Wiki Marketing Plans: Preparing to Succeed

(Jonathan Davenport wrote the below article for Anglia Business magazine, explaining the benefits businesses can expect when they implement Milner‘s Wiki Marketing Plan product in their organisation.)

Having a clear marketing strategy is fundamental if your company is to succeed; failure to create a plan will mean that you’re destined to become part of someone else’s. But planning ahead and setting a clear direction as a management team is not enough, it’s also essential that the marketing plan is well understood within your organisation, so that it can be implemented effectively to help you outperform your competitors.

Sharing the plan on a wiki based intranet is one way to support this. A wiki is a secure, editable website, which allows you to added or alter content at the click of a button, just like you would when using a word processor. This technology has been harnessed to create a wiki based marketing plan which helps us to accomplish four things:

1. A Structured Approach
As anyone who watches the BBC’s Dragons Den will know, a thorough understanding of your market, its potential and how you fit into it is absolutely critical to your success. The wiki will help you to develop a detailed market strategy in a structured way and store it in one place. The inclusive nature of the marketing plan means that everyone becomes involved in implementing it and staying ahead of the competition.

2. Continuous Improvement
Staff who are on the marketing front line can update relevant sections of the marketing plan so that it evolves to truly reflect your market. This ensures the business is kept abreast of developments, opportunities and threats. This input acts as support material for future planning cycles, creating a feedback loop for monitoring and improving business performance.

3. Storage
The plan also acts as a repository for all your marketing materials, which improves efficiency as staff know exactly where to look for customer facing material. This makes it far easier to communicate with customers, suppliers and key stakeholders in a consistent manner by providing your whole company with access to the latest PR plan, the event calendar, product collateral and more, which can be access securely from anywhere there is an internet connection (even via a Smartphone).

4. The Power of Social Networking
Using a wiki helps your organisation to tap into the power of social networking. Users of the wiki can register to receive email updates, informing them of changes made to specific pages or even the entire marketing plan. Just as updates from Facebook or LinkedIn encourage you to visit the site and remain abreast of developments, in our experience the updates from the wiki marketing plan drive the same behaviours.

So whether you don’t have a marketing plan, still write a plan that is stored in your bottom drawer or whether it’s posted onto a traditional company intranet, you and your company will see real benefits from initiating a wiki based marketing plan. Milner has been using a wiki based marketing plan for a number of years and we have experienced the many benefits that come from utilising this new technology, allowing us to get everyone on the marketing front line.

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