We’re nearly a full month into a new year – to us, it means it’s time to double-down on resolutions, evaluate goals for 2018 and recourse where needed. It’s a time to make sure strategies for the coming year are actionable, and ensure every tactic directly serves objectives for the year’s finish line.

For our clients, it means it’s time to temperature-check new marketing plans for the calendar year. We work with each one to make sure they have a full picture of the previous year’s work, with key insights on progress and target audiences, coupled with thoughtful analysis on the success of past initiatives. Armed with objective and fact-based knowledge, we help clients evolve and develop comprehensive marketing plans with ideas steeped in insight.

Where do we typically see opportunities to improve at this beginning stage of new year plans? Believe it or not, it’s not with the plan itself – it’s how you communicate your plan internally.

That’s right: for your marketing plan to thrive and help you achieve your 2018 objectives, think beyond the ways you communicate it externally, and talk about it with the people inside the organization. Employees, managers, executives and board members – everyone.

It’s a little extra work, sure, but internal communication is an important step to ensure your plan is disseminated from the inside out. It’s also necessary because the fact is, just because a marketing plan exists doesn’t mean your employees are aware of or understand it. Consider one or two times when you’ve spoken to an employee at your organization about an initiative, and you get at least one of the following remarks:

• I had no idea we could do that.
• No one told me we were describing it that way.
• I had no idea we could offer that to customers.
• I didn’t know we had that resource available to us.

At first glance, these are innocuous statements, but think about it… they undervalue the organization. Further, when your internal workforce is not informed of current initiatives and programs, it leads to inefficiencies, disengagement and a culture of apathy. Consider the detriment of an uninformed workforce, compared with companies with an engaged workforce that outperform the competition by 147% in earnings per share, according to Gallup. The benefits of talking to your peers about the brand and your marketing plans are clear.

At Barcelona Creative, we love big goals, and when the data we cultivate for clients are coupled with the right tactics and strategies, we drive your resolutions into reality. If you’d like to talk about how we create intelligence-geared marketing for our clients, or ways to get your marketing plan into the hands and minds of your employees, get in touch.