The Art of Marketing – Part 1 of the 2009 Marketing Plan Series

Since the Business Plan series came to a close I thought of the next logical step in what you have to do in your business to support the business plan and its operations.

This next step is the marketing plan.

The Art of Marketing

Doing marketing planning which is captured in the marketing plan, is an essential organizational activity, considering the hostile and complex competitive business environment. Our ability 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 make rational decisions.

Here is a great description of Marketing from HowStuffWorks:

According to the Dictionary of Marketing Terms, marketing is “the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.”

What does that mean to you? It means marketing encompasses everything you have to do in coming up with a needed product or service, making potential customers aware of it, making them want it, and then selling it to them.

So then, is sales considered “marketing”? Is advertising “marketing”? Often, you’ll hear sales functions referred to as “marketing,” but really sales is just a part of the larger marketing process, as is advertising. In the olden days (back 30 or 40 years), marketing did consist primarily of sales. Rather than having marketing departments, companies had sales departments with an advertising manager and someone who did market research. Sometimes they added a promotions manager or hired an agency to handle advertising and promotions.

Things began changing as some companies grew larger and larger and began offering many product lines that warranted having their own brand managers, market segment managers and many more specialized positions that addressed and mulled over the needs of their particular markets. The need for a marketing department began to be seen as a vital part of business. The marketing department also takes most of the blame if a product (or company) isn’t successful, regardless of whether or not the fault actually lies there.

Logically, your CMO or VP of Marketing would be in charge of this effort but in many startups you don’t have someone in that position so it is probably you with the ultimate responsibility. So my dear reader, I am here to the rescue to guide you through very important part of executing your overall business plan.

Planning your company’s marketing program is a process much like the one you go through in writing the business plan. You go through phases of:

• what are you going to do with the plan
• what are the company’s skills, strengths and weaknesses
• goal setting based on those strengths and weaknesses
• setting strategies for achieving your goals
• executing the plan
• putting the numbers together to back up your words

Before you dive into the plan, it is important to know what type of plan you are expected to write. We will cover this in Part 2.