Objective and Goal Setting

Like a project timeline, you have to have an end date before you can determine when to start. This is your chance to think big and picture those profits or media recognition at the end of your telescope. What is it that you want to achieve in one, three, five years? How does your marketing plan fit into the overall business mission statement of the company? Who is your primary target audience? Is there a profit margin you want to reach?

Assessing Your Current Situation

Before you set out to gain, you must first identify what you already have. It can be more useful – and economical – to use or restructure a current environment than to bring in outside talent. Gather your team and use the S.W.O.T. (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis to assess your team’s current status.Make sure to ask questions that generate meaningful information for each SWOT category to make the exercise useful to find your company’s “competitive advantage”. Conducting market research, analysis, and segmentation will come useful for you.

Writing the Plan and Strategy

Whether it is two or thirty pages, as long as the plan recognizes your target customers and has steps to take action towards delivering your product or service to them, it is a solid plan. The strategies you and the company stakeholders choose must be directed toward establishing marketing strategies that are affordable and flexible. The famous four P’s come into play here: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.

Implementing and Managing Your Plan

Now that you have your plan, it’s time to put it into action! The steps that you’ve outlined (or thoroughly defined) serve as the guide for a series of actionable items needed to move the organization toward the objectives that you set during the first step of this process. At every step of the marketing planning, marketing managers should use evaluation periods and feedback to assess if the current strategies are meeting goals and expectations