Do you have a good marketing plan?
Although it may seem absolutely obvious, there are many companies wasting resources by not having a marketing plan and they go around like headless chickens hitting the road. This bad practice can lead to the failure of a company.
A good marketing plan can be summarized in the following four phases:
- Analysis
- Planning
- Action
- Analysis of results
ANALYSIS
In this phase, all internal and external agents that intervene in the market in which we operate will be studied.
Internally, it is a common mistake to isolate the marketing department from other departments.
Teamwork has been shown to be more effective, hence the importance of maintaining a close relationship with other departments that can provide us with vitally important information.
In theory, all companies will boast of doing it, although as we all know in practice it is not really the case.
Nor does it help the secrecy of the sales departments that perhaps for fear of sharing certain information, prefer to keep it for themselves, hindering the growth of the company.
PLANNING
Once we have gathered all the relevant information, we have to plan all the strategic actions that help us achieve our objectives.
In this part of the process, the keyword is "creativity".
Creativity to decide the products or services that we are going to offer to the market, the design of the product, its manufacture and distribution, the pricing policy, the after-sales service policy, the promotional tools that we will use, and the communication strategy that we will use. will reach our target audience.
Creativity is not based on making a beautiful drawing for the advertising campaign or on designing an attractive product for the consumer, creativity must be applied in each of the actions of the plan to achieve success.
In this part of the process, a common mistake is to downplay any of the above and waste budgets meaninglessly. Creativity also refers to this, investing resources in a creative way to get the maximum benefit with the minimum investment.
ACTION
With good strategic planning on the table, it is time to coordinate all actions and put them into practice. For this, it is important to choose both the human resources that will carry out the following processes and the external providers that will help us achieve our objectives.
The industrial designer who will create our product is as important as the distribution company or the communication agency that will be in charge of getting the message to the consumer.
Some of the communication actions and if we have chosen to do ATL, BTL, TTL, or digital campaigns, they have to evolve on the fly depending on the environment. Our competitors may initiate actions that could undermine our strategy.
Possibly the most common mistake in this phase is the wrong choice of the agents who will intervene in the action plan, causing our product to not be finished on time, not to have the expected quality, that our products suffer damage or delays in transport. , or that our resources are misused when communicating to our target audience.
ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
Nowadays, thanks to the fact that absolutely everything is digitized, it will be easier for us to obtain all the data related to our strategic plan in order to analyze it.
There are endless tools on the market that make this task easier for us.
That said, we have to analyze the results of the strategy used to understand if we have done it well or badly, and in the case of having made mistakes, locate and solve them.
The objective of this part of the process is to move forward, to continue improving taking advantage of this valuable information to be able to create the next plan and achieve our objectives.
If we do not carry out this part of the process, we run the risk of repeating the same mistakes unlimitedly until we run out of resources, a common practice in many of the companies that have ended up in a failed adventure. If we do not take advantage of the analysis of results we are wasting time and money.
