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Depending upon who you ask a marketing plan is either a necessary evil or tremendous waste of time. - That’s such a shame, but I think I’ve finally come to understand why this is.
A well crafted marketing plan should be one of the most important strategic steps a business takes, but there’s a disconnect. Marketing plans get created, but never used because, once put to paper or ether, they don’t easily relate to the real life experience of a business. They get created but never installed.
- At a minimum your marketing plan should include:
- a description of your ideal customer
- your core message (vs competitors)
- your key marketing strategy
- your communications tools
- your lead generation plan (advertising, public relations, referral)
- your web plan (yes, with a blog)
- your lead conversion plan
- your customer loyalty plan
- your marketing calendar
- your marketing budget
- your key strategic indicators
- scads of sales, revenue and profit projections
Now, the creation of the above is a great start and a beneficial exercise for any business, new or existing, but here’s what’s needed to truly make your marketing plan work.
Your marketing must have a life and the only way it can do that is if you throw it into the middle of your day to day business. As a document it’s a fantasy and it stops breathing the minute you open the door each day. A truly effective marketing plan must integrate into the reality of the stuff you do each day.
Here’s how the perfect marketing plan would work.
You create the plan as prescribed above, you bake the appropriate elements of your plan into your CRM system, you tie the plan to your actual sales, you flow the plan projections into your bookkeeping software and you circulate actual results through your key indicators, automatically updating your projections. Now that would make a living, breathing powerhouse of a marketing plan and, now, your marketing plan would actually run your business. (As it should be)
I’m not sure the specific software to do what I’ve described actually exists today, but I’m betting a web application bringing together current offerings from some of the smart folks at a Palo Alto Software, Microsoft, SAP, NetBooks, Intuit, Sage, Zoho or NetSuite couldn’t be that hard to hack together.
I know there are plenty of BigCos and VARs out there that have created something like this for the enterprise market, but what about one for the real small business (2-50 employees)?
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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at Sep 20, 07 | 12:36 pm and is filed under Marketing Plans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’d buy that software! Even better if it was a hosted web application that you could pay a monthly fee for based on the size of your company. That way your plan would always be available to link to or show to banks, investors, partners…
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Based on the people I’ve worked with before who thrive on building marketing plans, I fear that most of the time and energy spent on building such a marketing plan would be focused on the “scads of sales, revenue and profit projections” aspect of the plan, and little on the actual nuts and bolts of the plan.
THEN, once the “scads” of revenue and profit generation have been tossed about and decided upon, the marketing team will then work backward to justify the expense of all of the other activities in your list.
It kinda reminds me of A href=”http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/theplan.html”>The Plan, or any of its various incarnations.
Nice article John. I’m constantly doing marketing plans for my CEO. I do one annually, then I do one for every quarter and then I do others constantly for all our products. I’ve been using a book by Malcolm McDonald called Marketing Plans, How to prepare them, how to use them. You know about any other good books on Marketing Plans?
I totally agree with Chad, a monthly subscription based on size would be really cool.
Chad, I would buy that software too - particularly if it were a web app - maybe it will be - I’m going to work on it!
Bill - I disagree, I put the scads term in there to downplay it and in my mind this plan, run through CRM would be more about the nuts and bolts - the number would simply verify the nuts and bolts are working - that’s usually missing in a simple action plan or idea of the week approach to marketing that too many take
John - Let me know when you need beta testers!
Love the idea! All of the elements are out there in some form, waiting to be brought together. I feel that the greatest challenge would be in making it simple enough to implement. A danger is in creating a Rube Goldberg-esque monstrosity of parts… so complex and intimidating that most of us, certainly I, would be overcome by the learning curve and maintenance.
Most businesses are small businesses. Make it as easy as Constant Contact and you’ve really got something!
John, thanks for the post.
Anytime you find yourself saying that some piece of software “couldn’t be that hard to hack together”, let that be a warning light. It will be definitely hard to hack together.
Especially for something of the form your describing, where data from multiple different applications, each with differing terms of meaning and differing assumptions, tries to be glued together.
