It is fall. Where I live, that means the trees are changing colors. In my front yard is a sugar maple tree. The leaves of the tree turn a brilliant orange and fire red each year. It is quite a beautiful thing to behold and many people comment to me about the tree each year at this time. What always amazes me is its size given its perilous life up to this point.

I planted that tree almost 20 years ago. It was a small sapling I had pulled out of my mother-in-law’s flower beds right before she moved out of her house and into ours. She had lost her husband to death about a year and a half earlier and, since then, had come to the conclusion it was time to sell her possessions, including her home of more than 40 years, and come to live with us. I wanted to give her something from her old home and thought the small tree would do it. I planted it in our front yard and it started to grow. However, shortly after this, a pesky neighbor kid who was in our yard playing with my sons decided to pull all the leaves off the tree. It was the middle of the summer and the tree was just a stick in the ground. I thought he had killed it. But the next spring, it sprouted new leaves. By June, it was looking very healthy. That is when my youngest son had a birthday party and his school friends decided to play a game of capture the flag. As you might have guessed, one of them tied their flag tightly to the little tree. Before I could stop them, someone grabbed the flag and ripped it from this tender tree along with all of its branches and leaves. Another year of the stick tree went by. Again, the next spring, this resilient little tree sprouted new leaves. That is when one of my relatives stopped by our house and decided to walk through the front yard instead of taking the sidewalk to the house. Not watching where he was going, he stepped on the tree and snapped it in two. This time I thought it was done. But once again, it continued to grow. The maple tree just refused to die! Now it is nearly 30 feet tall. 

That maple tree is a lesson in not giving up in the most adverse situations. In marketing, we are tasked with reaching people in good times and bad. Just how resilient is your marketing plan? If you are too rigid, you will find that when times change, what might have worked at one time no longer does. You have to change your schemes with the times or lose market share. If you are too loose with your marketing plan – so much so that you are constantly changing directions – you will not be able to hold the attention of your target market. You will lose the brand awareness that consistent, persistent marketing can bring to you. 

Part of understanding when to change your marketing direction comes from regular checks on how things are going. At least quarterly, you should look at the successes of your current marketing efforts by measuring how close you are to your goals. If you don’t have goals, you need to set them to gain an understanding of where the start and finish lines are in what you are trying to achieve. If you don’t have a plan to help you achieve those goals, you will not meet them. Strategic marketing plans help you clearly understand your goals and set the steps necessary to achieve them. If you find you are off course, a regular meeting will help you refocus. If your marketing is failing to help you get closer to the goals, you need to recalibrate. 

I bring this up because now is a critical time to set goals for next year and write your strategic marketing plan. This is the time of the year when many corporations are building their budgets. Goals, strategic plans and budgets go hand-in-hand. Make sure you are building not only a time to evaluate during the year, but the flexibility within your budget to shift marketing dollars from one direction to the other. 

If your marketing is to be as resilient as that little maple tree, you need a good root to come back from adversity. Marketing plans are those roots – they help you in the hard times and the good.