Marketing Plan & Budget

The marketing plan is the detailed roadmap that outlines all of your marketing strategies, tactics, activities, costs and projected results over a period of time.

A marketing plan organizes your company’s entire marketing strategy, outlines campaign media and execution, defines the required tools and processes and projects return on investment.

Marketing Plan Value

Most business people agree that good planning is essential for success. A plan is a compass; without one, you may be traveling in the right direction, but it's incredibly difficult to stay on course.

Since many B2B companies are sales-driven, they don’t create a formal marketing plan. While most have a budget, the marketing plan can be used to define a detailed course to follow throughout the entire year.

It’s simply not enough to operate with a revenue target, sales quotas and a “budget” for marketing expenditures. While that’s commonplace at most small-to-medium sized businesses, it robs the company of the ability to understand the true leverage gained by good marketing investments that flow to the bottom line and increase company value.

• Eliminate ad hoc marketing activities
• Tie marketing investments to cash flow
• Align the executive suite, Marketing, Sales and Finance teams with annual revenue goals
• Clearly understand the activities required by all team members to execute the plan
• Measure success and quickly diagnose problems

Growth Panel enables you to define your revenue goals and objectives and create a simple or detailed annual marketing plan your team can reference throughout the year.

Use Growth Panel to tie your CEO’s revenue numbers to the marketing and sales director’s activities, and provide financial benchmarks as they are executed.

Marketing Planning Tools With Growth Panel

• Define the Planning Process and Set Plan Objectives:  Determine the planning process, the people involved, and due dates. Establish high-level strategies and financial goals that will be the objectives of the plan.
• Create a Simple Marketing Plan:  For companies that lack a marketing plan or budget, but desire some basic structure around marketing activities, Growth Panel enables you to put together an overview plan and budget. Address your competitive positioning, your brand, and your pricing and distribution strategies, and outline a few campaigns with corresponding sales execution. Deliver a five-to-ten page plan and annual budget with projected ROI.
• Create a Detailed Marketing Plan:  For companies seeking a detailed annual plan, define low level competitive positioning strategies, brand strategy, and pricing and distribution strategies. Outline specific campaigns for the entire year, aligned with the sales plan and including projected impressions, responses, leads entering the sales process, customers acquired, gross profit and return on investment, by campaign. Establish the measurement process for review, and evaluate performance throughout the year.
  
  

You might need to address your marketing plan if:

• You don’t have a formal campaign planning process
• You’re not using campaigns to gain leverage and generate leads
• You’re a sales-driven organization
• Existing campaigns are ad hoc and not tied to revenue goals
• You need more leads
• You can’t measure ROI for your existing campaigns