Back to Page 1:  Why Strategic Marketing Plans Can Be So Valuable
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Strategic Marketing Plans buffer you from a changing environment while helping you gain multiple streams of income and customers. They also help reduce strategic errors on your path to growth and success.

How Strategic Marketing Plans Help Reduce Strategic Errors

A tech company I worked with that creates data storage boxes for mid-size companies, tumbled from $7 million of booming sales and consistent growth, down to $2 million of revenues and near bankruptcy almost overnight.

Here’s how they got into trouble in the first place.

As their revenues skyrocketed, instead of creating any strategic marketing plans, they hired a sales and marketing manager from a much larger company. The goal was for him to help transform their somewhat small company into a much larger one.

However, this person directed them to invest all their resources on creating a product far beyond their technical capabilities.

After all, he knew exactly what product the larger company would need to be competitive in the marketplace. So his logic was to push the radically smaller company to create this ideal product.

The only problem was the smaller company did not have the hundreds of engineers and programmers needed to develop and test a product like this properly.

The result: They introduced a product full of bugs, that crashed or simply did not work in the environments where it was sold. This caused a steady flow of customers to demand refunds and burned important bridges with resellers and distributors whose phones rang off the hook with angry customers.

Strategic Marketing Plans Are Like Insurance Policies Against Hardship and Failure

By developing a strategic plan, they would likely have avoided this problem.

Here’s why.

Strategic marketing plans force you to evaluate and consider supposed “facts” that drive your decisions. They get you to review issues and elements that you generally take for granted, and force you to consider them in a whole new light.

It takes a little time and effort to create effective strategic marketing plans, but it’s a small price to pay to combat business hardship and bankruptcy.

Think of your Strategic Marketing Plans as insurance policies — where you pay with time rather than with money. They provide a weapon to combat complacency and ignorance, and a shield against a changing competitive landscape.

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Also See: Situation Analysis for Marketing Plans
Also See: Small Business Marketing Plans