3 Elements of Successful Marketing Planning
Many small business owners and managers approach marketing in a shotgun approach. They throw money at different marketing activities and hope that something hits their target. In most of these cases, the results are poor. Owners and managers start blaming the radio stations, the ad agency, or even the marketing consultant who told them marketing was the most important activity of their business. They don’t understand the need to plan and map out their marketing efforts. Planning is key to reduce marketing costs and increase effectiveness.
Why create a marketing plan?
When an entrepreneur starts a business, they decide on the product or service, determine where they are going to get it, and plan on how they will sell it. Most owners and managers don’t realize that this planning actually coincides with marketing planning, but in order to be successful a conscious effort has to be applied to planning marketing activities that correlate to creating the product or service and selling it.
As we discussed in the marketing concept of consistency, marketing must be consistent. In order for marketing to be consistent, it must be planned. You must plan each step of your marketing just as you do a business plan. Most businesses have realized the need for a business plan. It helps to guide where the company is going, what is expected, and what they will do when they fail or succeed. These are the same reasons for creating a marketing plan. You must know what the goal of your marketing is, how much you are budgeting, the expected results, what to do if you exceed or fall short of your goals and expectations, and how to relate your marketing to the rest of your company.
What is the difference between planning and strategy?
Planning consists of your marketing roadmap. It tells you where you are starting, what’s your end point, and what the path is to get there. Your organization’s goals are included in planning. Budgets, analyses, and forecasts go into your planning.
Strategies are how you accomplish your goals and forecasts. In fact, strategies are part of the plan. Strategies tell you how you will get from the starting point to the end point and the specific way you will take your planned path. Strategies consist of the action steps that you will implement to obtain the forecasted results. To sum it up, planning creates the big picture and strategies make up the individual parts of the big picture.
What goes into marketing planning?
Marketing planning is typically conducted by your executive staff. The top-level managers usually provide input and feedback for the necessary goals and objectives to make your company successful and maintain a high level of growth. If you have a dedicated marketing department, they will ultimately be responsible for the marketing plan and its contained strategies, but the entire company must be involved in creating the basic outline of your marketing plan.
The marketing planning should begin with an overview of your business and what you intend on selling. When starting here, you should define your business specifically and break down your products and services so that everyone involved understands the basis for all of your marketing planning. Your marketing planning should consist of goals and objectives that relate to the goals and objectives of your business plan. From there, you should analyze your target market, competition, strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities (SWOT). You should also include what you are budgeting for this marketing plan so you can plan strategies correctly. Forecasting your expectations will give you benchmarks to evaluate your marketing planning, which leads to the need to determine how you will assess your results and what types of metrics need to be installed to successfully review your progress and success or failure.
Creating a roadmap is vital to being successful in business and marketing. Marketing can be expensive, wasteful, and ineffective if not properly planned. The old adage, “Failure to plan is planning to fail,” is very true in the realm of marketing. Even though many of today’s marketing activities include free and low-cost tools such as social networking, engaging marketing activities without planning can become expensive in regards to time spent.
Watch the video related to marketing plan
Marketing Strategy – Product Life Cycle
Help answer the question about marketing plan
How do you lay the ground work for a marketing plan?How do you lay the ground work for a marketing plan? I have a plan outlined and everything, what are some of the first steps that I should take for laying out the ground work. I need to present this to a company in order to get the job permenantly, so I kinda need help.
So if anyone can help that would be great.
About Author
Nate Stockard offers free consulting at freemarketinganswers.com, created by Stockard & Associates, Inc, a marketing and design firm in Houston, TX specializing in small business solutions.
His 13 years of marketing experience is also put on display at The Market Seedling, an informative source of information, articles, tips, and advice for small business owners and marketers.
i like this guy he seems really chilled out and fun
i learned sooo much more from watching this than in my class
There is no way you can afford me if you are a student.Good luck and honestly seek some help from your school not these yahoos.
Typically the Marketing VP or Manager or Director (senior marketer) is responsible for the marketing plan, although she/he also has input from other departments such as sales, operations, finance, product development. In a small business, one person can be responsible for developing the marketing plan.
All businesses need a marketing plan: it is the foundation for sales (without marketing planning, sales can be a scattered effort).
Yes an Investment Company needs a marketing plan: what's the market segmentation, target market, product differentiation, product life-cycle, promotion plan, pricing strategy, distribution program and so much more.
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Focus your marketing both online and offline –
For online insurance marketing – http://www.findlocalinsurance.com/insurance-marketing.html
For offline marketing, run newspaper and local tv ads.
Make it as easy as possible for management to get the gist of your ideas. Prepare an executive summary. This quickly overviews your major assessments, goals, and recommendations. This will help management find your plan's major points quickly. Then insert a table of contents for the plan itself.
You might want to look at a direct marketing blog that might have some ideas you can use: word-jobber.blogspot.com.
Objective should be based on increased revenue, increased memberships, increase awareness, increased plays, etc.
Your strategy should consist of methods you plan to implement to reach that objective.
Nice work. keep it up. jgfds
start with an executive summary.. you can find examples on google.. once you do your summary.. you will be able to write a business plan based on the facts of the summary.. the summary will be an excellent guide for you, provided you put in all the details and facts.. be absolutely honest.. don't cook the figures or the fact and don't fantasize.. use cold hard facts.. it will paint a picture of what you want to do.. the business plan will come together from the summary.. you are better off not using graphs.. examine each aspect of the product and its' marketability, then proceed with step one.. take as many steps as you need to get all the way from a to z.. be honest about the money and always, always maximize the expenses and minmize the profits.. this will tell you whether it can be successful.. if the conclusion is that it worth doing.. then write your marketing plan based on the steps in your business plan.. remember.. a marketing plan and advertising are two different things.. don't get them mixed together.. a good marketing plan will drive the advertising.. the marketing plan will spell out the road map and the advertising will provide the vehicle..good luck
One of the toughest marketing assignments is to write a marketing plan that is ambitious yet still attainable. By following the guide and using the template below, anyone will be able to write a top rate marketing plan.
