The Top Five Reasons Why Every Company Needs a Marketing Plan

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

- Benjamin Franklin

The majority of small businesses have never created, or maintained, a formal marketing plan and budget. Even many mid-sized companies have a ‘spray and pray’ approach to marketing that often goes something like this: “Well, sales are down this quarter and we need to do something fast. My buddy Bob said he ran an ad in this trade magazine and his business got some leads. Let’s run ads in that magazine, pronto. Oh yeah, and my high school daughter says she’ll make us a TikTok video!”

While the magazine ads and TikTok video very well may generate some brand awareness and leads, the effects will be fleeting, and the momentum will be squandered, if these tactics are approached as ‘random acts of marketing’ – that is, not contained within an existing holistic plan and budget in which all activities are synergistically integrated to amplify one another and yield sustainable results that can be measured against defined goals.

Every company needs a marketing plan because a systematized program empowers your team to deploy marketing proactively and therefore effectively, rather than reactively and inefficiently. Reactive, disparate marketing efforts are rarely measured because initial goals and metrics are often never set. They rarely leverage special offers, calls-to-action or valuable content you might have because they were executed too fast to consider proper integration with other marketing initiatives. And if the messaging or design were hastily crafted, the effort may hurt, not help, your brand. These are only a few of the pitfalls.

Marketing Strategy vs Marketing Plan

Sometimes people say, “We know what our marketing strategy is. We don’t really need to write it down.” This indicates that they may be confusing marketing strategy with a marketing plan.

Marketing strategy is the upfront work that needs to be done before you create a marketing plan. This includes competitive analysis, industry analysis, product development, pricing strategy, distribution strategy, target audience identification, buyer personas and customer journey maps. Once these are complete, they inform your brand strategy, which outlines how your product will be positioned, value propositions and other key messaging. All in all, your final strategy identifies who you are selling to, how your brand will attract them, and what objectives you want to achieve.

Once the strategy pieces are complete, the marketing plan is developed as the blueprint for achieving your strategic goals. A marketing plan should include summaries of the strategy work for team reference. But it is much more tactical because it also contains a detailed roadmap that determines what marketing channels will be used, how they will be used, what metrics will be monitored to measure performance, how much money will be spent on various channels and who will be accountable for each of the steps required for execution, maintenance, reporting and refining.

If your company doesn’t take the time to plan and ‘write down’ your marketing activities, budget and key performance indicators, you’re running blind, and the inefficiencies will cost you time, money and results in the end. Without a marketing plan, your company risks damaging its brand with piecemeal efforts that detract from your image.

Top Five Reasons Why Every Company Needs a Marketing Plan

1)      It gets results and allows you to measure performance for continual improvement.
Marketing success comes down to making decisions, creating a plan, and sticking to the plan. Even if your marketing decisions aren’t the best, you’ll still get much better results by operating against a plan rather than performing random acts of marketing. And even if initial results don’t meet your goals, a plan enables you to gauge performance so you can continually tweak things until your plan reliably hits its goals.

2)      It keeps the company aligned on agreed-upon company marketing objectives, strategies and tactics.
By getting executive buy-in on your marketing plan and documenting it, you’re establishing a set of agreed-upon objectives, budget parameters, strategies and performance metrics. This helps hold company leaders accountable for supporting the plan, it’s progress and results. It provides a reference point if things veer off-course so you can get back on track. Of course, plans can and do change, but a written plan reminds everyone of where you started so you can make more informed decisions about where to go next as conditions evolve.

3)      It gives your marketing team clarity so they can be more fulfilled, creative and effective.
Whether it’s 50 people or one person executing your marketing, they’ll be more successful – and personally fulfilled – following a well-defined plan. They don’t need to struggle in figuring out the objectives, target audiences, brand messages or channel strategies because these are already laid out. They have clarity about the plan and their personal accountabilities. Planning doesn’t constrain creative freedom. Quite the contrary. The plan’s clarity empowers teams to perform their jobs more easily, which frees up mental capacity to come up with new ideas that can strengthen your marketing prowess.

4)      Budget discipline helps your company prioritize what’s important and stay focused.
Having little money is no excuse not to budget. Having lots of money is also no excuse. Regardless of how much money you can allocate to marketing, budget planning instills discipline. It helps keep the plan on track, because if activities are coming in far below or above set budgets, then the plan needs to be checked. Most importantly for small companies, budgeting forces you to make decisions about what’s most important. You can’t afford to do everything, so you must make decisions to weed out less important activities, which enhances focus.

5)      A marketing plan helps you get capital funding or achieve your exit strategy.
If you’re considering seeking venture capital or a private equity partnership to bolster business capacity, or you have dreams of selling your company for big bucks so you can retire in the Bahamas, you must have a marketing plan. Anyone who might consider investing in, or buying, your company will demand evidence of your company’s ability to market your products, and evidence of your success. Your marketing plan gives them this information.

In summary, I’ll leave you with this quote by Benjamin Franklin: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Yes, it takes significant time and effort to devise your marketing strategies and create a tactical plan to achieve desired results. But if you don’t invest in upfront planning, consistently reliable marketing results will remain ever-elusive as you ‘spray and pray.’

So instead, embrace your inner planner! Or partner with a marketing pro like creo marketing who will do the heavy lifting for you!