Continuing with our theme of monster merriment (see last year’s post) we wish you a merry Christmas. Go on and indulge in yummy Christmas treats! May 2011 be a rewarding one.

I quote, “Unless you’re a fortune teller, long term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many market conditions that are out of your hands… Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control…” So there I am trying to be ‘good’. I’m spending my already nonexistent free time on a plan and I read that. The Rework approach is to make quick short term decisions. Decide on a daily and weekly plan and certainly not anything past a monthly plan. Yearly plans are definitely OUT. The Rework authors conclude that chapter like this, “Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.”

Right. Here’s my take on plans based on my recent experience. I persevered and finished my marketing plan. The Business Link website and the CIM websites were very useful. In fact the CIM have a marketing plan tool which I used.

The pros of marketing plans

• It’s a detailed look at a specific area of your business which you will otherwise never really do – it makes you think about your business in a way that you haven’t for a long time.
• If you follow a guide the process makes you ask questions you never normally have time to answer or that you’d never think to ask yourself.
• It gives you a bird’s eye view of where you’re at and most importantly where you want your business to go.
• Action points come out of a plan that is done correctly – as a result of taking time out to do our marketing plan we have a list of things we need to action to help us achieve the goals we have set.
• The process helps you become more market aware because you have to consider things like your competitors and what your customers actually want.
• You have to express clearly your business purpose, your core values and why your offering is unique – an important aspect in my opinion.
• It helps you target the right prospects.
• Writing a marketing plan helps you to bring everything together so it all makes sense! If you understand all the pieces of the puzzle and put it together in a complete jigsaw then your potential buyers will understand the tangible, compelling and meaningful reasons why they should take action and buy from you. When every aspect of your marketing and communications just makes sense and tie together, you help your target audience trust you.
• As designers who help people create communications like websites, fliers and logos I recognised that if my customers came to me after they had gone through the marketing plan process they would be clearer about what they wanted from our services.

The cons of marketing plans

• Many of the guides available are more applicable for traditional business models and they haven’t evolved as fast as businesses have had to.
• Today it’s important to include social media in your marketing plans and many of the guides I found have not yet included this aspect – another reason why the marketing plan can be perceived as outdated.
• Most plans advise you to write things like your commitment and mission statement which are often convoluted untruths very disjointed from the actual customer experience you provide. This is especially true for for larger organisations. Use these in the wrong way and you’ll do more harm than good.
• I found there was too much focus on competitors. I guess it is important to know about the opposition but felt that it took up a lot of time as it was so detailed. The good thing that came out of the competitor analysis was it gave us confidence – there is a lot of poor competition out there!
• I also found too much focus on things we cannot control. Like market conditions and the economy for example. Yes, we need to respond to changing conditions but we can’t respond until conditions change and this is where I agree with the Rework argument I talked about above.
• All plans tend to end up gathering dust on a shelf, lost in a filing cabinet on sitting on your computer never to be referenced again. This is a major weakness.
• Many business owners (especially new ones) can hide behind perfection before they get their proposition out there. Plans can take up a lot of time and can stand in the way of you going out there and learning from experience and getting some business along the way. I wrote about this in, “A small business conundrum.”

My conclusion
I’m glad I took time out to do our marketing plan. It has brought clarity, we have goals with reason behind them and we have actions to complete. We are going to change quite a bit about our business and this planning process has taken random thoughts and conversations and crystallised everything. My marketing plan is 25 pages long as a result of following the CIM marketing plan guide. I really don’t think it needs to be that long. In fact, since marketing plans do bring clarity and would help our clients we’re going to champion a simpler approach to marketing plans (more on that later).  I am going to have to battle against forgetting about our plan and reference it at least monthly to see how we are getting on.

I agree to some extent with both extreme views: ‘don’t plan and you plan to fail’ from traditional marketers and business gurus and the Rework theory, ‘planning is guessing’ and put our approach firmly in the middle which I think, is much more balanced!

We’ve been suffering from the two year itch syndrome. It’s about two years since our business officially started. And the good news is that we’ve survived – just! But the two year itch shows up when you tend to get busy in a bit of a hamster wheel that is just going round and round, and round and round…. doing I suppose, exactly what a hamster wheel is meant to do. You’ll only realise that you are going nowhere if you break the rules and take that long hard stare at yourself. Take time out to do this regularly, maybe every 6 months or so. It’s sometimes painful, sometimes scary but always beneficial.

So this is the result for us. We’re relooking at our marketing strategy, marketing plan and in the process clarifying our business proposition. And here’s a confession, this time we are actually going to commit these strategies and plans to paper! (As opposed to scratchy, undecipherable notes in my notebook). We’ll be changing some of our services and adding some exciting new ones. We’re going to roll out a new communication master plan, and we are going to act on it. Funny how we do this for our clients but don’t do it often enough for ourselves. We might even give you some insight into what we are doing in this uncomfortable process of shedding dead skin (yucky as that sounds), how we do it and what benefits we gain from it. It might work out as a little bit of a rebirth blog series. I don’t know all the answers yet so we’ll see how this goes shall we?

I haven’t blogged for ages. Yet I have a website with the blog as the front page. That is appalling, embarrassing and I know it does not give off the right signals. I have been less consistent on Twitter. I know I should do X, Y and Z but I’m just not getting round to it.

I know exactly what I should be doing but the reality is I’m just doing my best to make sure my group of clients are well taken care of and investing time into my businesses. I’m currently business building and I’m in the design business and it takes time, it’s not something you can put on a speedy conveyor belt. I could take on more clients (I need to take on more clients) but right now I’m investing a lot of time into my own businesses – this one and the Best of Zambia which we launch a brand new website for this month. I want to make sure that what clients I do take on we can deliver to. My whole team is working six days a week, 12+ hours a day, investing time because we believe in our vision. The honest, crazy truth is our biggest challenge is time, or lack of it. The crazy part is we all have the same amount of time and I can’t control the amount we all get. Argh!

So that’s the news from us – we’re completely and utterly out of time! So what do I do about it? And what are you doing better than me? Because everyone else out there seems a lot more in control of time than I?! How do you handle this time problem that plants all sorts of negative emotions like fear and worry in us? I’ll leave it open to the floor? Any tips will be gladly taken on board.

Inspired by our favourite, somewhat unsuccessful valentines card by Robert. Go ahead and have yourself a fun, tasty and woolly-jumper-free Christmas! We wish you continued success in the New Year.