By
Jyoti Tejpal
Deliver marketing campaigns on time Streamline internal & external requests Set up campaign workflows Plan interactive timeline Delegate tasks Track progress in real-time Easily create performance reports Run multiple projects & clients
Work execution platform Enables plan to manage & track marketing campaigns One central location Easy plan campaigns Manage content calendars Collaborate goals & initiatives Ensure projects aligned strategy
Free campaign management platform Plan & run marketing email campaigns Email marketing SMS broadcasting Telemarketing Facebook are part Unlimited projects & charts Time tracking & sales reports
Marketing Planning Software is designed to offer help to the marketing teams and solo marketers for planning and organizing their marketing campaigns. The software helps marketers to strategically try committing to future plans and budgets thereof as well as for monitoring the effectiveness of every performance, marketing campaign, and spending capabilities.
Key features of the software are forecasting and budgeting, tracking of goals and objectives, demand and sales planning, collaboration and performance reporting.
Provides customizable templates: Marketers usually have to draft extra lengthy marketing plans from scratch for every plan. They have to do it every time to pitch a marketing proposal for a new marketing campaign. Marketing planning software provides a large variety of customizable templates which the marketers can leverage to quickly and easily create the much needed marketing plans to present in front of the senior faculty and team as a whole. As all proposals are made, edited, and stored in digital format, marketing teams can even get leverage of their previously approved marketing plans to refresh and rebuild new ones. It helps in saving time and effort to a great deal.
Improved coordination: Marketing plans need a lot of communication and coordination among varied team members, both within and outside of the marketing team. Manually getting into the brainstorming sessions over the ideas and planning proposals delays the process of drafting plans. They even slow down the implementation phase of the process, especially when there are many small plans to discuss. Implementing a digital software helps in bringing everyone in the team onto the same page within no time. People can coordinate virtually in real time to make , edit, change, discuss, and approve proposals and plans from anywhere at any time.
Better plan presentations : Marketing planning software generally incorporates a variety of visual aids like charts, tables, and graphs to increase clarity around the proposal and present interest values in a more effective way. Built-in visual tools help make essential points about various sections of a plan and present them in a much appealing way, which a textual plan will not be able to fulfill and accomplish.
Aligning plans to business objectives and goals: Marketing planning software not only helps in planning campaigns, they can even assist and help in measuring return on investment (ROI) and tracking campaign performance. A visual dashboard assists in monitoring the campaign performance and helps in comparing it with plan that was actually made. Some software even provide tools for contingency planning that permits marketers to modify the course of their campaigns when their marketing plans do not work as expected.
Collaboration: Working collectively in drafting marketing plans and bringing team members together for editing, discussing, presenting, and approving plans.
Marketing calendar: Tracking a marketing campaign with its planned schedule thru a digital calendar view and watching past, current, and future campaigns.
Aim or goal setting/tracking: Measuring campaign performance and comparing actual progress with the required performance.
Media planning: Identifying advertising and promotional resources to be utilized in marketing acts.
Spend management: Tracking the amount of money used for a given product or with a given supplier.
Most products in the market are priced on a “per user, per month” basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price. A premium product is priced higher,and have some additional features like dashboard sharing, custom branding and data source connectors.
Features and functionalities offered: Before jumping into the pool of marketing planning software available in the market, it is very much advisable to figure out the primary and secondary feature requirements. While it comes to drafting marketing plans and proposals, each business has a varied set of styles and needs. Ensure to discuss the key requirements with your shortlisted vendors, and see which one can offer all the requisite features within the most reasonable price range.
Integrations with existing tools: There is no point of buying software which does not integrate with the other existing business applications. try to invest in a software which can easily integrate with the existing tools and applications so as to sync data within and throughout applications seamlessly without any need to re-enter data multiple times.
Interface learning curve and training: No one enjoys using solutions that are very cumbersome and difficult to use and confusing to learn. Ensure that the software finally selected for the marketing team provides a smaller learning curve and is easy to use. Try to explore free trials and watch demo videos to get the feel for a software before making any buys. Try to get full clarity on the support, assistance and training offered after the deployment of the solution and whether there are any conditions attached, like whether it is free or paid, response time, day and time restrictions, or service-level agreements (SLA).
Artificial intelligence (AI) will assist to create smarter marketing plans: With new marketing channels being searched every day and marketing strategies getting increasingly complex, marketers are facing quite a challenging to help and design a fool proof plan for the marketing campaigns. This is where AI can help. 95% of marketers have a big volume of demographic data, which even include location information, personal data and the interests of their audience which they can better leverage using AI and effectively targeting their audience. AI can assist marketers with profile building, audience segmentation, campaign modeling, and optimization, performance monitoring, and many more opportunities. Sellers have already begun adding AI capabilities to assist their marketing solutions.
