and how many people are connecting and communicating with us. No one had really paid attention to those data points. 

Once J.P. looked closely at the data, he was able to make the right marketing plan revisions to improve their school’s marketing results. 

Of course, if you have holes in your data, and you just don’t know what the objective reality is, go with your gut. 

But overall, marketing plan revisions discussions should be led by objective data. 

So what metrics should education marketing pay attention to?

• Email: 
  • Opens 
  • Clicks
• Web: 
  • Clicks
  • Bounce Rate
  • Conversions
  • Return Visits
• Social: 
  • Engagement
  • Shares
  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Conversations
• PPC: 
  • Impressions
  • Conversions
• Overall: 
  • Funnel Metrics 
  • (Either enrollment or development. Main concern here is whether or not your audience is moving through the life cycle.)

Most marketing tools provide all the metrics you need to make better marketing plan revisions – Google Analytics, CRM software, email service providers like MailChimp, etc.

Almost all social media platforms offer their own version of an analytic dashboard for you to consider during your marketing plan revisions meeting.

Pivot Often. Pivot Fast.

The whole point of making marketing plan revisions is to create the capacity to pivot quickly to meet new challenges head on. 

Your marketing plan meetings combine the data analysis, team reports, and strategic questions you’ll need to identify problems before they become disasters.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

When you’re able to pivot often and fast by revising your marketing plan regularly, you’ll save yourself a ton of headaches and losses.

For more help on improving your marketing plan, why not contact us today?

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