Main barriers to marketing planning

A marketing plan “outlines the exact actions you aim to carry out to interest potential customers and clients in your product or service and influence them to buy the product or services you offer

There are six essential reasons for making a marketing plan:

It enables you to recognize your target market.

It enables you to think about making both short and long term marketing strategies.

It focuses at the business as a whole and keeps market objectives together.

It allocates fewer resources to create the greatest possible return.

It helps an organization to measure their progress and outcomes.

It gives clearness to who does what, when, with what marketing tools.

A strong marketing strategy is a key component of any successful organization. But every now and then, sending a useful message to customers becomes puzzling and complicated because of barriers that take place behind the scenes during marketing planning. These barriers range from an enterprise failure to place its customers first, tensions between marketing and sales teams. . A marketer role is to investigate clients’ demands and then explore the potential for revenue.

A badly planned marketing and communications plan leaves the customers trying to bits and peaces of various messages together with the hope of understanding what the company is trying to say. An effective marketing plan allocates customer satisfactions at the heart of its branding, public dealings, sales and marketing strategies. Barriers to this integrated marketing planning consist of conflicts to change and departmental capacity or budgetary constraints. Another obstacle to the company is failure to gain acceptance from top management. Marketing team inability to communicate one shared voice to all stakeholders so that everyone hears an uncluttered message is another major problem.

There are a few other barriers that affect the marketing plan of any organization, they are given bellow

Demographical Factors

These comprise of the demographic changes, trends in the manner people live, work and think. These factors affect customer desires and the extent of potential markets such as population growth rate, age distribution, career attitudes, internal/external emphasis on safety and internal, external attitudes to change. A poor marketing planning of an organization will affect them badly because without analyzing these demographic factors accurately, making a proper plan for satisfying customer needs is crucial.

Economical factors

Every business is affected by economic factors locally and internationally. Whether an economy is operating in boom, recession will affect consumer self-belief and behavior. This will have impacts on the nature of competition faced by the company. Economic factors affect the purchasing power of prospective customers, hence it affect company sales and profits.

Technological factors

Technological factors are very important for competitive advantage. Technological factors can reduce barriers to entry, decrease minimum efficient production levels, and affect outsourcing decisions. Technology is altering the manner in which business operates. Internet is having a deep crash on affect on every strategy of organizations.

Political factors

Political factors comprise of government regulations and legal issues and describe both formal and informal set of laws. Changes in laws and regulations may affect marketing strategy and policy. Other factors comprise changes in the areas of toxic waste control, one and the same employment prospect, product protection, advertising, price control also affects the marketing plan of the company.

Culture

People approach towards business and toward the organization products and variation in customer lifestyles and values can affect the company marketing planning. Inaccurate information about population culture and promoting products are not best suited for customer demands can affect the success of an organization marketing campaign.

P4: suggest how organizations may overcome barriers to marketing planning

Marketing planning is “a reasonable series of events leading to the setting of marketing objectives and making of plan for achieving them.” The complication of marketing planning means that when organization embarks on it, they should expect to meet a number of organizational, attitudinal, process difficulties.

To better understand the barriers that have an effect on marketing planning in any organization, a marketing manager must recognize online initiatives that produce the best results as well as techniques that are simple to exercise. Inside the plan a methodical system should be developed to promote objectives and interlink them. The environment should be carefully scanned and informations should be approved up the channels through a laying system, which only permit applicable information to be passed on. Do not try to be a jack-of-all-trades; as an alternative, focus on more than a few exact practices that feel at ease.

Furthermore, marketing managers of many companies get so tired with daily emails, webinars and online analysis that they cannot spotlight on making their marketing strategies. as an alternative, deal with your time by restraining your access to emails and other social networks. This leaves more time for content creation and information generation.

Conclusion, Organizational culture and management unawareness are the main barriers in execution of a marketing plan. Some companies appear to not merit the likely benefits of strategic planning; they reduce marketing budgets and detach the department.

(Reference: http://www.writework.com/essay/barriers-implementing-marketing-plan-and-can-done-overcome)

Any rumblings between marketing and sales historically are blamed on culture. Today’s economy has shifted so that a business cannot afford any stalemates between marketing and sales. Also, well-written verbiage that tells the story of the product or service is paramount to any marketing planning. Effective copy has to capture the customers’ needs. In reality, poor content — such as unimaginative product spec sheets — appears in marketing literature or websites, leaving sales people equipped with lousy materials to build customer relationships.