How to Identify a Good Marketing Plan
What separates a great marketing plan from a weak marketing plan? The answer is how easy it is to follow, how willing your people are to follow it and how closely the outcomes match your expectations!
A good marketing plan should achieve marketing objectives and provide the action program necessary to implement the strategies that meet those objectives.
Incidentally, it needs to review the circumstances and the situation that the business is currently in, list the objectives of where the organisation wants to be, and provide clear direction and steps so that the desired outcomes are easy to implement and provide a means by which people can assess and control the progress so that the outcomes are achieved.
A Marketing Plan is a Formal & Accurately Articulated Instruction Set for Achieving a Business Outcome
Writing a marketing plan means that you have to lay out a clear and concise set of instructions so that the team knows exactly what to do to achieve the objectives set, using the strategy selected, and with clear instructions laying out the actions and tactics and tasks required.
The purpose of a Marketing Plan is to act as a step-by-step manual that lays out the specific means by which a company goes from where it is now to where it wants to be.
That means a good marketing plan ALSO includes indivisible tactics, feedback & control, and response to contingencies.
But the need for a marketing plan goes much deeper than just an instruction set for the organisations’ pricing, product, distribution, promotion, people, and processes… a marketing plan reassures management that it is in the right business, within the right industry, and is seeing the “big” picture.
A comprehensive marketing plan takes into account the world around us, the whole industry, variables beyond control, unforeseeable contingencies, and defines clear and tangible objectives on which everyone can focus and evaluate performance. A marketing plan embraces change… it is the quintessential defense against reduced ROI and loss of profits.
“More than a roadmap, a marketing plan is like a detailed treasure map… directing you through hazards, around landmarks and accurately leading you to the treasure you seek.” – Leigh Cowan, Head of Planning & Strategy
A properly written marketing plan means a successful business
Marketing Plans are so important it more than pays to create a marketing plan that you confidently KNOW WILL be a concise way to increase profitable business and successfully achieve your goals.
Marketing is perhaps the least understood concept in business management: It’s much more than advertising or selling. A brief definition of marketing is “the holistic process of managing exchange”. This means controlling much more than “products or services to a group of customers that have a need, which your product or service satisfies”…
If you want to improve or delegate your marketing planning, or just benefit from experience and knowledge, click this button to email, dial 02 8011 4355 to call, or fill out the webmail form, below.
What should be in a corporate marketing plan?
Corporate professional planners instantly recognize free marketing planning templates, on the web as ‘limited’.
A proper marketing plan SHOULD be a brief but crystal clear and concise ‘how-to’ manual that lays out the exact and specific steps necessary to achieve the goals it sets for itself.
A Marketing Plan contains logic, structure with known marketing models that accurately project proposed outcomes. A Marketing Plan does NOT contain facts the readers already know, theories they don’t need to ponder, or other irrelevancies.
Help for Experienced & New Marketing Plan Writers
Our people are academically, as well as commercially, adept marketing plan writers. We’ve studied the templates, read the manuals, reviewed the world’s best, shaken our head in dismay at some of the inferior offerings on the web – even from government offices of small business! We have taught the craft of writing marketing plans to MBA’s using the purest academic components to sophisticate the discipline.
What’s most important we have written marketing plans for >$1B down to $10M business that have been accurate, successful and highly regarded by our clients.
The right marketing plan approach
You need a marketing plan that is made for YOUR business. Avoid templates – especially free ones – are the “snake-oil” of marketing plans.
Base all your marketing planning on accurate and objective market research and industry knowledge, using benchmarks from other industries only if they are relevant.
Remember, ALL parts of your marketing mix rely and are co-dependent upon each other. Just like organs of the body… the skin cannot survive without the liver, the brain can’t survive without the heart, the hearts can’t survive, without the lungs…. each needs all the others to work properly for the body to work properly. Likewise, your business needs ALL the elements of the marketing mix to work holistically for the business to work well.
The professional marketing planner ensures that you manage the whole Nexus of Marketing with the finesse and artistry of the best marketers in the world.
A Marketing plan means marketing accountability!
The Golden rule of great marketing plans
Your company is unique – its competitors, industry, environment, capabilities, people and processes are special to your organization ALONE! When you start a marketing plan from ‘scratch’, you generate the best possible marketing plan because it is specifically tailored to the issues and the enterprise.
Why You need an Expert Marketing Planner to Write Your Marketing Plan
It is much harder than you might imagine for many untrained executives to realise that every strategy SHOULD BE a response to an objective that has been determined by analysis of unique circumstances … UNLESS every organization shares the exact same circumstances that create an identical objective, borne of the same capabilities and resources, then it unlikely that the same strategy will be suitable… Even copied tactics will have variable levels of suitability, certainly not the same!
How a marketing plan is written depends on many factors… existing market share… industry life cycle position, price elasticity, lifetime value of a customer, competitive rivalry, legal and compliance obligations, corporate mission/vision/purpose/values, strategic pricing objectives, strategic positioning objectives, logistics of implementing either choice, behaviour of attractive and alternative market segments, channel dynamics, is it a B2C or a B2B product in one or all segments, and more!…
What is the nature of different segments within the market? How does each segment perceive the product “type”, the product “category”, the “Total product”? What are the ramifications across multiple channels, how does the unique PESTLEED contribute to or detract from possible options… and more!…
Helping you Build FMCG, B2C & B2B Marketing Plans
Extraordinary marketing is the optimal coordination of the 8 P’s of Marketing, using the dozens of strategic marketing tools known to trained experts in Marketing… It is just like putting together a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t have outside edges.. hard at first but easier as you go… but once you’ve done it perfectly, it is much easier to do again. If you invest in expert help, you’re not only likely to get the best Marketing Plan you’ve ever seen, but you also have a benchmark for Marketing Planning for years to come.
