Posted by Frances Laing on Tuesday 16 June 2009
Auditing your marketing plans
As I mentioned in last week's blog, it is important to keep an eye on where you are going with your marketing plans.
It is hard to keep an eye on the future with the challenges presented by companies and the economic environment at the moment, and it is easy to be distracted by a panic when the corporate results are being examined.
Too often, Marketing plans are written once a year when the budgets are due, and are full of all the right terms and jargon. If you look at your plan is it a re-write of last year's plans, with a few tweak just to ensure that the budgets get signed off? Or a living breathing document that you refer to constantly to manage your time/team/results? If it is the former, then you should regret any time you spent writing it, as it was just a corporate exercise in documentation delivery! If it is the latter then well done! There aren't many of us left who use the plans in this way.
One of the biggest problems I have found is that marketing plans are not written with the intention of being monitored against a full set of deliverable results. Look at your last plan – how will your success be judged? ROI? The number of leads delivered? The elimination of a competitor? The increase in awareness? The increase of shelf-space allocated to you product? Whatever the measure (or lack of it), it is important that Marketers can justify the way they spend their time and money. Too often, the department is considered to be the largest un-monitored source of disposable income a company has, which is generally why marketing budgets are so easy to cut for many FDs!
If you find time to do one thing this week, carry out a quick audit of your last marketing plan, be it the annual, quarterly, monthly or weekly plan you last wrote. Can you see how your success will be seen? Would you be able to do your own PR on the achievements you will deliver – with tangible commercial benefits? If not, then perhaps it is time for a re-think! Marketing should be all about results, whatever they are. It is a commercial entity, or should be, and we should ensure that we can demonstrate our impact on corporate results.
Why not talk to us and see if we can help with the audit of your plans.