The vast majority of professional service firms in the UK, even some of the very biggest, have nothing even approaching a ‘textbook’ marketing planning system or process. Given the potential process and content benefits that have been identified, many professional service firms may see the value of developing a marketing planning process —if they have some idea about where to start.
In these terms marketing planning should be:
Structured: i.e. it is no good simply requiring departmental heads or even marketing partners to produce a marketing plan. Nonprofessional marketers (and even some marketing professionals) will fail to prepare and develop a successful marketing plan unless they are given a structured framework within which to work. In most cases this means developing a rudimentary planning manual and giving partners and managers the necessary training and skills to use it.
Iterative: one of the key terms in the marketing planning process should be iteration; i.e. simply moving through the stages of planning until you reach the end is not enough. Effective planning necessitates moving backwards and forwards between the stages within the process, feeding the results of one piece of analysis back to the beginning or making one decision and seeing how that will affect everything else by working it back through the process.
Market focus: the biggest part of any marketing plan and any strategic business plan is market analysis covering all of the areas such as sizing, buying behaviour, needs, factors influencing purchase decisions, etc. that were made explicit in the preceding section. Any strategic marketing planning process that doesn’t focus upon the marketplace and client needs as the driving force behind successful and effective strategy formulation is likely to fail.
Make assumptions explicit: in any planning process it is necessary to make assumptions. In poor planning processes, however, strategic assumptions are made implicitly and are rarely questioned. If and when assumptions have to be made in planning then they need to be made explicitly and they need to be validated as much as possible. It is surprising how often firms carry assumptions forward in their planning year after year. When the assumption was originally made it may well have been valid — this is much less likely to be true five years later. All assumptions in planning need to be made explicit and need to be validated.
Participative: marketing planning at the strategic level is not something that only the marketing partners, practice development committee or marketing consultant does. There are two main issues here: (i) marketing planning cannot be undertaken by an individual, (ii) in terms of participation it makes a lot of sense to involve those who will be implementing the resulting plans and strategies.
Managed: while all the books and consultants will ‘sell’ professional service firms planning processes, this is frequently not enough to ensure that planning ‘happens’ in the real world. Successful strategic marketing planning requires the consistent ‘management’ of these levels of planning process and a recognition that techniques of analysis and formal planning procedures are not in themselves enough to ensure an effective marketing planning process. Sarah writes for busines and sports websites and loves watching college football.
