Why Plan Marketing?

Planning is a crucial aspect in allowing an organisation to complete tasks on time and without exceeding resource allocation limits. One of the major problems within many organisations is that there is little or no long/short term strategy behind marketing or sales campaigns.

There are essentially two major reasons why strategic marketing planning may not occur - and both are justified by a focus on perceived results:

Lack of marketing resource
Lack of understanding of marketing planning

Often misunderstood are the roles that marketing plays within an organisation, from product development through to measuring customer satisfaction and ultimately impacting sales.

A marketing plan enables a company to formalise a strategy from which internal and external information is gathered and crucially provides a basis on which fully informed decisions can be made. So, for example Hare and Tortoise Marketing is a marketing consultancy company that is focussed on plugging the marketing skills gap that exists in small to medium sized organisations.

We have developed a marketing plan to identify how we should shape our services to meet customer demand and ultimately how we should also be communicating these services.

What are the benefits of developing a marketing plan?

Adaptation to Change: Understanding what the market is doing and how the marketing mix is developed, it becomes easier to identify areas that a company needs to change and how it should change
Resource Allocation: Within any small organisation, resource allocation is critical. By planning, resources can be deployed effectively to meet opportunities and threats to meet strategic windows of opportunity in order to generate competitive advantages.
Consistency: Planning provides decision makers with a common base to work from.
Integration with the Marketing Mix: A strategic focus allows the marketing mix to be fully integrated with the opportunities and threats.
Communication and Motivation: As part of our service offering, being able to demonstrate that marketing planning is crucial through communication of the company�s own success and development.
Control: By setting clear objectives and targets, it is possible to measure the success of campaign allowing better evaluation of tactics and strategies used. This provides crucial information for the future and allows the plan to be adapted for future campaigns.