Strategic planning for business and marketing profesionals

The American Marketing Association defines marketing so well.

Here’s how.

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

A closer investigation of this statement and you realize this; marketing has 4 components.

Which are:

1. Creating

2. Communicating.

3. Delivering.

4. Exchanging.

All these 4 components are both important and interesting.

However, exchanging is a component many marketers and biz owners forget about. Since exchanging involves money and sales which obviously affects revenue in a company, exchanging is the ultimate goal of marketing. You can create, communicate, deliver, and finally exchange and make money. Making money out of marketing activities is the sure way to test and approve it. Unfortunately, many marketers focus on a lot of the other components like creating and communicating. Which to me is the number one cause of failures in marketing campaigns.

Now don’t get me wrong! This does not mean that you should neglect the other components of marketing.

Remember that what happens before the exchange just matters as much. But exchanging goods or services for money is the final chapter of marketing. Once a sale has occurred, and money earned, that is successful marketing.

That is why I feel on a deep level that we cannot qualify any marketing activities that don't bring money as successful. Because marketing activities need to bring money. Any marketing activity that does not bring in money should be classified as Public relations. And public relations is a different subject from marketing!

Anyway.

I recently completed a course on marketing strategies and I am going to be applying it to one business which I am working with. In the course, I discovered something called The P’s of marketing.

Which got me excited and interested.

The interesting thing is that the 4 components of marketing that we have seen at the beginning of this letter directly relate to the 4Ps of marketing.

What are the 4 P’s?

1. Product.(creating)

2. Promotion. ( communicating)

3. Place.(delivering)

4. Price. (exchanging)

The 4Ps are also called the marketing mix. That means that marketing activities need to involve all 4 ideas.

If marketing is all about the 4Ps, what then do marketing professionals do?

Surely, marketing professionals can create, communicate, deliver, or exchange. These are the areas you can choose to focus on as a marketer. But that is not all, because there is something very important. Something that comes before all the components. Something that many new marketers never keep in mind.

Strategic planning is what separates beginner marketers from Pro marketers.

Professional marketers must know how to write a marketing plan and strategy.

And so to me, marketing professionals do 2 things.

They plan. They strategize.

Even though many look at Marketing more from the execution angle, the planning and strategy angle is what determines Marketing success. Ever heard of the old idea that failing to plan is planning to fail? That is what is up!

Take for example social media marketing.

This is a strategy.

Someone who can help execute this strategy is a social media manager. (who does not have to be a pro marketer.) Someone who is going to write the strategy is mostly someone called the chief marketing officer. (CMO) Can you see the difference in roles and experience?

Truly, a social media manager is not the one who is going to plan the marketing activities and come up with a strategy. A social media manager receives the plan from the C-suite officers. Because strategy and planning are tasks for a higher person like the CMO. Or the CEO. Not a manager!

This means for successful marketing, the top level must come up with a strategy that works and pass it over to the management for execution. The manager is then going to execute together with Juniors if there's any.

Without a doubt, planning is so important for both marketers and biz owners. Having a plan and strategy is what comes before successful marketing.

And now it begs two questions. How can we plan? How can we make a marketing strategy that can get us results in terms of revenue increase?

Find more insights on strategic planning when you read through this article on my blog here.

That’s it for today.

Talk soon!

Nick Osale.