I. Summary of a marketing planThe marketing planning (concretized in
marketing plan) is an essential organizational activity, considering hostile and complex competitive business environment. Our ability and skills to perform profitable sales are affected by hundreds of internal and external factors that interact in a difficult way to evaluate. A marketing manager must understand and build an image upon these variables and their interactions, and must take rational decisions.
Let us see what do we call a "marketing plan"? It is result of planning activity, a document that includes a review of organization's place in market, an analysis of STEP factors as well as a SWOT analysis. A complete plan would also formulate some presumptions on why we think past marketing strategy was successful or not. The next phase shall present objectives we set, together with strategies to achieve these objectives. In a logical sequence, we will further need to evaluate results and formulate alternative plans of action. A plan would consist in details of responsibilities, costs, sales prognosis and budgeting issues.
In end, we should not forget to specify how plan (or plans) will be controlled, by what means we will measure its results.
We will see how to build marketing plan, what is its structure: after we will see how to build traditional marketing plan, we will take a look at e-marketing plan and see how unique features of internet will require some changes in approach of writing a marketing plan.
But, before we continue, we must understand and accept that steps of marketing plan are universal. It is a logical approach of planning activity, no matter where we apply it. The differences you meet from a plan to another consist in degree of formality accorded to each phase, depending on size and nature of organization involved. For example, a small and not diversified company would adopt less formal procedures, because managers in these cases have more experience and functional knowledge than subordinates, and they are able to achieve direct control upon most factors. On other hand, in a company with diversified activity, it is less likely that top managers have functional information in a higher degree than subordinate managers. Therefore, planning process must be formulated to ensure a strict discipline for everyone involved in decisional chain.
II. The general marketing plan
The classical marketing plan would follow following scheme of 8 stages:
1. Declaring mission: this is planning stage when we establish organizational orientations and intentions, thus providing a sense of direction. In most cases, this is a general presentation of company's intentions and almost has a philosophic character.
2. Establishing current objectives: it is essential for organization to try to determine with preciseness objectives to be reached. These objectives, in order to be viable, must be SMART. SMART is an acronym and stands for "Specific", "Measurable", "Attainable", "Realistic" and "Timed". The objectives must also convey general organizational mission.
3. Gathering information: this stage is based on concept of marketing audit. After performing audit of macro-environment by analyzing STEP factors (social, technologic, economic and politic), we should turn focus upon immediate extern environment (the micro-environment) and analyze competitive environment, costs and market. Finally, we will conclude with SWOT analysis, by this way we will have a general view upon internal environment compared to external one. The SWOT analysis combine two perspectives, from inside and from outside, because Strengths and Weaknesses are internal issues of an organization, while Opportunities and Threads come from outside.
4. Re-formulating objectives: after close examination of data gathered in previous stage, sometimes it is needed to re-formulate initial objectives, in order to address all issues that might have come up from previous stage. The distance between initial objective and re-formulated objective will be covered by appropriate strategies. We must ensure re-formulated objective is SMART as well.
5. Establishing strategies: several strategies are to be formulated, in order to cover distance between what we want to achieve and what is possible to achieve, with resources at our disposal. As we would usually have several options, we should analyze them and chose one with more chances to achieve marketing objectives.
6. Plan of actions: consists in a very detailed description of procedures and means to implement actions we want to take. For example, if strategy implies a raise in advertising volume, plan of actions should establish where advertisements will be placed, dates and frequency of advertising campaigns, a set of procedures to evaluate their effectiveness. The actions we plan to take must be clearly formulated, measurable, and results must be monitored and evaluated.
