Marketing Planning

It’s the one area that could easily boost marketing return on investment but is perhaps the most neglected – marketing planning.

Many organisations engage in reactive, opportunistic marketing but taking the time to put a marketing planning framework in place has many benefits.

• It forces the sales and marketing teams to come together and formulate a plan of action which has the buy-in and commitment of all parties.
• By using SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achieveable, realistic and timebound), it delivers a plan which can be measured against targets.
• It gives the marketing team a framework for day-to-day activity and can form the basis of performance analysis.
• It helps to achieve much tighter alignment between the marketing function and the overall business objectives of the organisation, ensuring that all staff are working towards a consistent set of goals.

But planning is just one element.  Marketing planning is a constantly evolving exercise, which measures outputs and constantly seeks to refine activities towards better outcomes.