The marketing plan of a company is a full-fledged sketch of all the marketing activities from simple words to high scale advertising. You have a small business or a large business, marketing is the factor that cannot be ignored, and you need a proper plan that can be followed by your colleagues and employees to get the best results.
Do keep this fact in mind that your initial plan will not be compatible forever, this is a dynamic factor and needs to be revisited and updated with the changing requirements of your business. People usually think that they have spent hours of effort in developing a marketing concept and this will last long, but you need to keep the plan updating to keep pace with the changing trends and business competitions.
No doubt marketing is just a single aspect of the whole business but you need to put attention to this aspect to grow your business. One thing that will give you a clear indication of whether your marketing plan needs to be revised or not is the progress of your marketing campaigns. This article will provide you with the experts’ tips on when the marketing plan should be revisited.
When should you Review or Revise a Marketing Plan?
There is no thumb rule on how often you should revise your marketing plan. Some experts say that you should revisit or review your marketing plan once a month but below are some major factors that require a marketing plan to be reviewed.
- Significant Change in your Business
- A Campaign is Completed
- Change in Trends
- Showing No Progress
- Change in Products, Services, or Niche
- Quarterly Review
- Annually Review
Significant Change in your Business:
With time, your business can face a lot of changes and you need to update the plan to fill the gap. If somehow, you lose a lot of money in the business, you will have to create a marketing plan that can be fulfilled with a weak and low budget. The marketing plan is developed based on employees’ strengths and you will also have to change the marketing plan if one of your employees leaves the company.
A Campaign is Completed:
Social media campaigns play an important role in marketing. These campaigns have a specific starting and ending time. Once a campaign is completed, it is recommended to review the whole campaign and see whether the campaign has brought you benefits or went in vain. Depending on the analyzed information, you can improve the marketing plan to get better results from the next marketing campaign.
Change in Trends:
In this world of advancement and modernization, public trends keep on changing after a specific time.
If consumers are significantly changing their behavior or losing interest in the type of promotional activity you are following, it is recommended and essential to revise your marketing plan before the customers completely get annoyed by your brand.
Showing No Progress:
You only develop a marketing plan to grow your business and build a reputation.
If your plan is showing no progress even after a long period, you should review and analyze the flaws in your current plan.
Develop the new marketing plan while ensuring that you are not committing the same mistakes that you have done in the previous version.
Change in Products, Services, or Niche:
The marketing plan should be revisited whenever you move from one product or service line to another. The marketing plan is developed and advertising and campaigns are designed according to the products, the change in this aspect will require each factor of the marketing plan to be reviewed and updated accordingly. There are possibilities that changing the product may change your audience thoroughly, you may have to develop the marketing plan again for your desired group of audience.
Quarterly Review:
To get the best results from the marketing plan, it is extremely important to keep on evaluating your marketing plan on a regular basis. Most of the companies have the policy to review the entire marketing plan at least once in a three-month period. They usually review the marketing plan to compare it with the same period of the previous year and then calculate the budget and financial data as well.
Annually Review:
Most of the companies update their business plan every changing year and the marketing plan should also be reviewed at this moment. Review the marketing plan at the end of the year to determine which parts of the plan need improvement and which parts need to be mitigated. Also, look at the trends and set a budget for next year’s marketing plan.
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
A marketing strategy refers to the market segment and targeting and form of advertising for an individual campaign. Therefore, the marketing plan is the bigger picture and contains the overall budget allocation for each campaign and channel. A marketing plan may contain different strategies for each marketing channel.
Some Additional Tips:
- Most of the successful companies have stated that their managers put review dates in the marketing plan at the time of development. The dates are mentioned on the business calendar, and it is the responsibility of the manager to review the plan on that date without any delay.
- Monitor the marketing progress, traffic to your brand, sales, profits, loss, and every aspect of the business on a regular basis and if one of the above-mentioned factors is constantly reducing, you should consider a change or improvement in your existing marketing plan.
- Before updating the marketing plan, experts suggest that the manager should hold a meeting with the representatives of each business sector, talk to them about their specified sector. This will help the manager to analyze the whole business and will result in developing a better functioning marketing plan.
- Set an appropriate budget for the marketing plan and make sure that the budget will not be a burden on the organization.
The Bottom Line: Not reviewing your marketing plan can lose its effectiveness with the passage of time. Keep on reviewing and updating your marketing plan to make sure that it can keep pace with the changes. Most of the companies that bear huge losses make the mistake of developing a marketing plan and never revisiting it again. You should consider the marketing plan as a development phase that needs to be updated over time and use data to constantly improve.
