“Marketing Plan vs. Campaign Plan … What’s the Difference?”

Someone actually asked me that question the other day. It’s an excellent question. Except if you have the word “marketing” in your job title. So here’s a quick refresher. We’ll call it an executive brief.

The marketing plan is the written methodology for implementing a set of promotional campaign efforts designed to achieve your marketing objectives. For most companies a marketing plan is written on an annual basis.

The campaign plan is not the marketing plan. It follows from, and is guided by, the marketing plan. The campaign plan details specific efforts within the marketing plan. Typically, this is an individual campaign strategy employing particular tactics within a fixed period of time such as a fiscal quarter or season.

There are many trendy templates you can use to construct a marketing plan. But the truth is you don’t need a flashy presentation – you need a plan. And please remember to actually write your marketing plan down! Scribble your marketing plan out on a note pad if you need to. But please take the time to think thorough the following considerations.

Essential Elements of the Marketing Plan

Situation Analysis
The purpose is to understand the internal and external forces that can affect your business, customers, products and services. And how these forces might change in the immediate future. Remember SWOT – it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. Essentially your goal is to establish some explicit and testable assumptions about internal strengths and weaknesses and external threats and opportunities that can be used to assess the your current marketing strategy and identify new opportunities.

Setting Marketing Objectives & Goals
This is a process of identifying the degree to which marketing efforts might be able to impact the opportunities for, and threats to, your business. Marketing objectives broadly address what a business would like to achieve, and include both internal and external measures (e.g. increase ROI, increase market share). Marketing goals are more specific in nature, build upon objectives, are quantifiable, and are more detailed than objectives as they identify timing and quantification (e.g. increase market share by 5% in 2 years or increase ROI to 20% by 2012).

Prioritize Marketing Strategies & Tactics
For each marketing goal, multiple strategies may be developed. For each strategy, a specific tactic should be developed. Tactics are the specific program details required to execute the strategy such as: format, content, quantity, drop dates. The next step is to prioritize the strategies and tactics based on how well they will support your marketing goals and how important their strategic importance to your business. Always prioritize marketing strategies based on their business impact.

Possible marketing strategies may include:

• Increase Revenue: In order to increase revenue (or maintain the existing revenue stream) prospects must be converted to customer through various marketing communications.
• Cross-sell: A cross-sell strategy can promote buying from a product category that a customer may not typically buy from, or broaden a customer’s purchases across an increasing number of product lines.
• Upsell: An incentive encouraging the customer to spend more and thereby increasing the customer dollar per transaction.
• Renewal/Retention: Marketing efforts to keep current customers that have already purchased. Usually involves less of an investment that prospect-to-buyer conversion. Greatest benefit is the minimal level of investment required. Remember it can cost four to seven times more to replace a current customer than it does to keep one.
• Downsell: Used to acquire a new customers if an original offer did not meet their needs.

10 Tips for Writing a Successful Campaign Plan

Only after you have identified the specific goals and strategies of your marketing plan can you begin to develop a campaign plan. Campaign plans have more steps. Yes, precisely because they are more detailed. 

1. Be concise in your writing, providing details that offer a clear understanding of the campaign, how you will meet the marketing goal, and your measure of success.
2. Clearly identify your criteria for success and expected results. For example: Meet a response target of 10% or increase response by 2% over the last campaign.
3. Include the results of past campaigns for this product or similar campaigns. Hint: If you haven’t shared past campaign performance, the creative team doesn’t have this info for you.
4. Identify the target audience and customer segments. Individual customers within a customer segment have similar needs, wants and perceptions with respect to a company and its products.
5. Develop an offer to promote to the target audience. Then take the time to explain the benefits, details and requirements of the offer so It can be effectively communicated to your target audience.
6. Select the media and develop the contact strategy. Formulate objectives for regulating the sequence and frequency of customers contact.
7. Include any information pertaining to the production, operational setup and execution of the campaign. Identify the resources requirements – What operational resources are needed? Customer contact center, fulfillment, processing, production?
8. Determine testing needs. What are you trying to learn? What types of tests are you planning?
9. Include a campaign schedule, testing matricies, and your expected financial return calculations. You should be able to explain what the program is expected to contribute to the bottom line.
10. Double-check your campaign plan. Be sure you have provided a clear understanding o the product being offered, clearly stated goals of the campaign, the strategy and tactical plan to achieve the marketing goals, and the resources required.