Why have strategic marketing planning in your company?

May 22, 2024 seekerhubadmin

Strategic marketing planning is a management tool that serves to help the company create and implement marketing actions that contribute to generating demand for its products or services.

With it, the company remains competitive in its market. This is because the plan points out the best actions to achieve your digital and conventional marketing objectives, during a given period.

Thus, it works as a kind of instruction manual to be used every day and reviewed from time to time. In fact, it also contributes to decision-making regarding financial and human resources. Therefore, never leave it stored in a drawer.

How important is strategic marketing planning for companies?

In practice, this tool is what guarantees the company’s growth. Therefore, it is essential in the functioning of the business. Every entrepreneur knows that without plans they cannot point out a direction for their team, right?

The same goes for strategic marketing planning. There’s no way to leave it aside. After all, it will serve as a manual for your company to achieve better results, whether in marketing actions, brand growth or customer relationships.

However, results will only be achieved when the company carries out each step described in the planning. By structuring all processes and applying resources in the right places, you will be able to calculate the return on an investment, for example.

Furthermore, planning works as a guide to direct your team, making the team more organized and efficient, as everyone knows where they are at and what they should do for the business to grow.

What to take into consideration when creating a strategic marketing plan?

There are some important factors to develop your strategic marketing plan. Next, understand in more detail what they are.

Public

Every company that wants to develop its strategic marketing plan needs to identify its target audience. That is, your ideal customer profile. After all, who are the people who buy your product or service?

Although many companies believe they know who their consumers are, in practice, few actually manage to define it. To describe your audience, think of people who have common interests, needs or characteristics.

In other words, reflect on some characteristics about your consumer such as their age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, income and socioeconomic status. Go further and identify their beliefs, values, shopping habits, brand preferences and which media they use.

After collecting all the data, put it together into the most common patterns and describe them as your ideal customer profile.

This way, it will be easier to think about strategies and direct them more assertively for your business.

Positioning

Marketing positioning refers to what position the company wants to achieve in comparison to its competitors. That is, based on your audience data, you decide how you would like to position yourself to achieve better results with your business.

To illustrate, let’s look at some positioning goals in relation to your persona:

“I want my company to be a reference in free content for large dermatologists”

Therefore, you must produce content for channels where major dermatologists can be found. Therefore, at this stage you need to define which channels you should be present and how to innovate in each of them:

Physical or virtual stores?
Sites?
E-mail marketing?
Paid media or sponsorship and presence at events?
TV, radio, newspapers or magazines?
Social media ?

Currently, there are a variety of possible channels for your business to grow. To do this, study carefully which one is most interesting and suitable for your objectives.

Market

Another important step is to analyze the market in your sector. That is, you need to know how your competitor is operating and identify the differentiators of your business.

To do this, research the channels that competitors are on, their marketing campaigns, their content strategies, among other factors.

By studying these questions, you will see how you can optimize your marketing actions.

Our tip is to use a tool for this, such as SWOT analysis. With it, you will be able to assess your company’s weaknesses and strengths and your business’s threats and opportunities.

For example, if your company does not invest in digital marketing, this is one of the weaknesses of your business.

Goals

All strategic marketing planning needs to have well-established goals. In general, these objectives are set with quarterly, annual or monthly deadlines.

So, first set a deadline and then set realistic goals. To do this, think:

What does my company want to achieve during this period?
How to get more leads ?
What are the sales opportunities?
How to increase my website traffic?
How to improve visitor conversion?

This will make it easier to define your goals, as they must be tangible, such as: 10% increase per month in organic traffic, generation of 80 leads per month or delivery of 20 opportunities to the sales team, for example.

How to put the marketing plan into practice?

In fact, there is no point in developing a strategic marketing plan and not putting it into practice. To help you, create a schedule for each step. In it, you must break down all the actions, such as:

Activities that need to be performed;
deadline for execution of each activity;
how they should be done;
who will be responsible for each task;
funds available for each stage.

It is worth mentioning that strategic marketing planning documents, as well as the schedule, need to be clear and available to everyone involved.