Introduction
Chances are you want to develop your first Marketing Plan, and the only questions that have been boggling your mind are, “what is the management process?" and "Where do I start from?”
Good question!
If you've scoured the internet and couldn't find a resource that provided easy-to-follow, direct answers, you've come to the right place. Dig in!
Managing the resources, activities, costs and schedules required to execute a marketing campaign successfully can feel like rocket science 🚀, but it isn't impossible — thanks to marketing management.
The marketing management process is one of the core marketing functions that streamline the job of a marketer or marketing manager. It helps them to effectively reach their customer base, and respond quickly and accurately to their target customers’ demands.
What is marketing management?
Marketing management is a combination of two terms. The term "marketing" refers to a set of actions and processes of a company associated with buying and selling goods or services.
"Management" on the other hand, is a function of coordinating the integrated efforts of people towards a common goal by effective utilization of available resources.
The American Marketing Association defined Marketing Management as:
"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 objectives."
Consequently, this places marketing management as the most practical aspect of business management, since it:
- Deals with the needs and wants of consumers.
- Determines the promotion and pricing strategies to generate demand for goods and services or new product development.
- Decides the appropriate distribution strategies for these products or services to final consumers
- Collects customer feedback and other information influencing customer satisfaction.
Summarily,
- It's the practical application of marketing techniques, strategies, and methods to satisfy customers' requirements.
- Effective marketing starts with the identification of a set of consumers and their need structure.
- It is a continuous series of actions and reactions between organizations and customers — with companies making various attempts to provide value for and satisfy the needs of their customers.
A Marketing manager must have proper knowledge about the Marketing management process to fulfill customers’ expectations. Therefore, the Marketing Manager is responsible for ensuring total customer satisfaction and eliminating those products or services they aren't satisfied with.
Why is marketing management important?
Marketing is how companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships to capture value from customers in return. The main objective of all businesses is to satisfy the customer's needs and attain maximum profit.
Similarly, marketing management aims to accomplish these business objectives effectively.
Since the heart of any brand lies in how well you have made your marketing efforts, an effective marketing campaign is important for the following reasons:
1. Improves branding decisions
The customers must perceive your brand in the right way. Your entire success is dependent on how customers recognize your brand. Therefore, a company should make the right branding decisions to improve its brand reputation.
2. Enhances the scope of marketing campaigns
Several marketing techniques like video advertisements, online banners, pamphlets, etc., are proven very effective in creating any marketing campaign. Digging deep into the promotional secrets can offer you insights into some of the emerging trends in marketing, potentially fetching you remarkable results.
3. Provides a competitive advantage
Marketing Management helps small businesses to compete with larger firms in the market. If proper customer research is done along with creating creative campaigns, it can give you an edge over competitors.
4. Profitability
Profit is the backbone of a company. It is necessary to earn profit for growing and diversifying a business, and its maintenance as well. For this purpose, a company must know what market management processes are and how to effectively implement them. An effective marketing management plan helps to retain a company's old and reliable customers and attract and convert new ones to achieve maximum profit for maximum growth.
5. Introduction of new products
The most important way to increase your gains is by introducing new products in the market. However, customers must be given prior notice before the products and services are launched.
Scribe top tip: Some orgs or individuals might feel dismissive about the importance of marketing. It isn't surprising that marketing budgets are usually the first to suffer a cut when a company is in financial distress. However, the reality is that marketing influences what consumers buy — and can save a sinking ship.
Marketing can make or mar a company's revenue bottom line. It's what determines whether upon seeing your products or services, a consumer either whips out their wallet and makes a purchase or ignores your company entirely. Marketing truly works and advertising can be incredibly persuasive.
Of course, unless you're living in a cave, your business knows this, and so do your competitors. Your competitors most likely have marketing management processes in place and would take your market share if an opportunity is sighted. This is why marketing management is important: it helps you stay competitive. After all, complacency is the fastest way to kill any business.
The data you collect allows you to analyze your target customers (and their buying habits) to tweak your marketing plan and make it even more effective in answering their needs.
Steps in the marketing management process
The following five steps are involved in the marketing process.
- Market Analysis.
- Targeting.
- Marketing Strategy/Planning.
- Implementation.
- Control of the total marketing efforts.
Market analysis
Situational and environmental analysis is done to identify the marketing options, to understand the company’s own capabilities and the surroundings in which the company is operating.
Summarily, a marketer's job at this stage is to analyze and scan the external environment to identify marketing opportunities; and then collect market-related information to measure current market demand and forecast future potential.
