In today’s increasingly complex business environment, the ability to achieve profitable results is impacted by dozens of factors, many of which are interconnected. It often makes sense to try to bring some order to this chaos by understanding and applying a rigor to your strategic marketing planning.
A strategic business plan combined with a robust, solid marketing plan can improve company efficiency, which helps improve revenue and market share growth, and minimizes expenses — all of which lead to higher overall profitability.
The pace of the technology channel can inspire a “marketing idea of the week” mentality, but proper planning starts with strategy, a plan to achieve an overall goal, and ends with tactics, or the methods for achieving the strategy. In business, we often start with the tactics and forget to ask why we’re attempting marketing initiatives in first place. We also don’t allow ourselves time to plan accordingly with a three- or six-month window of opportunity. Unfortunately, this is not effective.
A marketing plan is useful to many people in a business, not just the marketing department. It can help professionals:
- Identify sources of competitive advantage
- Gain commitment to a strategy
- Get resources needed to invest in and build the business
- Inform key channel stakeholders
- Set objectives and milestones
- Monitor and measure performance
For a truly effective marketing strategy, you must study and evaluate your business and its target audience, then create a plan of action, follow through with and measure it. Don’t overthink this. Strategic marketing planning is important, but it shouldn’t be all-consuming. Simple steps can be incredibly valuable, like taking time to review what has been done in the past and its effectiveness, thinking about new opportunities, talking to sales reps and resellers, scoping out the competition and writing down a plan. It defines who you serve, what problems you solve and how you alone can solve them.
Creating a solid marketing plan can be the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a failed one. As most people have already experienced, marketing can be an expensive and complicated endeavor. Let’s not rely on hope as our marketing strategy.
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Mary Ellen Grom is vice president of marketing at SYNNEX Corp.
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