Planning your company’s marketing program is a process much like the one you go through as a young person deciding what you want to do with your life. You go through phases of:

• learning and discovery of the world around you
• development and self-realization of skills, strengths and weaknesses
• goal setting based on those strengths and weaknesses
• setting strategies for achieving your goals
• planning your attack
• working through that plan to make it happen

­This mirrors the process your business must go through in planning your marketing. In this article, we’ll talk about how to know your business, know your market, understand your strengths and weaknesses, and find the opportunities within those strengths and weaknesses in order to plan your marketing and make it happen. We’ll also give you some tips and rules from which all marketers can benefit.

What is Marketing?

According to the Dictionary of Marketing Terms, marketing is “the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.”

What does that mean to you? It means marketing encompasses everything you have to do in coming up with a needed product or service, making potential customers aware of it, making them want it, and then selling it to them.

So then, is sales considered “marketing”? Is advertising “marketing”? Often, you’ll hear sales functions referred to as “marketing,” but really sales is just a part of the larger marketing process, as is advertising. In the olden days (back 30 or 40 years), marketing did consist primarily of sales. Rather than having marketing departments, companies had sales departments with an advertising manager and someone who did market research. Sometimes they added a promotions manager or hired an agency to handle advertising and promotions.

Things began changing as some companies grew larger and larger and began offering many product lines that warranted having their own brand managers, market segment managers and many more specialized positions that addressed and mulled over the needs of their particular markets. The need for a marketing department began to be seen as a vital part of business. The marketing department also takes most of the blame if a product (or company) isn’t successful, regardless of whether or not the fault actually lies there.

Everyone is Responsible for Marketing

The thing to remember is that, in reality, the marketing department crosses over into the entire company. Everyone in your company should be aware of the marketing message, visions, and goals of the company, and should reflect that message in everything they do that is related to the product and your customers. This is referred to as Integrated Marketing Communications, and means that every contact with customers and potential customers, whether it’s through advertising, personal contact, or other means, should carry a consistent message about the company and product. In effect, every employee is a sales person, and every employee is a customer service representative. If they give mixed messages about what your business is, then your customers and potential customers will have a distorted picture. Having your marketing budget can be monitored in peachtree quantum.

Any bad experience a customer has with your company can affect future sales from that customer, as well as the people they tell about the experience. This bad experience can be anything from a rude receptionist, to poor packaging of a product. There are so many variables that effect whether a potential customer becomes a customer, or a current customer remains a customer, that the marketing department shouldn’t always be held accountable for the total success of a product. But in many companies, that is the case.