Marketing article 2 – Marketing planning, pain or pivotal? (3 of 4)
Linked
Successful marketing plans at any level are not created in isolation, but are linked in many ways – to other plans inside the organization, and to customers, partners, and activities outside the organization.
Business plans identify the planned enterprise-wide activities (or investments) that are required to generate a return. Marketing plans define all the activities that are necessary to create customers that provide the return, and are therefore intimately linked to the business plan. Similarly, marketing plans define the required new products to satisfy market demand and are linked in turn to new product development plans.
And most importantly, successful marketing plans are linked to customers, both in terms of inbound marketing knowledge acquired from customers and in the outbound marketing activities that are planned to touch those customers with information, products, and services.
More practically, successful plans are built from direct customer input, built with help from customers, and shared with them before execution to a wider audience begins.
Identifying linkages to your plan before planning starts will improve planning deliverables and identify who should share in the planning tasks with you – and reduces the possibility of painful rework.
While you may have one owner or a team of people working directly on a marketing plan, be sure to cast a wider net at some point in the process. You’ll specifically need to do this if the objective of the plan includes obtaining agreement from many stakeholders. But in all cases, wider distribution and a few meetings to explain and ask for input go a long way in getting commitment from those that will eventually be involved in execution or will share the results.
Measurable
Currently, there’s considerable focus on “marketing ROI”. Yet the ROI from marketing is received in many different ways and is not conducive to separating into quarterly financial buckets. Outbound marketing activities generate long term results – often over many years – and no one activity can be measured in isolation either from other marketing activities or the attractiveness of the product offering itself. You’re dealing with the prospect’s perception of your organization, and its products, that is built up over time through numerous touches.
But this does not mean that measurement is useless. Good marketing plans, capably executed, will positively affect the enterprise-level measures that an organization has defined. These effects should be assessed and targeted in each new plan. In addition, short term measures for the plan period must be defined and documented before the plan is executed. These measures should be keyed directly to the plan’s objectives.
Confine the measures you specify to the key three or four that provide the most clean view of your marketing effort in relation to the objective. For each measure, define how it will be collected and what you expect its magnitude to be after the marketing plan is executed.
Long term measures might include:
- the number of units sold, compared to plan, of each product
- sales funnel quality, and its size and trend over time
- sales cost
- improvements in the speed of the sales cycle over time
- pre-sales and after-sales support effort (not cost)
- brand awareness (various measures)
Short term measures to assess a set of integrated tactics might include:
- leads generated
- time, effort and cost to execute, compared to plan
- market position achieved, measured by an external benchmark
- any electronic measures that can be automatically collected and compiled
Given the project execution focus within many marketing groups, it’s easy to lose sight of the real results that marketing must achieve in order to add value to the business. Marketing objectives that include “in support of” or “to gauge interest in” are hard to measure, likely because they are too removed from real value creation to be worth doing. Defining measures helps to make sure your plan is keyed directly to achieving a specific result at the business level.
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