Follow these eight steps to help your firm create a strategic marketing plan
Strategic planning is an effective corporate tool that can be applied to your company’s overall function. It can work well, too, in improving your marketing efforts.
A strategic marketing plan probably won’t enable you to make instant business decisions. But it can create a blueprint from which consistent marketing decisions can flow. Also, it can provide you with the valuable opportunity to evaluate your business in the context of your competitive position and in relation to the future needs or demands of your customers or clients.
Marketing professionals must work, as people in any other area of business, within the parameters of set budgets, specific methodologies, and objective evaluations of results. A strategic plan is instrumental in establishing those factors.
Strategic planning involves both a process and a philosophy.
Strategic marketing and PR planning can favorably impact the bottom line.
Here are some suggestions to enhance your planning:
1. Budget enough time for the process. Devoting time to planning now will reduce frantic scurrying around to solve problems later. The time invested will be well spent.
2. Look outside your organization ad into the minds of your customers.
3. Involve as many as possible in your business as you can in the process. This is possibly the most important part of the whole exercise.
4. Bring in an objective facilitator who isn’t afraid to tell the truth.
5. Keep your procedure disciplined and take specific steps in developing your plan:
6. Work with your staff to determine what your corporate mission is or should be. Your completed mission statement should describe your organization’s identity and purpose. The more complete your statement, the better blueprint its. Be sure that everyone in the organization "lives the mission."
7. Establish specific objectives. The choices you make in establishing your mission statement will influence your objectives. For example, if an element of your mission concerns achieving a superior reputation for your product or service, one of your objectives might be to provide responsive, creative and cost effective PR to do the job. Your objectives will direct your strategies.
8. Keep your plan alive. At the end of the planning exercise, write up the plan in concise language and give each staff member a copy. Don’t just stuff it in a drawer and forget about it. It should be a living document that helps you chart your organization’s course. It can and should be changed when it’s necessary to abandon or redefine a course of action.
And, most importantly, your strategic plan should be flexible and enable you to grab a solid marketing opportunity when one presents itself. Let it serve you and your staff by reducing impromptu problem-solving, time-wasting fire-fighting, and impulsive decision-making.
Peter Monfre is a principal of Monfre Acott Marketing Communications in Milwaukee. He can be reached at 273-1550 or via the Web at www.monfreacott.com.
