By Elizabeth Boineau

There’s a time for every season and this one seems just in time after a long, cool winter. As the buds start to surface from their dormant state, it’s a good time a look at plans for growth in your business to be sure you’re in a good position to go full bloom.

It’s a little wonder some are loathe to start the process, as there are so many models and approaches to planning, and there are even more who are averse to it and label it cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive.

But it doesn’t have to be. Much as the Internet has changed everything to immediacy it seems, so too has planning had to go to express mode in the hopes of ever getting it finished and implemented before everything changes again—so let’s start digging.

First, decide if your company has an overall marketing plan in place. It may be a component of your company’s overall strategic plan, but if not, then you’re OK to develop a separate marketing plan. Whether it is a subset of a bigger plan, or separate, you still take the same steps to get there.

It’s worth saying up front that this may be a place where a little outside help from experts in the field will go a long way.

Of course, this must be part of a team effort, which is hands-down the best way to plan. So gather your team and start by seeking answers to these basic tenets of good planning:

1) State your goal: What are you trying to accomplish?

2) Who are your customers and prospects and what do they need?

3) Who is the competition and why are you better than they are?

4) What measurable elements can we assign to your goals? These are sometimes called objectives or sub goals and are designed to give direction and guidance in quantifiable and results-oriented terms (for example, increase sales by 15%; open in three new markets by the end of 2005). Though some skip this step, I recommend you attempt to answer it within your group, or at least plan to come back to it at your next planning discussion.

5) Define your strategies: How are you going to get there? What will it take to reach the goals and/or objectives you have set? Examples include the development of new products; exploring new markets for opportunity; initiating a media relations campaign; enhancing the brand profile and so on.

6) What action steps, or tactics, are necessary to accomplish the above strategies? Assign responsible parties and set dates for deliverables, both very important measures to ensure each item gets completed.  This is the living, breathing part of the plan that details the “to-dos.” It should be close by your side and frequently updated.

What are some other basic building blocks of good planning? It’s wise to either start with, or test thereafter, the basic understanding you have about your audience, their needs and whether you’re doing a good job of filling those needs. The research to support this streamlined approach is often of the secondary variety, i.e., reviewing all available information and asking key questions of the target audience considering both prospects and clients as you go through this part of the exercise.

Ideally, you’d hope to test some of the knowledge and opinions you gather this way by seeking it from others in the form of primary research like telephone interviews, focus groups or mail surveys. Otherwise, we draw conclusions based on experience, in addition to what we read and review, to help expand our understanding of the marketplace and the challenges.

This is no different from forming a hypotheses and hoping to test it to prove its validity, but sometimes we must move on and come back to test—that’s what streamlined planning allows you to do.

One last item: a plan is not for framing (nor sticking in a vase), so communicate the plan and its direction to all the ranks and get started. It takes a team to plant good planning seeds and even more to tend and nurture it into full growth.

Elizabeth Boineau runs E. Boineau & Co., a Charleston-based strategic marketing communications and public relations firm. She can be reached at eboineau@eboineauandco.com.

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