“Those who plan do better than those who do not plan even though they rarely stick to their plan.”

– Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister

“Have a plan. Follow the plan, and you’ll be surprised how successful you can be. Most people don’t have a plan. That’s why it’s easy to beat most folks.”

– Paul “Bear” Bryant, former football coach, University of Alabama

Different Levels of Marketing Planning

We’ve created a robust marketing planning app, so clearly we’re big proponents of planning. Marketers at different types of companies on average engage in different levels of planning:

• Fortune 500 marketers and experienced B2C marketers create extremely detailed plans for strategy, creative, distribution and sales execution.

• Marketers at mid-market companies typically create an annual marketing plan and budget, yet rarely plan to the level of detail as their big-company counterparts.

• Marketers at small to mid-size companies typically create a marketing budget and create light plans “on the fly” as they’re launching marketing initiatives.

Most of the difference between these levels of planning is caused by experience and bandwidth – marketers at the bigger companies typically have more experience and more time and resources to plan their strategy and campaign. It makes sense, because their budgets are large.

Marketers at mid-market and smaller companies typically have smaller budgets, fewer resources and less time for their marketing initiatives. But easy distribution of knowledge from the Internet is leveling the playing field.

From your account, you can create detailed plans for:

• Strategy: Positioning, branding, pricing, distribution, selling, campaigns

• Tool Creation: Websites, messaging, literature and collateral, corporate identity, software systems

• Demand Generation: SEO and SEM, social media, email marketing, online advertising, customer retention, direct mail, publicity, telemarketing and traditional media.

• Measurement: Marketing return on investment, customer lifetime and customer lifetime value

And you don’t need to hire expensive consultants to complete them for you.