Marketing Planning
Peek’s Top Marketing Planning Tips
The planning process can be daunting. Here are a few tips to make it go more smoothly.
Take a look at how the world has changed since your previous planning process. This will help you put current changes in perspective and get your team ready to consider new ideas. What marketing approach has your competition taken, and what new rivals, if any, have emerged? Has your sales or income gone up? Have you added new services? etc.
Don’t talk about the services you provide. Instead, focus on what your customers value and how you can help them, not on yourself and what you have to offer. Remember, prospects won’t be interested in anything until they see the value you can provide. That means focusing on their problems and how you might solve them.
Always start with research. Knowledge is a powerful weapon. The more you understand your market, clients, prospects, and competitors, the better prepared you will be in developing your marketing strategy. It lowers the risk of making an incorrect decision. You won’t be sorry if you invest in it. However, keep in mind that B2B professional research is entirely different to consumer research.
Expertise is most effectively demonstrated by exposure and the ability to make difficult subjects simple. The more your organisation’s specialists are seen and heard, and the more prospects turn to them for a clear understanding of complex issues that affect them, the more new business you’ll get.
If marketing is not implemented well, it generally does not succeed. Even the most well-intentioned strategies can go wrong if under-resourced, under-funded, and inadequately carried out. Make sure you have a plan that will work and the resources and people necessary to execute it.
Select fewer activities but fully support the ones you do pick. Instead of focusing on quantity, focus on the quality of your efforts. Choose which old approach you’re going to stop (or pause) if you want to test a new approach. It’s far more effective to concentrate on a few highly targeted tactics than attempting to implement numerous half-hearted ones.
Track the entire marketing pipeline. Don’t just focus on short-term outcomes. Instead, your marketing strategy should be consistent with your company’s long-term business development plan. Marketing plans that include defined objectives and a timeline for reaching them have been shown to produce effective results.