Money come$ after marketing

To some self-professed managers, this is just a total waste of time. What we must remind ourselves is that marketing communicates a consistent message to the intended audience. It also looks at what the market may need and want and at what price they would be willing to pay for it.

As we all know, marketing also explores the shifting needs of customers and consumers and so much more. So where exactly does a marketing plan fit in to all of this? It becomes the roadmap for achieving your business goals.

You want staff to feel confident that the captain of the vessel has the charts in order, knows how to run the ship, and has a port of destination in mind. Companies often undervalue the impact of a marketing plan on their own people, who want to feel part of a team engaged in an exciting and complicated joint endeavour. If you want your employees to feel committed to your company, it’s important to share with them your vision of where the company is headed in the years to come. People don’t always understand financial projections, but they can get excited about a well-written and well-thought-out marketing plan. You should consider releasing your marketing plan, perhaps in an abridged version, in the company. Do it with some fanfare and generate some excitement for the adventures to come. Your workers will appreciate being involved. We all know that plans are imperfect things.

How can you possibly know what’s going to happen 12 months or five years from now? Isn’t putting together a marketing plan an exercise in futility, a waste of time better spent meeting with customers or fine-tuning production? Yes, possibly but only in the narrowest sense. If you don’t plan, you’re doomed, and an inaccurate plan is far better than no plan at all because without a marketing plan, you’ll wander the seas aimlessly, sometimes finding dry land but more often than not floundering in a vast ocean. Sea captains without a chart are rarely remembered for discovering anything but the ocean floor.It’s more important than a vision statement. To put together a genuine marketing plan, you have to assess your company from top to bottom and make sure all the pieces are working together in the best way. What do you want to do with this enterprise you call the company in the coming year? Consider it a to-do list on a grand scale. It assigns specific tasks for the year.

You don’t allow your financial people to keep their numbers in their heads. Financial reports are the lifeblood of the numbers side of any business, no matter what size. It should be no different with marketing. Your written document lays out your game plan. If people leave, if new people arrive, if memories falter, if events bring pressure to alter the givens, the information in the written marketing plan stays intact to remind you of what you’d agreed on.

It enables you to budget marketing expenses — helping you keep control of your expenditures, manage your cash flow, track sales to marketing expense ratio, and measure success of your marketing efforts. It also ensures that product development dollars are not wasted.

Creating your very first marketing plan is a time and resource consuming endeavour, but well worth the effort. Once the plan is complete, you just need to make minor adjustments and tweaks to it; you won’t have to re-create it from scratch. It will serve as a template and benchmark for you to work from as you define your objectives and strategies for next year. It becomes a living document for measuring sales success, customer retention, product development, and sales initiatives.

Now that we know the benefits of a marketing plan, we need to take a step back and decide where and when to start.

vickyboodram@hotmail.com

Vicky Boodram is a Marketing/HR Lecturer & Consultant