What is marketing planning?

Marketing planning isn't marketing and neither is selling.  Planning is looking at how you'll get to where you want to be in 2-3 years.  This involves looking at issues such as what you're good at, where you are located, what competitive advantages you might have, what expertise you can build on and what weaknesses you need to address.  All this is discussed with staff and documented (staff need to know your goals as they are the ones usually who have to do it) - an outside consultant may be engaged to help but again the Practice has to do this work if it's to understand what's to be done.

From these discussions come the Objectives, Strategies and strategy goals of the Practice.  This is the 'where you want to be' and 'how we're going to get there' phase.

Marketing, as understood by most, is printing and distributing a flyer or running an ad in a local paper or for example sponsoring a local football club.  The aim is to generate leads over a period of days, weeks or months.

Selling is the conversion of those leads into turnover and happy long term clients. 

For our part we've introduced Seminars, a very brief marketing planning documentation process and this website.

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Some important points to remember.

1.  Outline in writing the 3-4 marketing strategies you’ll use in the coming 12-24 months.  Include all staff in this process.

2.  You need to look at having a website based solution that can actually help.  Such solutions are cheap resources.

3.  Set some targets for each strategy and measure strategy performance at least quarterly with the help of all staff.

4.  Start marketing and do it over and over and over.

5.  Re-plan as time passes to remove weaknesses in your approach, build on strengths and look to exploit new opportunities.