There’s a Fourth Option to Marketing Planning That May Offer the Best Approach

For many companies, the choice of how to create their marketing plans comes down to three options:

1. Leave it to Marketing

2. Management Directed

3. If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

However, there is an alternative fourth approach that can help companies to more effectively meet customer requirements, improve customer engagement, and advance overall business performance. This post examines each of the four options.

1. Leave It to Marketing

Traditionally, the marketing department is tasked with developing the marketing plan, either by themselves or with the assistance of an outside marketing company or advertising agency. With this approach, marketing professionals, within and outside of the company, collaborate with other specialists, such as media, research, and digital marketing to analyze market trends, identify target audiences, and devise the objectives, strategies, and tactics to achieve them.

In small companies, a marketing manager can develop a marketing plan alone, given the plethora of online marketing tools, templates, and self-help guides. However, the success of the template method depends on how well it is adapted to the specific needs and context of the business.

As smart and skilled as these professionals and specialists are in understanding marketing, their recommendations may be off-target because they could lack important and the latest insights into the very nature of the products, customer needs, and competition.

2. Management Directed

Sometimes the overarching approach to marketing is dictated by a powerful individual within the company given authority for change and new strategies.

Whether they agree or not, marketing support must implement the marketing plans as directed.

An example is J.C. Penney in 2011. After bringing in a new CEO with a background at Apple, the company embarked on an entirely new shift in pricing strategy. Popular coupons were eliminated in favor of everyday low prices, the new strategy confused customers and led to a drop in sales of over 25% within a year.

It’s easy to second guess a well intentioned marketing strategy, but it seems obvious, on the surface, that input from the sales teams, distributors and more in-depth testing and customer input could have prevented missteps and miscalculations.

3. If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Many companies seem very happy with their marketing plans and do not want to consider any major changes. The planning process sometimes involves just taking out last year’s plan, looking at what worked or didn’t deliver to expectations, tweaking it, and updating the budgets and timing.

This approach can seem appropriate for market leaders or companies with no significant competition. However, key market changes such as low cost off-shore competition, emerging online marketers, and changing customers habits and preferences may fail to be addressed.

Also, this method may be perpetuated by paid media companies, marketing services suppliers and other outside parties with self-interest in the status quo vs. doing what is right for the client’s business.

4. Align Marketing and Sales in the Planning Process

By harnessing the power of both individual and group thinking from marketing and sales, a fourth approach may offer the best option to develop an all new and highly focused marketing plan designed to actually “move the sales needle.” 

"Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoy 36% higher customer retention rates

and 38% higher sales win rates.

20 Sales and Marketing Alignment Statistics, The Pipeline, Zoominfo.com

This process, termed “marketing convergence,” is fully explained in a new innovative marketing planning guide from Marketing Convergence Solutions.

The guidebook is part of a planning package that fully shows how companies can develop a well-crafted strategic marketing plan encompassing objectives, strategies, and tactics that better meet customer requirements, improve customer engagement, and measurably increase sales, leads, and customer retention. A preview of the guidebook is available here.

Easy to understand and implement, the comprehensive planning package also includes online interactive facilitator training, six interactive planning template forms, a PowerPoint presentation for planning sessions, and examples of measurable marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics.

Want More Marketing Planning Ideas?

Go to Marketing Convergence Solutions for more practical ways to align sales and marketing to help you strategically generate more sales, leads, and customer loyalty.

A free preview of lesson five of the five lesson online interactive course in planning meeting facilitation is available here.