Step by step to the right marketing & budget planning
When creating a marketing plan for the next year or quarter, there are many individual steps to consider. With the right marketing strategy and planning, hardly anything can get in the way of targeted execution in the company and the estimated budget can be used in the best possible way to ideally achieve the desired success with customers. What is important here is step by step advance and First create the marketing plan and then estimate the marketing budget.
What is strategic marketing planning?
Strategic marketing planning is understood as Decision-making process about carrying out the company's future marketing and enforcing it. A distinction is made between strategic planning that determines the goals and concept, and operational planning. The company's operational marketing planning includes a plan for the collected marketing measures and prescribes how the various marketing tools should be used in the company. This includes defining individual content, into which focal areas and campaigns they are to be summarized and to what extent they influence the overall sales goals. Strategic marketing planning This combines the company's strategy with sales and individual actions. The marketing planning process should ideally be systematic, but is nevertheless characterized by creativity and flexibility to respond to special situations.
marketing plan
The defined results of strategic marketing planning can then be recorded and manifested in the marketing plan. When managing and defining the marketing plan, all marketing activities of the company in the planned period are listed. It is important to include the product or service that you want to promote in the marketing plan. In addition, this marketing plan sets the framework conditions and talks briefly about the potential in the market. In order to be comprehensible in general, it is important to provide explanations, influencing factors and derivations where appropriate. A good marketing plan is defined by comprehensive, thematic development , which should cover the following points:
- Analysis of the current marketing situation
- SWOT analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks (marketing and market)
- Overview of objectives: General goals in the company, marketing goals, and plans and objectives for sales, market share and profit
- Product features that should be particularly emphasized in marketing (USP)
- Planned measures: description, responsible persons, planned budget and medium
- Result forecasting and progress monitoring
What is particularly important?
In order to draw up a suitable and successful marketing plan, marketing should Particular emphasis is placed on the strategy. Only when the Current situation is clear and the market is analyzed at regular intervals, as soon as competitors are observed, a suitable plan can be drawn up. This should be realistically adapted to the strategyto avoid possible short-term changes in the best possible way. In addition to Marketing Situation Analysis Special attention will be paid to general objectives of the company laid. Ideally, these become The goals in marketing and thus also the marketing plan are derived. In addition to focusing on the goals, it is also important to plan the measures as future-oriented as possible. The most important thing, however, is not to forget the customer and the target group in this process and to adapt all marketing measures in the process to the customers.
Choose the right advertising material and content
The target group plays a central role in marketing when choosing the measures and the media in which they are published and distributed. In particular, the selected media of the marketing plan can provide information about which groups of people are being addressed for the individual product. This is already recommended to analyse the target group of the medium in advance and compare it with the target group and customers of your own product or service. In addition, it should be determined in advance what information customers should receive about the product or service and manifest this in the marketing plan.
Strategic marketing planning and budget
In addition, marketing measures are decisively influenced by the estimated marketing budget. It is particularly important to focus on the information and advertising material that promise the most success in order to protect the budget from risks and then, if there is a surplus, to add further marketing measures. Here, the marketing plan should show a certain degree of flexibility.
Die budget planning for marketing In most cases, starts with sales planning in the company. The greater the increase in sales should be, the more marketing will be necessary to achieve the goal, which in turn means that a larger marketing budget is needed.
How do I find the right budget?
Especially when planning your first marketing budget, Selecting the right overall budget is usually a challenge. There are no uniform key figures for setting the budget. Depending on the sector and product, different sizes are suggested. For companies and suppliers in the automotive sector, the average marketing budget is around 3%, in the service sector 8-10%, while for companies such as Red Bull, up to 30% of the sales volume is spent on marketing. In general, it makes sense to always choose a value above the industry average in order to stand out from direct competitors. However, if no industry values are known, the golden mean of around 10-15% of turnover is recommended.
The question of efficiency
In particular, it is important that Using funds efficiently and investing primarily in measures, which result in the highest possible advertising efficiency. This is calculated from the ratio of costs to reach or precise targeting. The more relevant people can be reached with the measure, the more budget should be spent on this measure. In addition, this strategy attempts to avoid unnecessary measures and thus costs and risks and to convince investors with the right arguments.
Which costs should be integrated?
In order not to be negatively surprised at the end of the year, it is important consider all costs and set up the plan in the best possible way. Key components and expenditure, which should be considered when preparing the budget in the marketing plan are:
- Design costs and costs for the production of advertising material (e.g. flyers, brochures, videos, etc.)
- Sales costs (including participation fees for trade fairs and events)
- Travel expenses for employees and representatives
- Working time of employees (for preparation, analysis, strategy and market research)
- Other costs (training, seminars, etc.)
Especially when calculating working hours, it is important to compare the estimated values at the end of the year with the actual values, so that it can be ensured that planning can be made even more precisely for the next year.
Checklist for marketing budget planning (bottom-up):
- Define marketing priorities appropriate to the product
- Management and selection of marketing measures and media
- Clarify scope (time period, repetitions, size)
- Calculate production costs
- Estimate personnel requirements and calculate time
- Estimate costs for service providers
- Calculate costs for individual measures
- Combine measures and calculate total price
- Compare the price with the estimated marketing budget
- Delete or accept measures where appropriate
software support
In order not to be alone in managing and implementing the marketing plan and to communicate the information and content to the marketing of the individual sales partners in the best possible way, it is recommended to technical support based on a software solution fall back. There are various business models for bringing the right marketing planner into the company.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
The most flexible options are offered by software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, where the Marketing and budget planner as a cloud program in a web app is provided online. The personal login data provides every sales partner and user with access to the system, which they can use online and from anywhere. However, this requires a reliable Internet connection to be guaranteed. In terms of price, the advantage is that it is not a large one-off sum, but monthly contributions.
Open source programs
Open source programs are the cheapest (mostly available online) solutionto implement a marketing planner. Since the software is not sold commercially in this case, no additional training is provided or regular updates are guaranteed. Open source marketing planners are therefore only recommended if the software is to be tested first and if the employees have sufficient previous technical knowledge, to get to grips with the program yourself.
License-based software
With this type of marketing plan, The complete license of the program was purchased once. The planner can therefore be installed on the computers of the individual sales partners and used together to implement the planning. However, this purchase can be comparatively expensive, but offers the option of making one-time adjustments and individualizations. After purchase, the license usually remains at the same standard and is not developed further.