In public services, the political component of the marketing environment has a major importance, as all decisions adopted within central administration influence both the objectives and measures implemented by units of local government and other public service providers. Any discontinuity in the activity of such entities might result in neglecting the real needs of citizens and slowing the reform process in the public sector. Therefore, all initiatives of public organizations must have a unitary goal and integrate harmoniously within a single process. A tool from the management-marketing literature that both contributes to this purpose and leads to an increased customer satisfaction and organizational performance is strategic marketing planning.

This paper presents, firstly, requirements and particularities of this process in the public sector, focusing on the need for bottom-up planning, meaning from the functional levels of public service organizations, to the corporate level, where strategic decisions are taken. To achieve this goal, there should be included in the planning process the clients and other audiences, which can provide useful information about the services they want, the quality or the accessibility thereof, and news about the services they need in the future.

There are also mentioned the factors that can influence the quality of strategic marketing planning in public services domain: the importance of marketing within the organization, marketing knowledge of employees in marketing departments and/or of management personnel, the efficiency of activities within the organization, and the manager’s marketing vision.

In the final part of the paper there are presented the stages of the conceptual model of strategic marketing planning in public services field: (1) accepting the idea of bottom-up planning, (2) avoid or eliminate discrepancies between measures taken at high levels and executions carried out at operational levels, (3) formation of work teams, setting tasks of members and appointment of a coordinator, (4) data collection, (5) establishment of strategic alternatives, based on information gathered from the market, (6) choosing the optimal strategy, which will lead to achieving the objectives set in an earlier phase and (7) establish and implement marketing programs.