Marketing Strategy Planning

“Plan your work and work your plan.” You’ve undoubtedly heard that old saying before. Or perhaps you’re more familiar with the proverbial version: “He who fails to plan, plans to fail.” Marketing strategy planning follows in the same fashion.

Sound advice. Planning is essential if you are to make the most of your days, weeks, months and years. And nowhere is planning for success more essential than in the areas of marketing, advertising and sales.

But not all marketing plans are created equal, and neither is all marketing planning. As you head into the new year, have you completed your marketing plan? And how do you know it’s a good one? Most important, what have you done to make sure the marketing plan is bound to be implemented at the highest levels in your company?

Let’s take a look at some productive and futile ways to plan, then at some strong recommendations for you, heading into the new year…

FUTILE METHOD #1: The no-plan method.

This is classic seat-of-the-pants marketing. No plan and no strategy for success. No explanation required. Only a warning. If this is your method, you’re doomed to play on the field of mediocrity throughout your career. That may be okay with you. It may provide you a nice, comfortable living. But it will never be what it could be. And I suspect that’s not alright with you. If it was, you wouldn’t be reading this article.

FUTILE METHOD #2: The way we’ve always done it.

This is by definition a futile method, if you’re at all unhappy with your results. When you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. This is an inescapable truth, but this is the way most companies do their marketing strategy planning, budget and their marketing, advertising and sales plans.

Are you one of those companies that says, I know I need a referral system in my business? You’ve known it for year, haven’t you? Then why isn’t it in your marketing plan for 2010?

FUTILE METHOD #3: The one-dimensional plan.

If you’re entire marketing, advertising and sales program is focused on the effort to bring in new customers, you have a one-dimensional plan and you are ignoring the fastest, easiest, most cost-effective ways to bring in new revenues and profits. You’re forgetting about increasing your average transaction and getting existing customers, clients or patients to come back and do business with you more frequently.  Look. We both know you should be doing these things, but if you don’t plan for them, they ain’t gonna happen.

PRODUCTIVE METHOD #1: Objective-based planning.

Solid marketing strategy planning including marketing objectives. In this process, you define your specific goals for increasing customers, units of sale and frequency of purchase, along with profitability. These are called your marketing objectives.

Meeting marketing objectives should lead to sales. If not, you need to set different marketing objectives.

Your marketing objectives should: be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and contain timeframe or deadlines for implementation. Examples of marketing objectives follow:

• Increase product awareness among the target audience by 30 percent in one year.
• Inform target audience about features and benefits of our product and its competitive advantage, leading to a 10 percent increase in sales in one year.
• Decrease or remove potential customers’ resistance to buying our product, leading to a 20 percent increase in sales that are closed in six months or less.

If you have multiple objectives, make sure they are consistent and not in conflict with each other. Also, be sure that the remainder of your marketing plan components – the marketing strategy, budget, action programs, controls and measures – support your marketing objectives.

Examples of functional promotional objectives” might include:

• We aim to build customer database of at least 250,000 households within the next 12 months
• We aim to achieve a market share of 10%
• We aim to achieve 75% customer awareness of our brand in our target markets

Setting your marketing objectives and finalizing the remaining components of your marketing plan may serve as a reality check: Do you have the resources necessary to accomplish your objectives?

Then you develop specific programs for achieving those goals, fund them, calendar them and execute them according to schedule.

PRODUCTIVE METHOD #2: Comprehensive Marketing Strategy Planning

This is similar to objective-based planning, but with a few enhancements. A good, comprehensive marketing plan will include the following:

1. A situation analysis – Here is where you take a good, hard look at where you stand today, in terms of competition, product strengths, trends in the marketplace, past performance, buyer motivations, etc.
2. Objectives report – This is where the previous method began. Here you identify your sales and revenue goals, your market share targets, the awareness levels you want to reach in your market segments, your reputation, your unit of sale and frequency of purchase targets.
3. Strategies report – In this section of your plan, you’ll want to define the strategic approaches to reaching the objectives. These include looking at changes in your products or services, pricing strategy, collaborative ventures, media, PR, testing and tracking protocols, etc.
4. Marketing Objectives priority list – This is where you identify specific projects, campaigns and/or initiatives you will undertake to implement your marketing strategic approaches. You will have projects in the areas of new customer acquisition, unit of sale growth and frequency of purchase increase. You will prioritize them in order of most important to least important.
5. Your budget – Until now, you haven’t worried about budget, you’ve been focused on priorities. Now you can simply look at your most important priority and fully fund it. Then go down the list from most important to least important, and fully fund each project until you run out of projected marketing money.
6. Schedule – Finally, put it all on a schedule so you can see what needs to be done on a week-by-week basis, and what it’s going to cost you on a week-by-week basis.

Ha! Who am I kidding? Who is going to do all that? Well, to tell the truth, the people who want to be most successful, that’s who. But I’m not kidding anyone. This is the toughest way to do it because it requires the most discipline. And it usually requires the most lead time. Typically at least 90 days.

So if you don’t have that kind of time left – and you don’t if you’re working on a calendar year, you only have two options.

1) Go through the process anyway, because the time is going to pass anyway. Or,
2) Opt for the Action Plan Process…

PRODUCTIVE METHOD #3: The 30-Day Action Plan

For many, if not most small businesses, this may be the most productive method of all. In fact, even if you use either of the productive planning processes I’ve already mentioned, this approach may be incorporated into your plan as a mechanism for making sure things actually get done.

In this plan you are eating that marketing elephant one bite at a time. And you can always see the light at the end of the tunnel. Here is the process.

1. Begin with your highest priority marketing, advertising or sales project and identify a date no more than 30 days out when  that project will be implemented.
2. Break the project down into steps. These are essential milestones that must be met to complete the implementation of the project. Make a project plan with these manageable steps and give yourself credit when you complete these steps.
3. Make a decision about how much time you must spend EVERY DAY, to complete the steps by the deadline you’ve set. The every day bit is critical. This will help you accomplish more and focus on your priorities. If you don’t allocate time every single day, you’ll never develop the habit of working on this stuff and odds are most of it will never get done. I recommend a minimum of one hour per day and have it at the same time everyday.  Then it becomes a habit and part of your routine.  Try it..it works!
4. Stick to your schedule. If you determine it will take 30 minutes a day, work on the project for that 30 minutes and then get back to your other projects. If you think it’ll take an hour, plan for an hour. Don’t go over two hours. This again requires discipline to stop but very important to avoid burn out. If you miss a day, don’t try to make it up the next day by working twice as long on your project. Just understand that your schedule will slip a day because of the day you missed. Don’t get discouraged or down on yourself either. Just keep plugging away. Plan for this and add padding to your schedule. Have an accountability partner to keep you on track. This usually best left to someone other than your spouse or a family member.
5. Implement your project with joy and celebration and start tracking your results. Give yourself a pat on the back for your discipline and reward yourself for successes.
6. Pick another marketing project and begin the process over again.

Successful marketing strategy planning is all about planning your work and working your plan, yes. But it’s about more than that. It’s also about reaping the rewards of a well-thought-out, sensible approach to growing your business.

Final Thought:  “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” Raymond Viault, former CEO of Jacobs Suchard

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