Understanding the planning process

President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Plans are nothing. “Planning is everything.” There’s a lot of truth to that. Although you’ll come out of this process with a written document, it’s the planning process itself that allows you to learn about your competitive situation, to make tough choices, and to align your team. The marketing planning process has four phases. In the analysis phase, you’ll learn about your customers in terms of how and why they buy your product. You’ll analyze the competition and how they compare to your company in terms of strengths and weaknesses. You’ll also analyze the overall market to understand its potential and where the most attractive segments are to earn revenue. In the strategy phase, you’ll what you’ve learned to make decisions around segmenting the market, targeting specific parts of those segments, and ultimately, how you will position your products and services to win over customers. In the tactical phase, you’ll create marketing programs to execute your strategy. You’ll make decisions around your products and services and how they have to perform in delivering benefits to your customers. You’ll set prices, you’ll create sales support material, and you’ll develop a marketing communications campaign. And finally is the measurement phase. As the name implies, this is the part of the process where you find out if you’re achieving what you expected to achieve. But it’s not just measuring sales. It’s finding out if you’re getting business from the customers you expected to get business from. It’s also finding out if they bought your products and services for the reasons you expected. The measurement phase helps you know if you’re getting a good return on your marketing investments. A good marketer is disciplined and doesn’t cut corners in the planning process. It takes a lot of time and lots of hard work, but in the end, it’s worth it.