In 1910, two teams of explorers - one from England, one from Norway - raced across Antarctica in the the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition; a competition to become the first to set foot on the South Pole. The Norwegian team, who spent a year planning their journey by surveying the inhospitable landscape in detail, won by more than a month. Led by Captain Robert Scott, the British team instead focused on raising cash for expensive scientific equipment and a gamut of transportation methods. Scott - along with all four of his British teammates - not only lost the race, but died on the gruelling journey home.
In business, as in exploring, he who plans wins. And while poor marketing planning won’t end quite as dramatically as Scott’s expedition, it might signal the beginning of the end for your business’ growth. A good marketing plan should act as a navigation system for your business: assessing the conditions and setting the strategic direction while allowing for updates, diversions, speed limits and unforeseen roadblocks along the way. While delegating marketing planning and execution to experts, whether in-house or outsourced, makes good business sense, that doesn’t mean letting go of the wheel entirely. Business owners have a duty to understand the basic drivers of effective marketing planning to ensure optimum performance.
How does this work in practice? Let’s say that one of your objectives is to penetrate a new market segment. Your goal might be to increase lead generation in that area by 20%. The strategy to achieve that could be inbound marketing, while the tactics used to get there might include a mixture content marketing, an optimised website, and a focus on email marketing campaigns.
Using the above tactics as an example, some of your actions might be to: create and maintain a blog schedule, ensure effective calls to action are present on all website sections, and commit to a weekly e-newsletter. Short term measures of success might include website visits, social shares, and email open/click metrics.
Long term, your results should directly tie into your starting strategy: in this case, a demonstrable increase in leads. If you’re looking for a simple yet powerful template, two frameworks spring to mind. Renowned for both its simplicity and its power, Peter Knight’s Highly Effective Marketing Plan (HEMP) offers a practical process for marketers and non-marketers alike. Similarly, the SOSTAC® planning model by PR Smith has been used by businesses to great effect since the 1990s.
Big corporations may have multiple marketing plans covering different areas of the business - on a grand scale, Unilever’s newly-integrated marketing teams manage over 400 distinct brands globally. Likewise, a smaller but still multifaceted publishing conglomerate, for example, may also have distinct marketing strategies for libraries, professional societies, schools, trade customers, end-users and so on.
For small and medium sized businesses, a single plan is likely enough. You may need more if your business has two equal but entirely distinct audiences - if you sell your product both to the retail trade and directly to consumers, for instance - but whether this is the most effective use of your resources will likely be answered as part of your pre-plan internal assessment.
The direction your marketing plan takes will vary considerably depending on not only the size of your business’ engine, but its make and model too. While the same basic marketing framework applies to any business, there are differences in output and techniques that separate a B2C marketing plan from a B2B one. For example, a B2C eCommerce business is likely to reach and engage its customers directly through a digitally focused and social heavy strategy.
B2B businesses on the other hand traditionally have a more circuitous purchasing process, requiring a highly-targeted approach to reach customers at each stage of their buyer journey. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach: marketing plans will vary depending on your business model, sales process, target market, and a million other variables.
Any marketing plan should contain enough horizon gazing to understand your market, sufficient landmarks along the way, and clear directions to ensure it is both readable and workable by anyone in your business. To do so effectively takes time.
How much time? To an extent, that depends on how long your journey is. But if a marketing director tells you it will be ready within two days, be suspicious. Creating a powerful and practical marketing roadmap will almost certainly take weeks, possibly months. As with most areas of the business, marketing planning is an ongoing process of revisiting and refining. A rigid 12-month plan is all well and good, but as Brexit and GDPR (the new data protection guidelines) both prove, businesses need to be agile and flexible.
Time to plan: Be prepared to invest several hours into the marketing planning process.
Either way, business owners should be prepared to invest several hours of life into the process: taking the time to plan from the outset will prevent you from having to backpedal on ineffective strategies further down the line.Delegating understanding is always dangerous - all parties need to be able to navigate the road ahead with confidence. By understanding and appreciating marketing fundamentals, you will be able to commission better marketing to see your business reach its goals with ease. The Marketing Centre helps businesses shift gears through effective marketing. Find out how your business is performing with our Marketing 360 Healthcheck.