Market Planning

Several of our clients have lost their key marketing person in the last quarter. Each for different reasons but all, except one, at the decision of the individual. The person leaving gave reasonable notice and there was a hand-over period.

We carried out a short in-house review of our clients over the last 3 years and noted that most companies were reliant on one or two individuals for their marketing activities. How well is your company prepared if you suffered an immediate or unplanned loss of your marketing lead? How many of the following questions could you answer “yes” to?

• Do you have a single, up-to-date marketing plan?
• Are your key marketing documents stored together in an understood and structured format?
• In the event of an immediate loss of your current marketing person, could someone step in and run marketing without their input?

Few companies could honestly answer yes to all of those questions. One quick change you could make within your company so you could answer “yes” would be to set up your marketing plan on a wiki – a secure, editable website. Many of you will have seen the Milner marketing methodology (see the picture left). A year ago, we built the methodology into a wiki and we have found a number of client benefits.

Benefits:

• Easy – all the key marketing topics are laid out on a single, graphical front screen to make it easy to understand and use
• Quick – the key information and most supporting documents are just one level below so everything can be found quickly
• Disaster proof – the design and layout allows other people in the organisation or a marketing specialist from Milner to step in and keep the marketing function running if you lose your key marketing person
• Free – the underlying wiki technology is free and powered by Google

We know that some of you store your marketing documents on a combination of individual PCs, intranets, Livelink or Sharepoint. We are going to take a look at those last two systems over the next few months to see whether they encourage an understanding of a company’s marketing and how they support the marketing process in a sudden loss situation.

If you want to see the wiki marketing plan in action then email us to arrange a demonstration and we will find a time and place that suits you.

To find out more about wiki marketing plans, visit www.wikimarketingplans.com/.

This is a screenshot of the wiki marketing plan, it incorporates the Milner marketing methodology.

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