Marketing Planning
Everyone is doing more with less these days and that is likely to be the new normal. So if you have limited staff, budget or resources, a good plan will help you make the most out of what you do have. As a Marketing Director, part of this process is working with the program managers I support to find out what products have the most revenue and market potential. I developed a checklist to guide that discussion and to educate new program staff about the planning process.
We have an annual planning process, that ties to the projected revenue goals for the year. From there it is broken down into financial and marketing goals by subprogram for each semester. I produce a one page marketing plan for a quick read of goals and objectives. I sometimes do a more detailed Marketing Plan with demographics, target markets, competition and products, but that is produced when products or markets have changed dramatically from past years.
The real day to day marketing projects I like to manage in a relational database, with individual jobs assigned to staff members. Right now, I am using Filemaker Pro. I plan each job in detail one month prior to the semester. This can up up to 400 jobs for 4 staff members. A job can be as complicated as a 24 page catalog for Digital Arts or as simple as a Blog posting for the Paralegal Internship Program. I enter all the jobs into the system and from there, we can generate individual job tickets, keep track of current deadlines and run past job reporting. Marketing has a weekly production meeting which uses a report from the database for all upcoming deadlines for projects by person responsible for completing.
