10 trends to inspire your marketing plan!

In conversations with our clients, the marketing plan comes up regularly. How do you approach writing it now? Where do you put the focus? What is important to capture and what is better to leave open? But also, how useful is it to make long-term plans? The future has limited predictability and one thing is certain: something always turns out differently than you expected or hoped.

Hearing all these stories, reminds me with a smile of my college days, when, as a marketing puppy, I set out to write my first marketing plan. Starting by Googling: how to write a marketing plan? Result: no shortage of roadmaps!

Now, a roadmap is a great start, but the real art is in fleshing it out. The marketing plan is only as strong as the expertise of the person who wrote it. And one thing is certain: becoming an expert is hard work, but staying an expert may be even more so. If you are willing to listen, there are plenty of signals from the market to "do something with." Think trends, customer feedback, monitors, internal developments, new regulations or actions from the competition.

I do not believe that you become and remain an expert by looking at the developments in your market from a single perspective. Tunnel vision and an overconfidence that your vision is the only correct one are then lurking. Opportunities and threats are revealed by looking at market signals from different perspectives. At Blauw we have arrived at a working method that focuses on different perspectives. We ourselves have been inspired by the ideas behind Design Thinking. This is how we like to help make developments our own, so that our clients can respond to them optimally.

Want to know more about trends?