The Marketing Planning Process

Divide your existing and potential customers into easily identifiable groups. Understand who your customers are, where they are, what they buy, why they buy, how much and when. What value do they put on your products or services? What markets are you really in?

Step 2. Identify your services/products

What is the range of products or services on offer? Is this the right mix for your target customers? Where are your products or services in relation to the Product Life Cycle? Are they in the introduction, growth, maturity or decline phase? What are the features and benefits of the products/ services you offer?

Step 3. Identify your competitors

Where are you in the market place in relation to your competitors? What are your competitors' strengths and weaknesses? What is your brand share, market share? What are your competitors' prices, sales strategies? What new products or services are they developing?

Step 4. Identify your competitive edge

Carry out an Image audit. Just what is the image of your business? Carry out a staff skills and performance audit - do you have the right staff with the right level of skills? Carry out a customer satisfaction audit - are you delivering what your customers want? Identify how you are going to build your competitive edge. Is this through:

-People

-Service or product excellence

-Reputation

-Image

-Price

-Or all the above.

Step 5. Carry out a SWOT Analysis

Identify the strengths and weaknesses within your organization. Say what you are going to do to build on the strengths and eliminate the weaknesses. Identify the external opportunities and threats. Now we need to look at setting the Marketing Objectives.

Setting Marketing Objectives

Most Marketing Plans run for a year at a time but it is a good idea to set, or at least have some idea of, your broad objectives in the longer term; say three to five years. A word of caution though, it is becoming increasingly difficult to plan very far ahead as the pace of change today is so fast and the introduction of new technology is daily re writing the text books on business operation and business development. Having said that, however, you still need to set objectives at least on an annual basis.

When setting your objectives it is not enough to say that you want to be the best company in town - how are you going to measure that? How do you know when you are the best?

Your objectives therefore have to be specific and measurable. Whatever your objectives ensure they are realistic and achievable. I often find that when I go into companies the owners or directors have set themselves too many objectives that they can't possibly hope to achieve. This is demotivating. So don't be too ambitious.