Online marketing planning - why? how? when?

Following on from my post on online marketing strategies, I thought I'd take some time to write a bit more about planning and why it is so important for businesses, especially during a recession when marketing budgets shrink every day.
This post was actually inspired to me by a good article in Marketing Week, and it made me think more about what I do on a daily basis.

Why plan?
First of all, I'll admit that to many marketers, planning is not the most exciting thing in the world. It is however a necessary evil and I actually quite enjoy this exercise as it allows me to focus my efforts and be more effective.
If you have a business, planning should be on your priority list as it will enable you to allocate your resources (human and financial) based on specific objectives set at the beginning on the year.
It will also help you decide which online marketing channels to use to achieve your targets.

Where to start?
I guess each marketer will have his/her own way of planning their online marketing activities, but I'll give you some examples of how I do it as it may help if you have no idea where to start.

1. Set clear online marketing objectives at the beginning of the year using overall business objectives as a starting point eg: if the aim of the business is to grow its customer base by 10% for the year, then an online marketing objective could be to increase online sales. The targets set will vary according to your business model, but remember that you need to set realistic expectations
   
2. Design your online marketing strategy - Now that you have targets, how do you achieve them? the role of the strategy is to identify the tools/marketing channels you're going to use to get results. Make sure to use tools that are suited to your target audience and always refer to your budget when doing so; there is no point including TV adverts in your strategy if you know you don't have a budget for it
   Once you have chosen the tools, set some timelines against them so that you know what needs to be done, when, and what resources will be required.
   
3. Create project plans for each specific task - Each part of your strategy can be individually turned into a specific project which needs planning. Include budget, resources needed, deliverables and objectives into your project plan as you may need to communicate details internally if you work for a large organisation. The individual plans will help you have a more detailed view of each activity.
4. Implement your strategy - Now that all the planning is done, all you need to do is start implementing your changes. it is sometimes useful to have an implementation plan at hand so that each person involved in the project knows which tasks have been assigned to them.
5. Measure and report - I know I talk about this pretty much every week, but make sure you measure the performance of your projects and report on them so that you know what's working, what's not working and how to improve in the future.

As my career in online marketing progresses, I find myself more involved in strategic marketing/planning and less with operational marketing, but this is something that I find fascinating. Granted, some of my colleagues will hate me for all my excel spreadsheets and the amount of documentation I produce for each project, but I don't think there's a better way to do it for now.
Actually, I'm considering using some online project management software like Huddle to try and get other people involved with my work so I'll let you know how that goes.

I hope the advice above can help some of you get a better understanding of planning, but as usual if you have questions or would like to see some templates, feel free to write!
Have a great sunny weekend if you're in London!