Marketing Planning Software
Planning successful marketing campaigns and strategies requires more than just spreadsheets and presentations. Having an extensive planning software solution that effectively aligns your plan and your marketing strategy can provide a competitive edge to small business owners like you when you’re up against more established competitors.
As a small business owner who doesn’t necessarily employ dedicated seasoned sales teams, you need a software solution that can help you connect your corporate strategy and goals with your marketing plans. While the idea seems simple enough, you need to understand that marketing plans, along with marketing strategies, are constantly evolving. You need to keep that in mind when you’re attempting to develop a marketing plan for your business.
Marketing planning software solutions allow you to develop great marketing programs and strategies without ever losing sight of your company goals and objectives. Through its many different features and functions, you and your sales/marketing team will be able to deliver a clear and concise marketing message in front of your target audience and develop a marketing plan that will eventually help you close more sales.
Aha! provides a fully-featured marketing planner and product management solution that enables users to easily create visual marketing roadmaps.
Marketing planning software solutions come in many different forms. Some are offered as part of a more extensive project management platform, while others are integrated with some types of marketing analytics solutions. In some cases, marketing planning solutions are referred to as road mapping, which simply means the function enables businesses to easily trace their product portfolio and project development process from start to finish using visual roadmaps. This is actually one of the key functions of a planning software solution.
Marketing planning software solutions are also mostly cloud-hosted or offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Given that they are often incorporated into a marketing performance management solution or project management tool, you might have to consider looking into products belonging to these categories to find a fully-featured, more flexible marketing planner for your business.
Examples of marketing planning software include Husky Marketing Planner, Hive9 and Aha! roadmap software. These products have a wide variety of offerings in terms of features and capabilities, all focusing on helping users to streamline the planning and creation of marketing campaigns, measure their efficacy and predict trends and revenue based on marketing strategies.
Aha!, more specifically, is a cloud-based platform marketed as a project management solution for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as large enterprises. The solution serves a variety of industries, including finance, energy, education, medical, government, legal, non-profit organizations, marketing and more. It offers different features and tools such as Kanban boards, collaboration tools, task management, product roadmaps as well as reporting and analytics tools.
Some of the key features you might find in most marketing planning software solutions include visual reporting and detailed charts, real-time goal tracking, community engagement tools, predictive analytics, collaborative tools, performance management, data management, campaign management and strategy and planning management. These are just some of the functionalities and tools that can help improve your marketing strategies and bring your message in front of the right people.
Predictive analytics, for example, can help your marketers and marketing team come up with new effective marketing campaigns and strategies based on trends and how your leads connect to revenue. With the data that can be obtained from marketing planning software, an effective and potentially successful marketing plan should be easy to create.
The real-time goals tracking feature will help make sure that when you develop a marketing plan, it has a clear goal in it that you can keep track constantly and in real-time. You can identify which activity will help your marketing team reach which goal before it’s too late to make any kind of changes to the different aspects of your plan.
The performance management functions will also enable you to easily rank the overall performance of your marketing campaigns, strategies and programs based on return on investment (ROI), revenue, specific goals, and other categories.
Planning is a crucial step in any endeavor, whether it’s product development, project management or marketing. Planning allows for better efficiency, security and more profits for businesses. No great marketing programs and campaigns are ever successful without proper planning.
As businesses operate in increasingly complex and constantly evolving markets, meeting the ever-changing difficulties that come with it is undoubtedly a serious challenge for most organizations. Marketing planning software is something that is specifically designed to help businesses navigate the complexities of today’s markets, making sure your message is brought in front of the right people—the consumers you’re trying to market your products and/or services to.
Project managers will benefit greatly from a good marketing planing solution as it helps them steer their strategies and campaigns to coincide with both marketing and corporate goals. These solutions also allow users to gain valuable insights into their target market and customers. The data they collect can then be leveraged to identify and map out key strategic actions, develop a marketing plan and determine how goals and objectives can be achieved using that plan.
Marketing planning software is a great marketing solution for small and mid-sized businesses and even large enterprises. It is especially useful and provides a serious competitive edge to small businesses with no dedicated marketing team. Additionally, if you’re a company that doesn’t rely on seasoned sales teams to market your products and/or services, having a good planning software solution can really do wonders for your marketing strategies in terms of effectiveness and results.
The bottom line is marketing planning software can only benefit your business in the long run. If you’re a startup or a small company with limited resources, having a tool that can help bridge the gap between achieving your goals and coming up with a surefire marketing plan to help grow your business is especially valuable.
