It’s the new year. You’ve likely already begun planning how to achieve world domination in 2013. You decided what your budgets will entail, how much you’ll allocate to marketing and promoting your business. You may have even brainstormed some strategy. All this is excellent and you’re definitely heading in the right direction, but did you put together a real marketing plan?

Build an Idea Database

If you’re like me, some of your best ideas come at 2am or while you’re heading home from work. Keeping your ideas in your head is a good way to forget almost all of them. Find a solution to archive your ideas. Build an idea database! This could be as simple as a pen and paper or you could join me in the digital world and find an app for that. I personally use Trello and Evernote as I can use them on both desktop and mobile. The important thing is to save your ideas somewhere so you can use them later.

Create a Road map

After you have the wheels spinning, figure out which ideas would be good to put into fruition. Keep in mind how the ideas could impact your business, cost, what’s needed to deploy and how they could build or work together. Thinking about how and when you would execute these marketing ideas will help you narrow down which ones to move forward with.

How would these marketing ideas potentially impact your business? Would they help with branding, lead generation?

Schedule Your Strategy

Once you have some of the details worked out, you can now begin scheduling these activities on your marketing calendar. As mentioned above, put some thought into seasonality and how these strategies can work together and build off one another. Remember to include in your schedule the people and vendors you will need to execute. Make sure they’re on board with everything as well.

Fund Your Attack

Marketing cost money. Be sure to carve out a generous marketing budget for 2013 so you can make these awesome marketing strategies happen! Also know that with marketing, you often get what you pay for. Trying to hire “cheap” vendors could end up costing you more in the long run.

One VERY important thing to remember as you begin executing your strategies is to put proper tracking in place! Without tracking, you’ll never know important metrics such as cost-per-lead and ROI. Without this information you’re flying blind and you will likely never really know if your strategies were successful or not.

Make 2013 the year you’re going to take your business to the next level. A well planned and executed marketing strategy can make a world of difference in lead generation and overall sales. Plan your work and work your plan. Best of luck to you all this year!