Marketing Planning (& Marketing Plan)

Marketing Planning is the process of analysing marketing situations, deciding marketing objectives, and implementing various marketing strategies to achieve those objectives. Here’s more on marketing planning and its process.

What is Marketing Planning?

The Marketing Planning process is a methodical approach to achieve specific marketing goals. It involves several steps such as conducting a situation analysis; setting marketing objectives; formulation of strategy; implementation of action programs and control.

“Marketing Planning is the structured process of researching and analysing marketing situations, deciding marketing objectives and strategies, and implementing, evaluating and controlling activities to achieve these objectives.” Hollensen, 2006

So what is the ‘Marketing plan’?

The Marketing plan is basically an internal document that outlines a company’s planned marketing activities for the achievements of business and organisational goals. So, marketing plan is the outcome of the Marketing planning process.

Why Marketing Planning?

All elements of the marketing mix; Product, brand name, price, promotion, place, etc., are important when selling a product but not good enough without marketing planning. This is because Organisations operate in a very complex and competitive environment coupled with vast technological changes.

So, marketing planning is to identify sources of competitive advantage, to deploy resources to meet challenges, to coordinate & integrate marketing activities and to set achievable targets to measure their success.

How does marketing planning help a business organisation?

• Analyses market trends, customers information & data, capabilities and competition. All what we learnt about the marketplace.
• Helps develop strategies for targeting best customers.
• Leads to best use of resources
• Help identify own strengths and weaknesses

Marketing Plan: Two Parts

The marketing plan can be divided into two broad parts:

• The situation analysis: This covers the analysis of current data and information related to the internal and external marketing environment, the product, markets, industry and competitors.
• The objectives, strategies and programmes: These are based on the outcome of the situational analysis. So, accurate and thorough analysis is a key to the development of successful marketing strategies.

The first step in marketing planning is to study the current situation, before charting out the marketing plan for the organization. Environmental Scanning is the systematic, ongoing collection and interpretation of data about internal and external factors that affect marketing and performance.

The internal audit covers capabilities and factors inside the organisation whereas the external audit covers circumstances and factors outside the organisation. The audit results are then used in SWOT (TOWS) analysis, to reveal the firm’s primary strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

While preparing the plan, its also important to go through the mission statement of the firm to understand of it provides appropriate direction for organisational decisions, actions and resource allocation, including marketing planning.

Conducting External analysis of the sector using a PESTEL framework

Using a PESTEL framework, conduct an external analysis of the sector (business context), highlighting key factors which may be a threat or an opportunity for the organisation going forward.

Summarise your understanding of the sector and identify the key factors that emerged from this analysis – mention key things that impact the business sector positively or negatively.

Internal analysis using a SWOT

Using the SWOT framework, conduct an internal analysis of the Organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in successfully meeting the needs and wants of the target consumer segment. Summarise the effectiveness of current marketing arrangements and indicate areas for further development. This analysis should bring together the findings from the previous analysis.

While conducting a SWOT analysis for a company, you need to bring in factors from your PESTLE analysis / External analysis for the SWOT. Based on the SWOT analysis, evaluate and summarise the effectiveness of current marketing arrangements of the company, and indicate areas for further development.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning Strategy

When launching new products, Organizations use the STP framework – Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning approach to identify target consumers and to address the specific needs and wants of specific segments.

A perceptual map is also created to better understand how the product of the company is seen (should be seen) against its competitors.

The Marketing Mix

Once the positioning strategy is determined, the appropriate Marketing Mix is planned that will help achieve the positioning.

The 7P Marketing Mix framework is commonly used to detail how marketing tactics/activities should be employed to attract one key consumer segment (target customer) and meet their needs.

Every business requires marketing in order to promote the products and in order to drive sales. Every business also goes through a cycle and firms early in the cycle tend to spend more money on marketing. While the more established brands may spend more on other aspects of the business, such as increasing the product line or widening its distribution channels, startups tend to spend more on marketing to create awareness about their business.