Marketing Plan

Marketing is an important component of a successful business venture. Here we focus on the concept of a "marketing plan" and how to put together a successful plan.

What is a Marketing Plan?

A Marketing Plan is a document that presents your resources and limitations, your objectives, your planned activities, your expected results, and – often overlooked – your correction mechanisms if things don’t go the way you originally planned.

A written Marketing Plan can be short or long; it can be fancy or plain; it can be detailed and complex or a simple outline. The key is that a Marketing Plan must be clear and focus on building long-term sales/profits.

A Marketing Plan builds off the Business Plan – but it’s not the same thing. A Marketing Plan describes how you plan to identify potential customers, plan to get new customers and plan to keep your current customers. A Marketing Plan expands on the part of the Business Plan that talks about marketing/sales.

Why You Need a Marketing Plan?

You need a Marketing Plan to help you decide what to sell and how to sell it. A Marketing Plan describes what you are trying to do and how you do it.

There’s lots of evidence that a good Marketing Plan helps businesses.

The most obvious evidence is that almost every successful big business has a written Marketing Plan. People who run successful businesses must always minimize costs. Yet most business people in big firms also develop Marketing Plans, so they must believe that a Marketing Plan is cost effective and essential to their potential success. Said another way, if most firms develop written Marketing Plans, you should too.

Executive Summary

Your Marketing Plan should have a summary that repeats the main points of the Plan. Often, people are busy and don’t want to read an entire Marketing Plan, so this Executive Summary gives them a quick overview.

Current Strengths/Weaknesses

This is a list – often in “bullet” form, not long descriptions – that describes the internal parts of your business. In other words, what do you have to work with that will allow you to be successful in marketing your product or service? These are your Strengths. Also, what are the negative things that will get in the way of your success? These are your weaknesses.

This is a list – often in “ bullet” form, not long descriptions – that describes the external environment surrounding your business. In other words, what’s going on outside your business that could impact it? Since you need to understand your internal strength/weaknesses, it follows that you also need to understand the external conditions outside your business.

Strategies describe what you plan to do. Strategies contain the overall blueprint for your marketing Plan. Perhaps surprisingly, strategies do not say how you’re going to do things.

Since there at a high level, you’ll probably only have a few marketing strategies.

Some Examples of Strategies:

We plan on being the lowest priced seller in our area (most common)
We plan on being the highest priced competitor in our class.
We plan on never to give discounts since discounts will cheapen image.
We plan to market via distributors.
We plan to market only with our own sales force and never use distributors.
We plan to rely heavily on advertising to promote our product or service.
We plan never to advertise, but rely solely on word-of- mouth to build our reputation.
We plan to appeal to a broad customer base, or to an exclusive customer base, or to a very specific group of customers.

Marketing Goals/Objectives

These are the targets that you are shooting for. The best goals/objectives are numerical because they can be measured. While “customer satisfaction” and “morale” are important, you need to be able to measure them – otherwise it’s just someone’s guess if things are getting better or worse. Hoping that your customers are “satisfied” is not good enough. You need some way to measure their increasing satisfaction. A simple way to measure satisfaction could be to count repeat customers: how many times do the customers come back to you.

Marketing Tactics

Tactics explain how you’re going to market. Tactics flow directly from strategy. So in this section, you describe your marketing details; we plan to advertise every week on five radio stations; we plan to have three sales events every month; we plan for all of our packaging to have similar colors, designs, etc; we plan on packaging in four sizes; we plan on using a (specific) celebrity to promote our products and pay them a percent of increased sales; we plan on introducing our products at the next trade show, etc.

Marketing Budget

As with all budgets, the marketing budget is a detailed spending plan for the planning period. Usually budgets cover one year in great detail, and summarize numbers for later years. The marketing budget should be in the same format as the other budgets for your business.

Marketing Controls

Most businesses have financial controls, such as cash in the bank, which they use to monitor spending levels. Marketing Controls relate to the tactics of the Marketing Plan. The controls monitor what is happening in the business in relation to the marketing goals/objectives. For example,: if your firm has a goal on increasing sales by 3% for the year, you need a system that measures sales. You need to relate actual results to planned results. This is the first step in a good control system – you must be able to get numbers to make comparisons.

Online Resources

Sample Marketing Plans: www.mplans.com