I. Overview of a marketing plan
The marketing planning (concretized in the marketing plan) is an primary organizational activity, considering the hostile and complicated competing company environment. Our quality and skills to perform profitable sales are affected by hundreds of internal and external factors that interact in a difficult way to evaluate. A marketing manager must understand and build an image upon these variables and their interactions, and must take rational decisions.
Online Working
Let us see what do we call a "marketing plan"? It is the follow of the planning activity, a document that includes a narrate of the organization's place in the market, an prognosis of the Step factors as well as a Swot analysis. A unblemished plan would also formulate some presumptions on why we think the past marketing strategy was victorious or not. The next phase shall present the objectives we set, together with the strategies to perform these objectives. In a logical sequence, we will supplementary need to value the results and formulate alternative plans of action. A plan would consist in details of responsibilities, costs, sales prognosis and budgeting issues.
In the end, we should not forget to specify how the plan (or plans) will be controlled, by what means we will measure its results.
We will see how to build the marketing plan, what is its structure: after we will see how to build the traditional marketing plan, we will take a look at the e-marketing plan and see how the unique features of the internet will need some changes in the arrival of writing a marketing plan.
But, before we continue, we must understand and accept that steps of the marketing plan are universal. It is a logical arrival of the planning activity, no matter where we apply it. The differences you meet from a plan to another consist in the degree of formality accorded to each phase, depending on the size and nature of the assosication involved. For example, a small and not diversified company would adopt less formal procedures, because the managers in these cases have more palpate and functional knowledge than the subordinates, and they are able to perform direct operate upon most factors. On the other hand, in a company with diversified activity, it is less likely that top managers have functional facts in a higher degree than the subordinate managers. Therefore, the planning process must be formulated to ensure a precise discipline for everybody complicated in the decisional chain.
Ii. The general marketing plan
The classical marketing plan would follow the following scheme of 8 stages:
1. Declaring the mission: this is the planning stage when we create the organizational orientations and intentions, thus providing a sense of direction. In most cases, this is a general presentation of the company's intentions and roughly has a philosophic character.
2. Establishing current objectives: it is primary for the assosication to try to determine with preciseness the objectives to be reached. These objectives, in order to be viable, must be Smart. Smart is an acronym and stands for "Specific", "Measurable", "Attainable", "Realistic" and "Timed". The objectives must also carry the general organizational mission.
3. Conference information: this stage is based on the thought of marketing audit. After performing the audit of the macro-environment by analyzing the Step factors (social, technologic, economic and politic), we should turn the focus upon the immediate extern environment (the micro-environment) and analyze the competing environment, the costs and the market. Finally, we will quit with the Swot analysis, by this way we will have a general view upon the internal environment compared to the external one. The Swot prognosis join the two perspectives, from the inside and from the outside, because the Strengths and the Weaknesses are internal issues of an organization, while the Opportunities and Threads come from the outside.
4. Re-formulating objectives: after the close exam of data gathered in the old stage, sometimes it is needed to re-formulate the introductory objectives, in order to address all the issues that might have come up from the old stage. The distance between the introductory objective and the re-formulated objective will be covered by standard strategies. We must ensure the re-formulated objective is Smart as well.
5. Establishing strategies: some strategies are to be formulated, in order to cover the distance between what we want to perform and what is inherent to achieve, with the resources at our disposal. As we would normally have some options, we should analyze them and chose the one with more chances to perform the marketing objectives.
6. Plan of actions: consists in a very detailed description of the procedures and means to implement the actions we want to take. For example, if the strategy implies a raise in advertising volume, the plan of actions should create where the advertisements will be placed, the dates and frequency of the advertising campaigns, a set of procedures to value their effectiveness. The actions we plan to take must be clearly formulated, measurable, and the results must be monitored and evaluated.
7. Implementation and control: consist in the series of activities that must be performed in order to run the marketing plan in accordance to the objectives set by the marketer. At this stage, it is primary to gain the hold of all members if the organization, especially when the marketing plan is due to sway the assosication from its grounds.
8. execution measurement: constitutes the last but not the less foremost stage of the marketing plan, since we can perform only what we can measure. In order to measure the performances achieved straight through the marketing plan, we need to permanently monitor each old stage of the plan.
The marketing plan that has a feedback cycle, from 8th stage back to the 4th. That is because sometimes during the planning process, we might need to perform stages 4 to 8 some times before the final plan can be written.
Iii. The e-marketing plan
The e-marketing plan is built exactly on the same law as the classical plan. There is no dissimilar approach, but there might be some formal differences given by the uniqueness of the internet environment. Many of these differences come from the necessity to ensure a high rate of responsiveness from the customers, since the e-world is spellbinding faster and requires faster reaction from its companies, compared to the traditional offline marketplace.
Even though it is perfectly standard and is a tasteless institution to use the 8-stage classic model for the e-marketing plan as well, you might want to think the simplified version proposed by Chaffey, who identifies four major steps to build the e-marketing plan:
1. Strategic analysis: consists in continuous scanning of the macro- and micro-environment. The accent should fall on the consumers' needs that convert very rapidly in the online market, as well as on surveying the competitors' actions and evaluating the opportunities offered by new technologies.
2. Defining strategic objectives: the assosication must have a clear vision and create if the media channels will complement the traditional ones, or will replace them. We must define definite objectives (don't forget to check if they are Smart!) and we must also specify the offering of the online activities to the organization's turnover.
3. Formulating strategies - we do that by addressing the following primary issues:
- create strategies towards the target markets;
- positioning and differentiating strategies;
- create priorities of online activities;
- focus attentiveness and efforts on Crm and financial control;
- formulate strategies for goods development;
- create company models with well-established strategies for new products or services, as well as pricing policies;
- necessity for some organizational restructuring;
- changes in the buildings of transportation channels.
4. Implementing strategies: includes true execution of all primary steps to perform established objectives. It could refer re-launching of a website, promo campaigns for a new or rewritten site, monitoring website efficiency and many more.
Note: a tasteless strategy to perform e-marketing objectives is the transportation strategy. The steps to built a coherent transportation plan will be presented within a supplementary article.
Iv. The e-marketing plan (sample titles)
1. Executive Summary
a. Overview upon present conjuncture;
b. Key aspects of the strategic e-marketing plan.
2. Situational Analysis
a. Characteristics of the e-market;
b. Possible factors of success;
c. Competitors' analysis;
d. Technological factors;
e. Legal factors;
f. Social factors;
g. Possible problems and opportunities.
3. The e-Marketing Objectives
a. Product profile;
b. Target market;
c. Sales objectives.
4. The e-Marketing Strategies
a. Product strategies;
b. Price strategies;
c. Promotion strategies;
d. Distribution strategies.
5. Technical Issues
a. Website content;
b. Website "searcheability";
c. Logging protection (for customers and staff);
d. Customer registration procedure;
e. Multimedia;
f. Autoresponders;
g. Order forms and feedback forms;
h. Access levels to online resources;
i. Credit card transactions;
j. Website hosting;
k. Website publishing;
l. Technical staff (size, requirements)
6. Appendix
7. Bibliography
The e-Marketing Plan - Brief summary and Working scheme
