Marketing planning why marketing planning is important

Why Plan Your Marketing?

By Jennifer Beever, Marketing Consultant
© February 2002, New Incite Marketing Analysis and Design

Do you find yourself halfway through your fiscal year having done little or no marketing at all? Do all your marketing activities convey different messages and project different images? Do your marketing efforts get poor results?

Marketing planning is important for a number of reasons. First, it allows you to create and implement marketing programs that are strategic in nature and intentionally tied back to your business objectives. Second, marketing planning results in a documented marketing approach that is easier to communicate to your employees and helps ensure that marketing is a company-wide function. Third, a marketing plan allows you to manage to a budget and better negotiate with outside providers. Fourth, a marketing plan helps you stay on track when day-to-day firefighting threatens to derail your intent.

Marketing plans help tie your actions back to strategic business objectives. Should we advertise our new product or spend more on our web site? Are we investing too much of our marketing budget in low margin products or services? How are we going to achieve our revenue goals? A marketing plan helps you answer these questions and more.

For example, if your sales or business plan calls for 25% growth or $20 million in revenue next year, you need to chart an aggressive course to get there. If you know your lead conversion rates, you can back into the number of leads that are required to generate the $20 million in sales. Such an increase in revenues may require a significant increase in leads that can only come from direct response marketing such as direct mail, email, or advertising.

Marketing plans help you communicate marketing to your entire company. Great companies make marketing a function of the entire organization. They make sure that each employee not only understands their marketing strategy, but they own it. A clear marketing plan gives your organization their marching orders so there is no confusion.

By sharing business objectives and marketing strategy and tactics with employees, you expand your marketing reach exponentially. Rather than having a handful of sales people selling, you can get your entire company telling your story. In many cases this pays off tremendously. Your customer service representatives know where the company is headed and can use their relationship with customers to convey the right messages. Other employees can sell too.

Marketing plans help you manage expenses and negotiate better deals. When you conduct your marketing in a piecemeal approach, you are not in a powerful negotiating position. Most marketing service providers, whether an ad agency or a service firm, will be much more interested in and do a better job on an entire marketing program rather than independent projects. Moreover, anyone that you ask to bid on an integrated marketing plan should give you a price break based on the amount of business. Your marketing plan can become a contract for partnership between your company and the service provider. A service provider who truly understands your objectives and indeed "owns" them will provide much more value-add for your company.

Marketing plans help you stay on track and manage to objectives. The biggest compliant I hear from business owners is that they get distracted by day-to-day activities and don't take enough time to conduct planned marketing activities. Most companies are in reactive mode, resulting in an inability to grow in a significant, strategic manner. Don't let this happen to you. Your marketing plan must include regularly scheduled meetings. If you don't have a marketing staff, schedule the meetings with your marketing services partner. These meetings should be at least once a month on a tactical level: did we get the ad produced? Is the web site update done? Did the mailer go out? You should also include quarterly meetings to do strategic analysis of your marketing: has the marketplace changed? Are we getting results per our objectives?

Effective marketing plans are based on thorough research and strategic analysis of your marketplace and on resulting strategic objectives. If you haven't done strategic analysis and business planning, your marketing plan could fail. In addition, marketing plans must be based on clearly stated vision, mission, and goals for your company. If you don't have a clear vision, your marketing plan could take you in a direction different from your intent and will most certainly fail. The more time you spend on marketing planning and managing to your plan will result in greater growth, lower marketing expenditure, and a more proactive, healthier work environment.

This article may be reprinted with permission of the author. Please contact Jennifer Beever at 818-347-4248 or by email, jenb@newincite.com, for permission. Proper acknowledgement of the author, including name, company, and contact information, must be made with use.

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