a goal without a plan is just a wish - motivational handwriting on a napkin with a cup of coffee
It is fascinating how much planning we need not only in our professional but also in our personal life.
Planning
Some households are very organised and even put the weekly family dinner menu together in advance, so they can arrange the food shopping accordingly and I have to say…. wow! Love it, because I am sure these families are not standing in the front of the fridge at 6pm on a Tuesday evening, scratching their heads what to serve within about 10 minutes.
Two recent 2017 planning sessions at our Happy HQ (involving some very naughty cakes and donuts….but these are parts of the motivation, right?) made me think more about planning. Believe it or not we don’t just help our clients with their marketing strategies, but as a company we need to think about our own overall direction to guide us in our daily business as well as in our short-term and long-term decisions.
We all want to be more successful and planning the marketing for our organisation is a key factor in this. Far too many companies lose focus about their own (marketing) planning as it serves internal use instead of external one, but without it how can the team get to the chosen destination?
Planning informs, supports, sets objectives and strategies. There are some key questions we all need to answer:
Where we are exactly now?
Where do we want to get to?
How are we going to get there?
A good plan will drive resources and valuable funds towards a desired direction. It will also prevent us from making expensive mistakes.
We all live in a very fast-moving world therefore we need to accept the fact that our plans need to be solid, but they can’t be completely set and planning itself can’t be a one-time procedure either, needs to be an ongoing process, something which can be revisited time to time and can be adjusted following the market changes around us
So why wait? How about an early New Year’s Eve resolution and plan now for 2017?
Krisztina Szigeti is an Account Manager and creative thinker at Happy Creative, a strategic marketing and branding agency based in Blackpool, Lancashire.
