If you drive the marketing for your technology company, the most important function of your responsibility is to write the marketing plan. The resulting document is so critical to the day to day activities you and your team will pursue in the upcoming months. The truth of the matter is most of these marketing plans fall short of their expected impact for a variety of reasons.
Having trouble getting started, or perhaps you have hit the proverbial wall in the midst of formulating your plan. This problem spans industries and countries according to Tim Calkins, a Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Tim published a great article, based on his research, identifying the five most common pitfalls you can avoid when developing your plan.
Pitfall 1: Too Much Data
The biggest problem for many marketing plans is that there is too much data; the marketing plan is so full of facts, figures, and findings that the document gets hopelessly bogged down and the heart of the plan—the recommendations—gets lost. Unfortunately, too many marketing plans focus on the analysis and the data instead of the recommendations. The bulk of the plan is devoted to explaining what the team knows about a business.
The problem is that there is basically an infinite amount of data available today on any business. A Google search on McDonalds provides 27.9 million results. A search on Sony delivers 830 million results. Too many marketing plans focus on the data instead of the recommended plan of action. This is a huge miss.
Pitfall 2: No Clear Strategic Initiatives
A good marketing plan should be focused on presenting the objectives, the strategic initiatives needed to achieve the objectives, and the tactics associated with each of the initiatives.
In far too many marketing plans, however, the strategic initiatives are not clear. The plan either gets so bogged down in the data that the recommendations never emerge or, perhaps more frequently, the plan jumps from the data directly to the tactics. The plan presents details such as coupon values and dates before explaining why promotions are needed and how the promotion efforts fits into the big picture.
Clear strategic initiatives are essential, because a business can focus on doing only three or four things in a year. The challenge in a marketing plan is to identify these initiatives. This is where a plan creates the most value. When formulating a marketing plan, executives should always be asking “Are we focused on the right things? If we do these things, will we achieve our objectives?”
Pitfall 3: Lack of Rationale
There are two reasons for creating a marketing plan. The first is to clearly lay out the plan to build the business, and the second is to gain support. This second reason is critically important and too often overlooked. The truth is that a plan will succeed only if people believe in it.
Many people have to buy into a marketing plan before it can have an impact. Senior management needs to support the plan; without senior management support nothing will happen. Cross-functional leaders are also critical; it is almost impossible to implement a sales initiative if the sales team doesn’t think it will work. A business team also needs to support the plan; people have to believe in what they are working on. Even a great plan is doomed to failure if doesn’t have support.
Pitfall 4: No Cross-Functional Involvement
A good marketing plan cannot be written solely by the marketing team. Indeed, if the marketing team creates and writes the marketing plan on its own, there is probably a serious problem.
Marketing plans should focus on building the business; a good marketing plan has a general management perspective. As a result, the plan needs input from across the organization: the sales team, the operations group, the finance department, the customer service organization. The list goes on.
Pitfall 5: No Financials
A good marketing plan needs to be linked to the financials of a business. Indeed, the only reason any company should do any marketing is to drive sales and increase profits. As a result, a marketing plan needs to be clearly grounded in the numbers. For example, a marketing plan should almost always have a financial objective, such as revenue or, even better, profit.