Before starting on your written plan, you should answer the following questions:
1. What is the product or service you are selling?
2. Who is your market that will buy the product or service?
3. What need does the above market have for your product or service?
4. What is the basic message that you would like to send to this market in regards to your product?
5. What is the best way of getting in contact with your projected market? (i.e.- T.V, Radio, Print, Online)
After answering the above questions you will ready to start on your marketing plan. When answering question five keep in mind your budget limitations as you do not want to set yourself up for committing too much money to advertising.
Follow the template below using your answers to the above questions to guide you through.
Executive Summary
The Executive Summary can be taken straight from the business plan or it can be newly written for the marketing plan. Below is a suggested list of things to be included.
Description of the Company
The description of the company should include a brief summary of the company including when it was founded and some general details about your company. It should not be more than about 10 lines and should not go into too much detail about the companies mission or products and services as this comes later in the Executive Summary.
Mission Statement
This should not be anything new and should be taken directly from the Business Plan. Most companies have mission statements from day one and this should be included on all marketing plans.
Products and Services
The information in this category could vary depending on the purpose of the plan. If this is a company wide marketing plan then all products and services should be listed briefly giving a good description of what each of them can provide. If this marketing plan were specific to a product, then a description in more detail would better suit the marketing plan.
Financial Feasibility
This section should also come straight from the business plan and give a brief description of the financial outlook of the company and what effects may arise if the marketing is not successful. You should not discuss financial plans for the marketing program in this section of the document.
Strategic Focus and Plan
Mission/ Vision
Not to be confused with the Company Mission, this statement is what you would like to get out of the marketing plan. If this is a marketing plan for a single product, then this statement should state what your company expects out of the product and they plan to achieve this.
Objectives
The objectives of the marketing for the particular product, service or company should be outlined in this section. If one of the objectives is to make 50,000 people aware of your new product then this is something that should be included in your objectives. You can also include company objectives in this section if they are directly affected by your marketing. For instance, if your goal is to make one million dollars in sales the first year, then this is an objective that comes in direct contact with the marketing program.
Competitive Environment
Here is where you need to outline the competitive environment of your market. This would include any competitors whether they are in direct or indirect competition.
Situation Analysis
There are two effective marketing tools that can be used in a situation analysis purpose. The SWOT analysis and the BCG Dot Matrix. (Please refer to article on Effective marketing tools for beginners if you are unsure about these two tools).
For an in-depth analysis include both the SWOT Analysis and the BCG Dot Matrix in the Situation analysis. These diagrams can compare your products to your competitors and help you to determine the best approach for winning your section of the market.
Competitive Analysis
This section differs from the competitive environment as it describes more in-depth how you plan to effectively market against the competition. This section should outline direct competition's weaknesses and how you plan to capitalize on these weaknesses to grab the market share.
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Market Product Focus
Marketing Objectives
These objectives can work in two different ways depending on what type of marketing plan you are writing. If you are writing a company wide marketing plan, then this section would outline all of the objectives you wish to attain through your marketing program. They should be listed in a number format along with a detailed description of how you wish to accomplish these objectives.
If the plan were being created on an individual product/service basis then the marketing objectives would be what the company expects to gain from this product/service. Once again, objectives should be listed in a number format with a detailed description of how this products/services marketing will tie in with the marketing of the program and how this will be accomplished.
Target Markets
This section will define in detail the market in which you will be marketing your product. It should be described in detail, and should outline how you come to the conclusion that this is the right market for your product/service. You should also state why this market is going to use your product and show what research has been conducted to come to this conclusion.
Marketing Program
Product Strategy
The product strategy should give a detailed description of what your product(s) are and how they are going to benefit your company. You describe which products you think will be most popular and describe which ones you want to be the most popular (The BCG Dot Matrix is very good in helping you determine this). If you are doing an individual product marketing plan, then this section would describe in detail what your product is and what strategies you have to make it beat out your competitors.
Price Strategy
The price strategy is where you will describe your key pricing issues. It is a good idea to state whether you are taking the high cost-low turnover method or the low cost/high turnover method. If you think your key selling point is going to be the price, then explain that here. If you are taking the low cost/high turnover approach then explain how your company will succeed with the low profit-margin on each product. Be sure to include rough estimates of profit-margins, manufacturing costs and end consumer prices.
Promotion Strategy
The promotion strategy is one of the most important sections of the marketing plan. This is where it can make or break a marketing program. This section should include advertising strategies you plan to engage in, any marketing strategies for your products such as attending trade shows, conferences etc. Also you should explain what message you want to promote in all of the items mentioned above. You should send the same message through all channels of communication.
Just Do It
Now that you have your plan, go out and make it real. There is no use spending months in analysis paralysis trying to write a perfect plan. Rather, have a bias towards action and go get started NOW.
Hope this helps.
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Mplans.com http://www.mplans.com actually have free marketing plans as well as paid marketing plans. You may want to check if you can use their free marketing plans, giving them the proper credit of course
http://mplans.com/sample_marketing_plans/
nice.. better then other things….
It was quite helpful, thanks.
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