What is a Marketing Plan?

Marketing planning is the establishment and maintenance of a feasible adaptive management process between organizational goals, skills, resources, and its various changing market opportunities. The goal of the strategic plan is to shape and continuously adjust the company's business and products in order to achieve the target profit and development. A marketing plan involves marketing strategies and tactics that can help a company achieve its overall strategic goals. Every business, product, and brand requires a detailed marketing plan. ^[1]

Marketing Plan

(Marketing term)

Marketing plans are tactical plans for businesses,

The core of all plans is execution. No matter how good the plan is, it is not first-class execution. The first common execution error in marketing plans is "rat marketing." The problem with "rat marketing" is not the obstacles to plan execution. It is due to the lack of a clear direction in the marketing strategy of the management team, so that the execution of the plan is not clear.

One electronics manufacturer has been plagued by the slow pace of new product launches. In this industry, the products that are first put on the market often have great advantages. However, the company's products are often one year behind its main competitors from the beginning of conception to the formal entry into the market. This annoyed the company's managers.

In further research, it was found that the company's managers have been making the weak development department devoted to the development of existing equipment on the market, etc .: "No value" programs. Despite the strength of the development department, changes have been made due to changes in management. At the same time, because of too many plans, the power is scattered and difficult to achieve. And so many plans stem from the company's lack of clear understanding of the company's business scope and market conditions, and are keen on planning. The more and more plans are made, just like the rapid reproduction of mice, it is called "rat marketing".

The second common marketing mistake is "short commitment marketing." Suppose a company wants to implement a nationwide customer plan to improve service to key customers. How should it implement this plan? Perhaps the general manager will organize a national customer service plan based at the headquarters, but this behavior of the general manager may conflict with the sales director. It would be better if he performed this task through the company's sales department. In fact, people don't understand the art of smooth execution of marketing programs in different departments of an organization. As a result, they stay at the initial stage of learning from practice.

The company's main product is some special equipment, which can only attract those engineering companies that need this special equipment, and these users are usually smaller engineers. The company's sales service strategy also adopts a measure of equal distribution of sales force to adapt to this customer structure. Well-known: The "80/20" rule tells us that 80% of corporate revenue is obtained from 20% of large customer orders. However, the company's accounts only accounted for 20% of major customers' contributions. Therefore, although it has to invest more in sales and vigorously develop customer sources, it has achieved poor results.

In view of this, the company's boss sends someone to serve as a national customer service manager, responsible for plans to improve services. The national customer service manager is affiliated with the marketing director, but is not binding on the sales and service personnel of the company's branches. In the absence of real power, the customer service manager is responsible for integrating the national customer plan, providing optimal services to a small number of important customers of the company, and changing the company's previous practice of evenly distributing sales and service forces.

Fifteen months passed quickly, and the customer service manager in charge of this national customer service improvement plan had no results other than submitting a national customer opinion form. The company's service to important customers remains the same. Many large customers turn to other companies with good services.

From the above example, it is not difficult to understand the harm of this "short commitment marketing". The company's customer service plan contradicts the marketing strategy it pursues. Facing his own marketing weakness, the general manager did not take actual action to correct it, but only announced a national customer service plan that was inconsistent with his marketing plan. This plan is just an unfulfillable "short promise" that conflicts with the company's own behavior on the one hand and fails to cooperate with the company's specific marketing department on the other. In the business world, there are many people who make such "short promise marketing" execution errors.

A perfect marketing plan does not necessarily lead to good marketing activities. The "rat marketing" and "short commitment marketing" mentioned above are execution problems that often occur in marketing plans.

When company leaders have a vague understanding of the nature and direction of marketing, it is easy for them to come up with various marketing plans, so that their power is scattered and it is difficult to do anything well. "Mouse Marketing" came into being.

1. The marketing plan details the expected economic benefits. The relevant departments and enterprises as senior managers can predict the future development situation, which can reduce the blindness of operation and allow the enterprise to have a clear development goal, which is convenient for the enterprise to adopt. Corresponding measures strive to achieve the expected goals.

2. It is beneficial for the enterprise to judge the costs and expenses to be borne, so as to further refine the plan and save expenses.

3. The marketing plan describes the tasks and actions that will be taken to facilitate the clarification of the responsibilities of the relevant personnel so that they can complete their tasks with goals and steps.

4. It is helpful to monitor the actions and effects of various marketing activities, so that companies can more effectively control marketing activities and coordinate departmental relationships. ^[3]

If small and medium-sized enterprises want to gain a place in the increasingly competitive Internet and use network promotion to improve performance and enhance the competitiveness of enterprises, they must first build their own websites, and use the website as the core for network promotion is the first choice for many small and medium-sized enterprises. The website is not only the appearance of the company on the Internet, but more importantly, it can publicly promote its own company and products, and the content and scope of the promotion can be more detailed and wider. Some companies may feel very strange. The corporate website is very new and practical, and the content of the website needs to be updated frequently, but why are there so few users? Which link is wrong? The key lies in PR. Value and website ranking, if you want to increase website traffic, companies must publish the website's external links to a variety of regular, relevant, high-quality platforms, and promote the website from multiple aspects to attract more users to visit the website and increase traffic , While also increasing potential customers. Of course, it is even better to publish to the portal.

In order to further expand the effects brought by online marketing, companies must also publish the website's advertising information to business websites with high user views. Because the website itself has a limited promotion role, it needs to promote the website from more aspects, promote it for the enterprise, and publish it to other business websites so that the website can be recognized by more people, thereby improving the website's Popularity, this is a key step in online marketing, and it is also a solution to the problem that some corporate websites do not have too many users.

To better implement and implement marketing plans, effective process management is also required. Including the following three points:

First, the marketing plan should be broken down layer by layer.

In order to better achieve the marketing goals and plans, it must be broken down layer by layer. For example, the sales director is broken down to the sales manager, the sales manager is broken down to the sales supervisor, the sales executive is broken down to the salesman, and the salesman is broken down to the dealer. The dealer breaks down to his salesman and even downstream channel customers. During the decomposition process, the background of the goals and plans, implementation points, precautions, etc. are told to them, and then the implementation of their marketing plan is monitored.

Second, process management must be held accountable to people.

After the marketing goals are issued to the sales director, as the person in charge of the enterprise, he only needs to stare at the sales director. As a sales director, you need to quantitatively decompose these sales tasks into specific direct reports, and urge and check them, so that they can implement marketing goals into marketing plans and decompose them into specific work indicators, such as market development , Promoting new products, doing promotional activities, etc., and so on, and so on, the more solid the decomposition work, the more detailed the decomposition, such as sales director-sales manager-sales executive-salesman-dealer-distributor- The terminal operator, the more clear the responsible person, the more helpful it is to achieve the marketing goals and plans.

Third, the day is controlled by the moon and the day is closed by the month.

We have to decompose the marketing goals of the year into each month, and then decompose the goals of each month into each day, and then control the goals and plan completion of each day. How to make up the next day.

To achieve daily control, daily control, and strive to achieve the average daily standards.

The monthly clearing is to clear out the target task amount of each month on the basis of daily control, and the next month can be loaded lightly instead of carrying forward.

The so-called daily knot is to summarize daily, summarize the gains and losses, summarize the successes and failures, rather than repeat some mistakes, or good experience can not be copied and inherited. Monthly high means that I have to improve every month, including sales performance, including work skills, and so on.