About this short course

Marketing success depends on how the marketing plan is structured and managed in the organisation. Planning is the key to this success. Marketers therefore need to make every effort to understand their industry trends, their customers and their competitors. With this knowledge they need to carefully design their approach and activities in a way that they are able to implement and measure the outcomes easily. Marketing planning is crucial for any company as it focuses on identifying opportunities and creating long-term strategies and objectives to take advantage of those opportunities. The strategic marketing process is a long-term, dynamic and proactive process, that links strategic and operational marketing strategies into a marketing plan.

One of the core functions of a marketing manager is to set up and manage a marketing strategy and plan for a company. The marketing strategy is an overall, organisation-wide programme for selecting a particular market and then satisfying consumers in that market by means of a careful blend of the elements of the marketing mix: product, place/distribution, price and promotion.

This course highlights the factors that companies should consider when doing marketing planning. Marketing planning is the process of anticipating future events and market conditions and identifying the best way to realise organisational objectives. It is not a once off activity, but rather a continual process that involves setting objectives and then deciding on appropriate actions and activities that will help the organisation to achieve those objectives.

The outcome of the marketing planning process is a formal marketing plan, which allows the marketer to manage the process better and allows the organisation to realise its marketing objectives and there succeed in its industry.

This course takes you through the elements of a marketing plan including; defining the organisations mission, conducting a situation analysis, selecting a target market, setting marketing objectives, considering internal marketing and finally implementing, evaluating and controlling the plan. The module finishes off with some metrics for measuring marketing performance.

You will learn about:

• The nature of strategic planning and the marketing planning process
• Developing a marketing plan: mission, situational analysis, segmentation, target market, setting objectives, marketing mix, internal marketing strategy, implementation, evaluation and control