Strategic Planning

Strategic e-Marketing Plan

Recent shifts in the economy have had a dramatic impact on many areas. Competition has increased for many companies, forcing some to be more aggressive just to maintain revenue. At the same time competition has decreased in other sectors, creating growth opportunities.

So, how do some companies seem to always be ahead of the trend? They know when to change marketing strategies to keep revenue growing. They do this by using proven strategic marketing planning techniques.

Updating Your Strategic Marketing Plan

How do you know if you need a strategic marketing plan now?

Here are situations that indicate it’s time to review your strategic marketing plan:

  • Increased competition
  • Decreased revenue growth
  • Lower unit sales
  • Change in gross margins
  • Improved productivity that lowers costs
  • Increased customer churn
  • Change in average order size

These factors indicate that changes in your markets have occurred — and that you need to reevaluate your strategic marketing plan.

The most successful companies have two things that their competitors don’t have:

  • A marketing strategy that clearly identifies their market’s needs and how the company can meet those needs in a competitive environment.
  • Marketing programs that apply the company’s overall marketing strategy every day to every marketing activity.

In helping companies improve their marketing programs for the past twenty years, one challenge has kept companies from achieving their full potential.

Making it easy for every marketing manager to apply the company’s marketing strategy affects their marketing programs

To help companies overcome this challenge, I’ve developed a unique strategic marketing planning process that combines the best of the traditional marketing strategy planning process with a modern approach to what some call “visual thinking.” The result is an interactive “marketing strategy map” that shows marketers just how their marketing strategy decisions affect the planning of their marketing programs.

For example, a pricing strategy may determine how the company will set initial pricing for products, how they will use discounts, etc. Then, when a product manager or brand manager is planning the rollout of a new product, the pricing strategy provides guidance that will keep the new product’s pricing consistent with how the rest of the company’s products are priced.

The process starts with an overview of the whole strategic marketing plan:

Then, we drill down into each section to discuss and decide what’s best for the company.

The interactive mapping software allows us to expand only the sections we are focusing on:

In addition, we can examine how part of the strategic objectives affects part of a particular marketing program

This interactive marketing strategy map helps improve the strategic planning process in several ways:

  • Makes it easy to see how strategic objectives influence marketing programs
  • Captures ideas, options, and decisions in real time during planning sessions
  • Enables marketing executives and managers to update plans frequently
  • Reduces the time spend preparing a strategic plan, allowing more time on planning sound marketing programs