Question

Describe how annual plans facilitate the coordination of programs, the implementation of marketing strategies, and how to develop an annual marketing plan.

Answer 1

The implementation and control of marketing plans - is a process which should ensure the achievement of the strategic objectives adopted by the company. A special role in this process plays a function of organizing and directing people. It involves preparing comprehensive list of activities to be performed, people responsible for this activities and resources needed.

Controlling of marketing plans - the main objective is the current monitoring and evaluation of the marketing activities of the company, recording and reporting of deviations to management, which takes decisions based on this information.

During the process of the implementation of the marketing plan managers must ensure efficient use of capital, human and marketing resources of the company. Selection of the strategy has a significant impact on the subsequent functioning of the company, because its organizational structure must be adapted to strategy. Strategic marketing effectiveness largely depends on the level of involvement of executive leadership in the implementation of marketing tasks. In the implementation of the marketing plan very important factor are the skills, attitudes and behaviours of the staff.

For many marketers, it’s the most dreaded time of the year: Annual Planning. But it doesn’t have to be. If you can shift your thinking and planned activities a bit, you can uncover the gap between your marketing goals and your current plans (and current performance) and create the kind of plan that, when executed, will attract the company’s best prospects, deliver valuable information that helps those prospects in their purchasing journey, and nurtures and closes those prospects into customers.

The best place to start with outlining your marketing goals is to fully understand your business’ overall goals for the coming year. These may be goals like a revenue growth percentage, further penetration into an existing market, breaking into a new market, or improving overall profitability. Assuming leadership has formalized these goals (i.e., they're formally written down) and communicated them to sales and marketing, you should have a good base for setting specific marketing goals that directly align with business goals.

When it comes to your organizational structure, it's ideal for sales and marketing to jointly develop goals that hold both teams accountable and put them in a position to support one another. You can do this by putting together a marketing and sales service level agreementfor the year, if you don’t already have one.

As you begin to build out a solid list of specific marketing goals you may begin to have an "Oh, shoot" moment — when your hands get sweaty, your stomach drops, and your heart begins to race.

How are you going to achieve these aggressive goals, in order to meet your part of the commitment with your sales team, so you can deliver qualified leads and specific new business opportunities your sales team can act on and close?!

Ok, you've outlined some specific marketing goals that are tied to your business goals. And you've evaluated and critiqued your current activities and plans using KPIs, to determine what's working, what needs to be better supported with additional resources, and what needs to be dropped like a bad habit. At this point, you should be able to recognize the gap. If your current plans now are resulting in a 5% decline from last year's results, what makes you think it's going to get any better if you continue to do more of the same?

• Step 1: Clearly outline those activities that aren't working. As mentioned above, by determining KPIs to measure effectiveness you should be able to easily identify the bad eggs.
• Step 2: Make the decision to actually let go and stop spending your budget on those activities.
• Step 3: Make the commitment to adopt new, or double down on existing, activities and strategies that you've determined will yield greater results.