Marketing Plan and Marketing Strategy

Marketing Plan and Marketing Strategy

Marketing in today's scenario is very important. To put simply, marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services. Today if you want to see your product, getting your product known is very important. to make market and customer aware about your product is essential for your business growth. Marketing product or services generates customer awareness and demand for your product. Marketing basically begins with a strategy and plan.

Marketing Strategy and Marketing Plan. ?

Marketing strategies are nothing but what goal you want to accomplish, whereas a marketing plan contains all the details of how you are going to achieve your goals. With a proper marketing plan and its execution, you make sure your customer know about your product or services you are offering.

Marketing Plan and Campaign

Marketing Plan is top level plan which consists of all the other plans and campaigns. A marketing plan mainly consists of Campaign. Campaigns runs on the basis of what objectives and tactics you would need to fulfil your marketing plan. So basically A marketing plan can be structured as

Campaign

One of the main business activities in CRM marketing is the business to the client interaction. This simply means a company want to interact with large number of customers or prospect customer. In such scenario Campaign management is used for carrying out marketing campaign as per marketing plan. The two elements of campaign - Objectives and Tactics.

In SAP CRM Web Ui, there is a particular profile for Marketing professional where all the marketing activities are done. It is called MARKETINGPROFESIONAL.

Prerequisites concepts for creating a Marketing Plan. 

There are some concepts we need to have in order to create a successful marketing plan. Those are
- How to configure marketing plan profile.
- Define types and objectives
- Segmentation and creation of External Lists
- Mailforms

How to configure and define marketing plan profile.

For configuring marketing plan profile we need to go to GUI. Go to SPRO > CRM > Marketing > Basic Data > Define Types Objectives and Tactics. Copy from the standard for marketing plan, and give a short name

• A new marketing plan is created.
• Now do the same for campaign. Copy from the standard.
• A new campaign is created.
• Now we have to define objectives and tactics for our campaign. To do so go to SPRO > CRM > Marketing > Basic Data > Define Objectives
• Create a new objectives under any name. Create a suitable objective.
• A new objective to reach "1 million sale" is created.
• Now go to define tactics. Tactics are generally that through which we wants to achieve our objectives.Here we will be creating those tactics that will fulfil our objectives of 1 million sales. For tactics, go to SPRO > CRM > Marketing > Basic Data > Define Tactics
• Go to new entry to create tactics. Here we will create some tactics which will be useful for company to achieve the objectives.
• Now again go to SPRO > CRM > Marketing > Basic Data > Define Types Objectives and Tactics. Select your marketing plan and click on Objectives
• Select new entry, and enter the objectives you created in earlier steps.
• Now select this objective and go to tactics.
• Select New entry and look for the tactics which you have created for above objectives.
• We have selected the tactics for our objectives.

This was all of the configuration related to a marketing plan and campaign which are done in GUI. There are two more concepts for Marketing plan. Those are Segmentation and Mail forms.

Segmentation

Campaigns in marketing plan are executed for a certain segment. The segment is the target the campaign is executed for.

First we create attributes for BP segmentation maintaining data source for segmentation. We create a target group using segmentation and then target group are used with marketing activity to address a particular set of customers or prospects. 

External List Management 

We can create a target group for segmentation by using external list also. External List Management is used for uploading BP to the CRM externally. There are two steps in external list management - 

1. Define a mapping format 

2. Maintain address list.