The 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.

That applies to any kind of plan, whether we're talking business or personal finances, university degrees or NGO programs, website promotion or weight loss.

Setting objectives and milestones is of crucial importance for any planning activity and is core of its success, or failure. Knowing how to set objectives is not exactly rocket science in terms of complexity, but any strategist should know basic rules of how to formulate and propose objectives. We will see in this article why objectives play such a major role within a company's planning and strategic activities, how they influence all business processes, and we will review some guidelines of setting objectives.

The Importance of Setting Objectives

One might wonder why we need to establish objectives in first place, why not let company or a specific activity just run smoothly into future and see where it gets. That would be case only if we really do not care whether activity in discussion will be successful or not: but then, to use a popular saying, "if something deserves to be performed, then it deserves to be performed well". In other words, if we don't care for results, we should not proceed with action at all.

Setting objectives before taking any action is only right thing to do, for several reasons:

- it gives a target to aim to, therefore all actions and efforts will be focused on attaining objective instead of being inefficiently used; - gives participants a sense of direction, a glimpse of where they’re going to; - motivates leaders and their teams, since it is quite custom of establishing some sort of reward once team successfully completed a project; - offers support in evaluating success of an action or project.

The 5 Rules of Setting Objectives: Be SMART!

I am sure most managers and leaders know what SMART stands for, well, at least when it comes of establishing objectives. However, I have seen some of them who cannot fully explain five characteristics of a good-established objective – things are somehow blurry and confused in their minds. Since they can't explain in details what SMART objectives really are, it is highly doubtful that they will always be able to formulate such objectives.

It is still unclear from where confusion comes: perhaps there are too many sources of information, each of them with a slightly different approach upon what a SMART objective really is; or perhaps most people only briefly "heard" about it and they never get to reach substance behind packaging.

Either way, let us try to uncover meaning of SMART acronym and see how we can formulate efficient objectives. SMART illustrates 5 characteristics of an efficient objective; it stands for Specific – Measurable – Attainable – Relevant – Timely.

1. Be SPECIFIC!

When it comes of business planning, "specific" illustrates a situation that is easily identified and understood. It is usually linked to some mathematical determinant that imprints a specific character to a given action: most common determinants are numbers, ratios and fractions, percentages, frequencies. In this case, being "specific" means being "precise".

Example: when you tell your team "I need this report in several copies", you did not provide team with a specific instruction. It is unclear what determinant "several" means: for some it can be three, for some can be a hundred. A much better instruction would sound like "I need this report in 5 copies" – your team will know exactly what you expect and will have less chances to fail in delivering desired result.

2. Be MEASURABLE!

When we say that an objective, a goal, must be measurable, we mean there is a stringent need to have possibility to measure, to track action(s) associated with given objective.