The Beginnings of the Marketing Process
The benefits of marketing speak for themselves by bringing in new business and helping your company grow. Now it’s time to get started crafting a marketing process and plan.
The marketing process works like a cycle. You begin with the first step and progress through each phase of marketing until you reach step one again and repeat the process. You can break the marketing process into five basic steps: setting goals, analyzing the current market, creating a plan, implementing the plan and finally monitoring the results.
1. Set a Goal
You can’t know how to arrive at your destination if you don’t know the destination in the first place. Setting a marketing goal should begin by revisiting your corporate mission and objectives. Your goals as a company should drive your initial marketing goals and objectives.
2. Analyze the Market
With goals and objectives to guide you, you next need to analyze the current market. This analysis should include:
- Prospective client behavior and client trends;
- Your product situation including price;
- Information on your competitors;
- And a SWOT analysis — a look at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The information gleaned from the analysis will guide your marketing plan.
3. Create the Plan
Using your corporate goals and your market analysis, you will write your marketing plan. The plan starts by identifying marketing goals and objectives. Then you select target markets, the marketing mix (print, social media, email, etc.). Finally, you develop a budget based on your objectives, target market, and marketing channels.
The plan answers what will be done, by whom, when and for how much.
4. Implementation
Implementation is where a lot of companies want to start the marketing process because this is the action phase. Without the first three steps though, your actions likely won’t yield the results you want.
Implementing your plan means putting into place all the strategies you have identified and allocating the resources to make the plan happen.
5. Monitor and Adjust
Implementation actually takes up very little of your marketing efforts. Planning and reviewing require most of your attention.
Once you implement the plan, you need to monitor its effectiveness. Is the plan doing what you hoped? You can do this by leveraging the data your marketing efforts produce such as how many new prospects a call to action or landing page produces.
Once you receive the data, then you make adjustments to your marketing strategy by starting the marketing process over again.
Marketing can have a powerful influence on the success of your business. Do it right by following the key steps of the marketing process.
