A marketing plan is essential to any business whatever the size. It should emphasise the company’s strengths and weaknesses, set hard but achievable goals and define the future plans of the company and how they intend to change to meet those goals.
The marketing plan can be outlined in any way as long as it is clear and understandable. Though there are some basic areas that should be included:
Current Marketing Situation
This should always act as an introduction to the marketing plan and should look at the current marketing activities of the company. It should outline where and how the company derives its revenue and how much is spent on developing these revenue streams. This is crucial in ensuring that any marketing is cost effective. Mention should be made of any strengths and weaknesses of marketing your product and also where you stand against your competition, where do you have a competitive edge? Also in this section you should note down other factors that may have a bearing on your marketing such as geographical restrictions, distributor problems, local laws etc.
This section will act as a benchmark for future plans as it will give a measurement against the effectiveness of future marketing campaigns.
Target Market
It is absolutely essential to outline the target market defining them by factors such as age, gender, income or location. With many products this will not be an exact science but it will help in targeting the marketing campaign enough to ensure relevance and effectiveness. It is then important to ensure that this target market exists in your area.
You should really focus on what your company excels at whether it is price, quality or whatever your unique selling point may be. Focus on what you can do better, where you see your opportunities to improve and also what any stumbling blocks may be. By knowing the above factors, the company is better able to meet the goals of the marketing plan.
Goals
Now that you are aware of where you stand in the market you are in a position to set realistic achievable marketing goals. These goals should be specific and measurable. For example, an effective goal would be “a 10% increase in online sales,” not “better online visibility.” Some goals do not have a numerical measurement so you may say “develop 3 new products” rather than saying “develop new products”. These tangible goals give your company a defined path and an end result to aim for keeping the company focussed going forward.
Strategies
Once you have outlined each goal you then need to put in place a strategy for achieving that goal. Take each goal in turn and look at specific methods to achieve it such as newspaper promotions, Search Engine Optimisation etc. Make sure that the correlation between the goal and the tactic is defined for example if you are looking to increase online sales by 20% it would not be a good tactic to put an ad in the local paper.
Budget
Lastly, budget, all strategies have an associated cost. Keep a close eye on the marketing spend and also how much revenue the initiatives raise. If the marketing is effective and is showing a profit is it scalable? Can you justify spending more and would that see a similar increase in revenue? On the other hand if the spend is greater than the increase in profits then evaluate if you can clearly see that the strategy isn’t going to work either change it or stop it altogether. There are very few businessmen who haven’t had failures it’s just that the successful ones don’t throw good money after bad. They know when to cut their losses and move on.
