Excel in marketing planning - better without!

Once again the Excel sheet with the marketing plan is shot to pieces, tables with several sales partners cannot be integrated, cross-references with relevant data have been deleted and the master plan has not been up-to-date for a long time! Sometimes there are just a few too many bugs and yet in many companies you still find the good old Excel sheet - quarterly or annual plans including campaigns extended with sheets on paid search, social media, content marketing and product marketing plans.


Draw up an annual plan, set a budget and you're done - marketing planning is no longer that simple. If you want to keep an eye on target groups, KPIs and channels, you have to break new ground. And at the latest when several people have to work with the Excel list, which is perhaps even sent to different sales partners in order to merge them again afterwards, even the best marketers capitulate.
Marketing management portals provide more flexibility thanks to automation and collaboration and make marketeers sit up and take notice. This is because flexibility concerns both the creation of integrated marketing plans by the group and the stores/dealers as well as the quick adaptation based on valid data.


How is this achieved? By configuring highly complex marketing plans in such a way that they can be read and used by each individual user without losing any information or data depth.


Want an example?
The marketing plan of a company with a decentralised sales structure consists of a national plan, many regional plans and has integrated campaign proposals for various sales partners. The individual sales partner, however, has "only" a limited view of the whole according to his rights, but can edit his entries and measures as well as take over suggestions. At the same time, he sees predefined inline reports and plans his own campaigns accordingly. So he has a complete but uncomplicated tool for marketing planning.

In return, the marketing centre receives all planned or completed advertising measures of the individual sales partners and can thus really condense all information in a meaningful way. Analysis and visibility are very possible thanks to coherent, visually compelling and interactive insights in the dashboard. In this way, central marketing can ensure the effectiveness of measures - without loss of time, errors and frustration.

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