Understanding 360: How to make a 360 marketing plan

If you are interested in marketing, you must have come across the term 360 marketing. When you search for how to make a 360 marketing plan, you may encounter many different explanations. Even if it is a widely used generic term, 360 marketing is generally not fully understood.

Albeit you get the point theoretically, the execution of a 360 degree marketing campaign can be very complex.

So, what is this 360 marketing?

Technically speaking, the term literally means an effective marketing strategy covering all the target audiences' points of contact in the entire buying cycle.

The confusing part is that marketing is not a single linear process. It is a never-ending cycle that should be transformative and flexible.

First of all, while you are constructing a 360 degree marketing strategy, you need to carry your analysis and strategies from a holistic and dynamic perspective.

It needs to be holistic because you need to include all the steps in your target audience's buying circle, and your brand should be present at every point of contact with your customers.

What this means is that you need to accompany the buyer's journey from the starting point of being aware of a need to the end. And, what we mean with the end is not the final purchase action.

Circleboom Publish intends to deliver cutting-edge software capable of managing many social media accounts in one location, as well as extra outstanding features such as built-in content creation, curation, automation, and, of course, post scheduling.

With the correct tools, any social media account may thrive above its owner's expectations. Here's how we make authentic, easy-to-use social media solutions for a successful 360-degree marketing campaign.

The customer's buying journey is not linear but a cycle. You need to strengthen your relationship with your customer after the sale for retentionand improved customer health score, too.

Your approach to 360 marketing campaigns should also be dynamic as the needs and conditions always change. With the contribution of the feedback and data-driven results (ROI), you should evaluate and re-position your 360-marketing strategy.

How to make a 360 marketing plan

The recipe for a 360 marketing plan differs for every brand as every brand is unique, and its target audience is distinct. According to your brand personality and target audience profile, the possible communication tools available for you change. So, we have prepared a general guideline that hopefully helps you understand how to make a 360 marketing plan.

#1 Know Your Target Audience

The very first step of every 360 marketing plan is to know your target audience. If you build your 360 marketing plan based on assumptions, you will take a huge risk wasting your effort, time and money.

In order to know your target audience, you need to do market segmentation or research that will provide you data-driven insights. You can conduct research, do interviews and surveys or make a field trip. This may sound like a time-consuming step, but remember that you will build your 360 marketing strategy on this data. If you do it effectively, it will help you move your business forward in the right direction.

Moreover, you can also examine your existing customers and potential audience who follow you on social media. If your business is active on social media, a user analytics tool can provide you with very valuable insights. Circleboom's excellent User Analytics Tool can help you get to know your customers by providing you your followers' data-driven demographic background.

With your followers' in-depth analysis, you can learn when your audience is online and what characteristic features and interests they have. You can determine the needs and desires of your target audience with data-driven facts.

If your business doesn't have a Twitter account, you should consider taking part in this platform full of opportunities. You can check our guide to create a Twitter business account for a good start.

#2 Determine the Purpose of Your 360 Marketing Campaign

We have already mentioned that a 360 marketing strategy is a cohesive approach. In order to successfully construct one, you need to be clear on your purpose. The campaign structure will differ if it is a general campaign of your company, or a new product launch or a re-positioning of an existing product.

#3 Find Your Position in the Buyer Journey

Customer journey mapping can be expanded with details and adapted to unique conditions, but let's consider a generic one to understand the fundamentals of this step. Utilizing process mapping software can facilitate this process, offering tools and features to create comprehensive visual representations of your customer journey.

First, let's look at why the buyer journey is important for a 360 degree marketing campaign.

• Points of contact with the customer may change according to the stages of the buyer's journey.
• The content should be different for each stage.
• The target audience strategy should be unique to each stage.

If you want to increase your brand awareness, e-mailing your existing customers will not make much sense. You need to reach out to new potential customers with content that piques their interest. If you want to increase your sales, you need to create content that will generate action for the audience already aware of your brand. If you want to strengthen your bonds with your existing customers, you need to communicate with unique content like special offers.

360-marketing is a cohesive approach. You can think of it as a puzzle; all the parts should fit together to form a united whole. As you can't complete a puzzle with your eyes shut, you can't construct an effective 360 marketing strategy without a data-driven foundation.

Based on your customer behavior analysis, you should follow different tactics for each stage. This will allow you to reach the right audience at the right time with suitable content on a convenient platform.

#4 Cohesiveness is the Key

Although you need to use different tactics and marketing mixes for each stage, it is important for your brand perception to establish a consistent manner. Your messages in each stage should be compatible with each other. The communication needs to be in line with your brand identity and tone of voice.

Your marketing mix plays an important role at this point. The most typical marketing mix includes Price, Product, Promotion and Place, the 4P's. Many other Ps like Packaging, Positioning, People, Politics can be included in this set, but the fundamental elements are a good starting point.

All the Ps in your marketing mix talk with each other. If you do not have a consistent marketing mixture, it will be challenging to establish a cohesive 360  marketing campaign.

#5 Construct a Complete Marketing Experience

It would be best if you reminded your target audience of your brand to stay in their mind.

Let's go through an example. Consider that your outdoor advertisement has caught the attention of the potential customers in line with their needs. While surfing on social media, he came across your brand again on Twitter. Finally, while doing online research on his needs, he encountered your brand on a product review blog.

Creating a complete marketing experience using omni-channel strategy will help you strengthen the impression that your brand is ubiquitous, which is very important for a successful 360 marketing campaign. In this strategy, it is important to interconnect all your communication channels.

At this point of how to make a 360 marketing plan, as in all steps, knowing your target audience is indispensable to achieve your objectives. More than who your target audience is, you need insights about when and where there are online, their personality and interests so that you can be present with the right content.

Circleboom provides you the demographic data of your Twitter followers, the best time to tweet for higher impression and engagement rates, and the Interest Cloud of your Twitter followers so that you can understand with what content they are mostly engaged with.

Making an effective 360 marketing plan is a challenging task. It needs effort, time, and money. Circleboom can take the pressure off by helping you with social media management which is crucial for 360 degree marketing.

Following an always-on social media strategy can help you to increase your brands' impression and engagement rates. It is surely challenging yet rewarding. Constant visibility on social media is hard to manage manually. With Circleboom's publish tool, you can schedule your tweets by creating a queue and reach your target audience at the right time.

Well, there is another challenge for establishing constant visibility on social media; the content. Especially if you plan to follow an always-on strategy, you need to provide content regularly that interests your target audience.

Circleboom is here to help you again. Circleboom's publish tool can also help you to find thousands of articles online. All you need to do is select your interests among more than 300 categories, including thousands of blogs and websites. Then you can create your queue with your selection, and Circleboom will automatically post your tweets at the right time on Twitter.

Wrapping Up

Creating a 360 marketing plan can be very challenging, but the results will be worth it if you follow the right steps. One of the main challenges of this strategy is that it can be very time-consuming as it needs to be based on data-driven analysis.

If you construct your 360 marketing strategy on assumptions, there is a high risk that your efforts will go in vain. For this reason, we recommend you not overlook the importance of knowing your target audience in a 360 marketing strategy.

You can try Circleboom for free to get an in-depth analysis of your Twitter audience which will guide you with data-driven facts while making your 360 marketing campaign.