Targeting/segmentation
Identify the different categories of customers who are likely to respond positively to your proposed marketing program.
Here, the marketing manager assesses other competitors in the market and devises a suitable and unique position that helps the organization stand out from its competitors. This is the stage where you craft your USP (Unique Value Proposition). A brand’s value proposition is the set of values and benefits that it promises to deliver to its customers.
Scribe top tip: Never underestimate the importance of understanding the consumer decision-making process and identifying certain factors that influence this process while developing marketing strategies.
Marketing strategy/planning
After identifying the marketing options available and segmenting your potential customers, the next step is to develop a strategic plan that brings your ideas to life.
The following is a mini checklist of tasks to complete at this stage:
- Develop a strategy for coping with pricing changes in countering your competitor’s counter-pricing strategy.
- Set up intermediaries and recruit salespeople to distribute the product to different parts of the market.
- Find out the current position of your company using variables such as market power, current market share, and strengths and weaknesses of the company when faced with fierce competition.
- Use various methods like SWOT analysis, scenario building, cross-impact analysis and other environmental scanning techniques to scan the marketing environment for opportunity identification.
- Align the company’s business mission to your marketing goals, identify the category of customer markets your company wants to serve, and decide on the type of strategy to use to achieve the desired marketing goals
Don't forget to also find answers to these questions:
- What problems do your potential customers have that your company's products or services can solve better than other competitors?
- What is the profile of the customer having the pain point(s) you identified?
- What are the particular stages and circumstances (actual/ potential) that need modifications in a company’s marketing offer (products, prices, distribution, or promotion)?
Scribe top tip: As a marketing manager, do not take on the role of a product owner at this stage. Rather, think like a solution provider. Market analysis should help you to identify new markets for existing products and for new products, to innovate new products for existing customers and to discover potential product ideas for the future.
Implementation of the marketing program
A marketing plan is not effective without implementation. Without a proper implementation program, your marketing planning exercise is just a paperwork chock full of ideas.
Your goal at this point is to develop an integrated marketing communication strategy via a combination of mediums like public relations, advertising, sales promotion and direct marketing to promote your offerings in the market.
Control of the total marketing efforts
This last step of the marketing management process transforms the written or planned strategy into action and the product is presented according to this process.
Marketing control is a process of benchmarking the expended effort and resources with the set goals. Achievements are evaluated against the set objectives to find weaknesses, if any, and to design modified action plans for the future — to ensure their effectiveness.
Scribe top tip: Ensure that your organizational structure and culture reflect your company's readiness and effectiveness to cope with the ever-changing needs of customers by providing a sustained level of satisfaction.
What happens when the marketing management process isn't handled well?
According to CoSchedule's 2022 Marketing Strategy report:
- Organized marketers are 674 percent more likely to achieve success than their counterparts who do not.
- Marketers were 414 percent more likely to report success when they document their strategy.
- Marketers who proactively plan projects are 356 percent more likely to report success.
This means that for marketers underestimating the importance of the marketing management process, you cannot achieve success because you can't:
- Regularly plan your tasks, marketing campaigns, & projects with clear, established processes.
- Integrate consistent processes, established workflows, & better planning into your marketing to achieve maximum outputs or results.
- Be 💯 percent focused on what and how you will execute your marketing to help produce the success you want to achieve.
- Create an effective social media marketing funnel that converts or grows your social reach, increases leads, or drives more sales, since you aren't organized.
- Keep everyone on the same page, since you don't have a universal record of what you’ve done, what you’re working on, and plans for the future.
- Avoid a backlog of marketing ideas since you don't know what to plan ahead or what marketing campaigns to drive for busy seasons.
- Collaborate, especially with remote team members and other various stakeholders interested in what your marketing department is doing.
- Ensure that your team has enough work, enough time, and enough flexibility to successfully execute project requests & campaigns.
How to create A stronger marketing management process
As I mentioned earlier, creating a marketing management process might sound daunting, but it isn't impossible. However, note that it's one thing to build a marketing management process, and it's another ballgame entirely to create a stronger marketing management process that stays atop the digital mountain and cements its roots there.
The first step to achieving this is by documenting what you already know. Audit what future plans, including:
- Current projects.
- Upcoming events.
- Active marketing campaigns.
- Upcoming projects & campaigns.
- Project or campaign requests.
- Related tasks, resources, & processes needed to complete you & your team’s work.
