Marketing Plans

How important are Marketing Plans

Well as with everything else it’s relative, it depends on how important it is to grow or even to maintain your revenue.

This is not a glib answer in my opinion they are important but not any more important than say debt management or 90 day planning. Growth may not be the most important thing to fix right now but if you want to see growth and you want to maintain your market position in the long run it would be good to have a marketing plan sooner rather than later.

Once you start writing one its a good idea to begin with the overall Strategy, this is usually best defined by the areas of target definition or target markets, how you best serve that market and how to communicate to it (covered in previous articles)

The next step would likely be an operational marketing plan. These typically focus on products or services; market segments and how the marketing communications and campaigns will achieve targets defined in the strategic plan. It usually has separate sections covering tactics for customer acquisition and retention.

A marketing plan should include:

1. The current priorities, and future direction of your organisation
2. Your current position in the market in relation to external factors
3. A critical analysis of your organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (possibly a PESTLE too)
4. Clearly set of defined objectives and a way to measure their success.
5. The tactics that will be used to achieve those objectives.
6. A set of actions expected time frames and clear responsibilities and accountabilities for getting things done on time.
7. The finances and resources required to deliver the plan and the forecasted revenues that the plan is expected to deliver.
8. Agreed upon regular checks of the progress and outcomes against the agreed upon measures.

It is usually a good idea to have your marketing plan written to support your overall strategic plan, so set out to deliver the longer term 5-to-10-year mission, and then to support the objectives for the next 12- 18 months and then broken down into 90-day tactical chunks that need to be delivered through your agreed actions.

Most SMEs don’t have a clearly defined marketing plan of any kind and those that do have a plan have usually outsourced it and have no idea if it’s a good one or not, fewer yet measure the numbers themselves.

The good news is that if most of your competition don’t have a plan either so creating any kind of plan of your own puts you ahead of the game and gets you a competitive advantage, a well thought through plan will put you far ahead of them.

If you want to know more get in touch