Flexible Marketing Planning

By now it's getting well into the new year, and you've probably read countless examples of what to expect in the upcoming year for things related to your business. Companies always try to predict where the market is going to take them, and develop their own 5 year strategies for how they're going to run their business. Planning is important.

It's the companies that don't plan that often struggle to develop in an always changing economy. It's in the best interests of every company to have a plan, so that no one on staff is lost about the next steps in the process.

There's a problem with planning, however. Planning causes reliance, and in a lot of cases, reliance on a specific idea can actually harm your company more than help it. We see this in many different aspects of a business, but one of the best examples with this is in marketing.

A little over 5 years ago, Twitter was created. A little over 5 years ago, Facebook became un-exclusive and opened up to the public. YouTube was developed 7 years ago and bought by Google another five years ago.

Last year, MySpace became a music site. Marketing, for example, is constantly changing. Five years ago, few people would have considered Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube a useful marketing tool, and MySpace was still popular enough that companies were creating MySpace pages and paying people to run them.

Five years pass, and the entire marketing industry has changed. Marketing is an ever-changing field, and while there are some aspects of marketing that remain constant, if your business wants to succeed it needs to always be adapting to trends and looking for new ways to meet the target audience.

Your business should always have a plan, and that plan should include developments that your company makes five years down the road or more. But the longer you plan out, the more you should be willing to update that plan. Your research will show you that not everything you do should be set in stone. The world is always changing, and if you align yourself too closely to one specific viewpoint, you're likely to find that five years from now your plan has become obsolete, and you're clinging to something that is no longer viable for your company.