Most importantly, you need the top software documentation tools to bring your marketing plans to life. This report reiterates our claim by discovering that marketers who use project management software were more than 4x more (426 percent) likely to report success than those that don’t.
The same report also discovered that 62 percent of marketers do not use any kind of project management software to manage their marketing efforts. That's saddening, considering that they must use the right approach and strategy, alongside the right tools — if they want to achieve maximum success.
Why Scribe?
Marketing management involves creating and implementing a marketing plan. That means creating tasks, as well as monitoring and tracking the progress of your marketing strategy as it progresses.
Scribe is a cloud-based documentation and workplace collaboration tool that allows you to instantly create a marketing management process — while making it fun and exciting!
Not convinced yet? 🤔 Consider this a mini tour, and let's examine some of these awesome benefits you enjoy when you create your marketing management process — oh, and it's hassle-free!
1. Keep teams in the loop
As a marketing manager, you and your entire department answer to Important stakeholders within the organization. They want the latest updates regarding your campaigns, and chances are high that they want to get updated in a stress-free manner. Scribe allows you to easily collaborate with your team and other stakeholders by empowering everyone with the tools needed to monitor the project's progress. For example, you can suggest edits, ask questions with real-time mentions, leave comments and work together simultaneously.
2. Manage multiple plans simultaneously
Most marketing efforts push out more than a campaign. Scribe’s portfolio management features give you an overview of all the projects you’re working on so you can share/send resources to streamline costs. Scribe helps you to plan, organize and execute your marketing management from start to finish.
3. Endless templates
Nothing frustrates a busy person more than having to start work from scratch, especially in certain process documentation use cases. Ask Lauren, our content editor. Scribe allows her to create brand guidelines, update them regularly and create other marketing-related documents. You'd hardly find Lauren looking to tear her hair out.😅)
With Scribe, creating marketing management processes from scratch is a thing of the past. It allows your marketing management team to create limitless marketing-related documents.
Whether it's a how-to guide, marketing strategy, SWOT plan, environment analysis, market analysis, Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), marketing plan, product requirements plan or even a performance report, Scribe's extensive gallery offers over countless Scribes and Scribe Pages for you to use and share.
4. Interactive elements
Scribe allows you to add multiple visual elements to transform your marketing-related documents into something fun, interactive and engaging. You can add media elements such as screenshots, pictures, screen recordings, videos, presentations, charts, maps, etc.
5. Live-sharing features
With Scribe, you can easily share your process guide with anyone (including new team members for onboarding purposes) by:
- Sending directly to teammates or with a URL link
- Exporting as PDF document.
- Exporting to Confluence.
- Embedding in existing tools and wikis
- Copying into a document with HTML or Markdown
6. Multiple product integrations
Easily embed Scribes in hundreds of tools you're already using, such as Notion, Zendesk, ClickUp, Docebo, Confluence, HubSpot, Lucidchart, Miro, Microsoft Teams and more.
7. Documentation security
Scribe ensures your documents are safe, thanks to security features such as file access restrictions, password protection, document tracking, etc.
8. Organization
Apart from using Scribe’s search features to find whatever document you’re looking for, Scribe Page features allow you to categorize your Scribes under different categories. Think of Pages as an online file cabinet that allows you to store and organize documents in different compartments.
Wondering how to create your first Page? Here’s how to get started with Scribe!
Once you've created a Scribe, you can start building your Page.
Marketing management process FAQs:
1. What are the seven principles or 7Ps of marketing?
The 7Ps of marketing, commonly known as the marketing mix, include product, price, promotion, place, people, process, and physical evidence.
2. What other things are included in a marketing plan?
- Situation analysis – Business environment analysis, Internal analysis (SWOT analysis), USP and core competencies.
- Financials – Sales forecasts, expenses forecast, working capital, etc.
- Strategic plan – An outline detailing the pros and cons of the strategy.
- Implementation – Operations, customer loyalty, brand building, consumer behavior, plus product and pricing decisions.
- Follow-up – After implementation, follow-up is conducted to ensure the marketing strategy is on track.
3. What questions should you ask when evaluating a company's mission to ensure it aligns with/influences your marketing strategy?
- What is the reason for your company's establishment?
- What is the purpose of your business?
- How does your mission statement clarify your strategy?
- How does your mission statement unify your team?
- What is the strategic influence for your business?
- What is the desired public perception for your business?
4. What's a 5C Analysis?
A 5C analysis (Company, Customers, Competitors, Collaborators, Climate) is another way to evaluate the market environment.
Ready to create your first marketing management process in seconds? Scribe away for free here!
