Reading: The Marketing Planning Process
Roy Larke
The Marketing Planning Process
The marketing planning process is a part of all business planning – all businesses must offer value to its customers to succeed, and the marketing plan is the first step in identifying both the customers and their needs, as well as ways in which the company and its brands will meet those needs.
Planning is very important. For example, banks and other finance providers will expect to see detailed plans before they will agree to provide funding.
The Business Plan
At its most basic, marketing planning consists of three main activities when planning marketing. At the highest level, companies carry out business planning. Business planning consists of making decisions to guide the company over both the short-term (usually 6-12 months) and the long-term (a year or more, but usually up to five years).
A business plan will cover all aspects of a company’s business and how the owners or senior managers hope to improve the business over time. You can learn more about business plans on the government’s business planning website.
A business plan will include a lot of information, some of which will also be useful for marketing planning below. This information may include:
- A description of your business and your business’s mission statement
- Key metrics relating to your business such as:
- Revenue or sales
- Cost and Profit figures
- Assets
- Employee numbers and skill data
- External factors affecting your business (both positive and negative ones)
- Internal factors affecting your business (what your business is good at and what it is not good at)
- Major goals
- Key objectives
Setting goals (major and general outcomes the company wishes to achieve) and objectives (more focused actions that will help the company achieve its goals) is an important part of all planning.
Example of Goals and Objectives
GOAL: Increase sales by 10% within 12 months
- Objective 1: run an advertising campaign targeting 20-30-year-old women with average household incomes of $68,000 or more, living in the Waikato Region.
- Objective 2: introduce new package designs using colours preferred by respondents in our market research
The Marketing Plan
Within the business plan, you will include more details of certain aspects of your business operations, such as a finance plan, a personnel plan and so on. One of these will be the Marketing Plan.
The Marketing Plan provides a data-focused analysis of the market and environment in which the company operates, with a particular focus on the business’s target customers. A marketing plan will include both medium-term and short-term goals and objectives.
The Marketing Mix Application Plan
Within the Marketing Plan, a key component will be a plan for how the company will apply its Marketing Mix. The Marketing Mix is also commonly referred to as the 7Ps (or sometimes 4Ps). The application plan outlines how a company will make adjustments to each of these factors, and those adjustments usually relate to the short-term (6-12 months or sometimes less):
Marketing Mix Decision Examples
- Product: how will your products (or services) meet the needs of your customers?
- Place: how will your customers access your products (or services) and what will be their experience when doing so?
- Price: in monetary terms, how much value do your products and services offer to customers, and how much profit does this allow you to capture?
- Promotion: how will you tell your customers about your products and services, and what do you want customers to think about those products & services?
- People: which people will customers interact with when experiencing your services?
- Processes: what kind of experience will your customers have when using your services?
- Physical Evidence: in what kind of environment, atmosphere, ambience, or circumstances will customers experience your service?
Why do you need a business plan?
A business plan and its parts are living documents. They are not static documents that are created once and then forgotten. They are important documents that set out the environment in which the business operates, what the business does, and what the business plans to do in the future. These documents change and evolve over time, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot.
As we said above, plans are often key documents needed when applying for funding, such as a bank loan. They show evidence that a business is being well managed and that it has prospects for growth – and so it is likely to show a return on the investment of the money it receives.
In addition, a good business plan helps entrepreneurs focus on the key objectives they need to meet in order to achieve their overall goals and so to help the business to succeed.