It’s too bad, as my marketing team could definitely use something like this.
[…] instance, I read a great article by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. In it he talks about the need for an application that marries up the best parts of a […]
John,
I have just been promoted to Head of Department and I’m working on a marketing plan. Your advice about incorporating the plan into everyday activities was a useful reminder. I am now looking at my plan from a different perspective.
Thanks
Jeffery,
Simple is the key - remember the market I said that needed serving. I neglected to add Salesforce.com to the mix, but there’s a perfect example of an app that does too much.
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I would add to your article that keeping the plan SHORT with only a COUPLE metrics that you will track is vital.
I have seen many plans that are too long or complicated, so they end up being too hard to use in your everyday job.
We keep our metrics/goals posted on the wall and in a dashboard online.
We use MoonRay for a lot of this. It executes and tracks all my marketing campaigns, as well as giving me info about who’s visiting my site and when.
It doesn’t work with my quickbooks yet, but it’s the most comprehensive marketing toolset I’ve seen yet. I’ve got half my business on autopilot with it…
Just my 2cents.
Don’t know if it’s kosher to put this on here..
Find em at moonraymarketing.com
Mike
Another great post John. Good tips on what to include in a working marketing plan as opposed to most plans that sit on a shelf gathering dust! Also good because so many smaller businesses still haven’t combined on and off line marketing and testing etc - all of which is needed esp. for on-line businesses. Thanks.
Tamsin
This is something I definitely need to do.
One question, John -
Are the key strategic indicators just figures that let you know you’re going in the right direction? Like unique visitors for a web site?
Starr,
Sure you could look at it that way but the idea is to come up with a list of things that you can measure or at least that you can figure out how to measure and know that if you are improving or increasing them it’s a good indication that you are moving in the right direction - so would unique visitors increasing be something that would indicate that your core message was be accepted?
You struck a cord with this post. I’m sure your hits spiked with this one.
“But what about one for the real small business (2-50 employees)?”
In my very unbiased opinion - we’re “the one!” Our company’s informal M.O. - we serve the “S” in SMB.
In most big companies, the development of the marketing plan — the process — takes on an importance, eveen a reverence, of its own. Content — the actual strategy — gets overwhelmed by this focus on process when it is combined with adherence to top-down target & goal setting. I can point to many first drafts of marketing plans that were intellectually and logically sound. By the time we were finished with draft 27, each one wordsmithed unmercifully and cross-reference to the finance department’s view of the targets we were expected to hit…the logic had become, ahem, flawed.
I have the same experience with John Rosen in the Fortune 500 company. All the efforts to nail down the coherent marketing plan gets lost in translation between different department, particularly with the finance. We used OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies and Metrics) and Metrics went into the tracking system.
In a small company, it is easier to share the marketing plan and plug that into the functional executions and the software platforms each function use. And summarize the KPI performance into one interface to share among everyone. I am not sure if one software would solve this. It seems it is a combination of off line and online processes.
[…] Duct Tape Marketing lays out its premise for the perfect marketing plan. […]
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Great suggestions, but the key in my opinion of having written marketing plans for my companies, clients and for my small business is keep it to one page.
Sounds simplistic and it is, but it also throws the BS out. Any of the experienced marketing executives here have probably wasted months of their lives creating a new annual marketing plan haggling over budgets and numbers and milestones, only to have it shelved after the first quarter and only reappear come the end of the third quarter when it is performance evaluation time. Waste of time in my opinion.
The other great value a one page marketing plan is that new employees and other departments can quickly grasp the strategy and tactic’s with only one page you have the built in flexibility to go forward.
The connection between theory and application has plagued many a marketer.
(And if you’re a “business owner” you are, by default, a “marketer”.)
That is one of the primary reasons we created Make My Marketing Work, the new home study marketing program that helps business owners not only create a marketing plan, but also develop experience and habits that will help ensure the execution of the plan, beyond simply using the home study program.
Called a “bookinar” because it blends the best elements of a book, seminar training and one-on-one business coaching, the Make My Marketing Work program is helping business owners and entrepreneurs develop a strategic approach to their marketing.