Strategic Planner
Marketing organizations are challenged to ensure that their spend delivers on the organization’s brand awareness and revenue growth objectives and the money is spent in an effective manner with no over-budget surprises. As a result they look for significant improvement in the following marketing planning areas:
Strategic planning
Ensure that various stakeholders have full access to the objectives and schedules of the marketing plan and collaboratively and transparently work together to create and approve such plans. Marketing teams then use the approved marketing plan to design and execute their marketing activities. This ensures complete alignment between the marketing plans and corporate goals and objectives.
Operational planning
Provide a consistent way to integrate budgeting, campaign planning and spend tracking into a cohesive process. This requires:
- Marketing managers to define planned marketing programs and integrated campaigns.
- Ensure that budgets are appropriately allocated to each campaign in the marketing plan.
- Program spending is tracked for each plan/campaign at a detailed level.
- Information on planned vs. committed vs. available funds for any plan/campaign at any given time is easily available.
As a result, all stakeholders have detailed visibility into the execution of the plan, can track marketing spend by cost categories, by customer segments, by products and many other parameters, and find it easy to realign marketing budgets mid-year due to changing market conditions.
