The key to developing any successful marketing strategy lies in its planning. The plan needs to ensure that all tactical marketing programs support the organization's goals and objectives, as well as convey a consistent message to all of its key audiences.

PMG takes great care in the planning phase to ensure the strategy is in line with your organization’s overall company direction. We have developed and evolved a proprietary engagement methodology that ensures high-quality, fully customized marketing strategies for our clients.

PMG’s strategic market planning methodology includes the following seven phases:

Kick-off: We collect and document your organization’s idea for the plan, including vision, key objectives and goals, timelines, challenges and opportunities. In this phase, we also identify and refine key research questions, and define an effective story for the plan.

Discovery: Our approach invests heavily in the up-front understanding and identification of your organization’s internal and external informational stores ensuring that we have as much information as is available.

Key stakeholder interviews: This is extremely effective for getting an in-depth understanding of how key people inside (or outside) the organization feel toward different aspects of the strategy. Quite often, gathering input from stakeholders has significant positive impacts toward achieving buy-in from the organization as a whole.

Gap analysis: Once we get a full understanding of your organization’s knowledge base (through discovery as well as interviews with key stakeholders) we determine what informational gaps exist.

Strategic market research: We review all information currently available through discovery as well as key stakeholder interviews and build a research strategy that addresses any informational gaps that exist.

Drafting the plan: Upon completion of the research phase we write a plan that ties directly back to the requirements of the kick-off. Depending on the scope of the plan, deliverables typically include; customer strategy, product development, marketing communications, sales development, competition, customer service, and organizational strategy.

Review and Finalize: Finally, we review the plan with your organization to ensure it meets the requirements of the kick off phase and make any adjustments to the plan if needed.

Please click here for an illustration of PMG’s Strategic Market Planning Methodology.