Are you familiar with marketing plans? Are you aware of its significance to your company?

Regardless of how big or small the company is, marketing plan is needed to become successful. What is marketing plan? How vital is it in the success of companies? Whether you are starting a small or large company, you need it to guide you in your daily operation.

Significance of marketing plan:

It is a detailed analysis of the internal components of a business enterprise. It presents an overview of the external forces which affect the company and ways of dealing with them. It sets goals to guide the firm in whatever direction it undertakes. It provides a benchmark for achieving future marketing incentives. It offers strategies on how to launch a new product or service. It presents ways on how to address or how to fix a problem. It ensures that all your resources are properly utilized and properly targeted.

As a whole, marketing plan is a platform that establishes where you want to go, what you want to be and what road you like to thread.

When formulating your own marketing proposal, always remember to consider the current business scenario, your goals and strategies and your target market. It should be logical, goal-oriented and realistic. More so, you need to consider the elements of marketing mix such as the product, packaging and methods of distribution. You need to consider the five parts of a marketing plan such as:

Purpose/Mission – You have to explain the purpose of formulating your marketing plan. It should be concise and clearly worded for everyone to understand. To have an excellent mission statement, it should answer the following questions like: What services does the company provide? What is your business creed? What is your standard of doing business? What types of products you sell? Why are you in business?
Strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis – As the phrase implies, you need to provide information of your strengths, weakness and the threats.
Marketing objectives – This part is crucial and important in the development and marketing of products and services. In this part, you need to identify your financial objectives, overall marketing objectives and marketing tactics.
Strategic marketing programs – It is the longest portion of the document because it details the strategies you need to implement to achieve a designated marketing goal. In this part, you need to consider the product, price, promotion and place.
Budget analysis and implementation – It is the final section of the document which analyzes and scrutinizes the company’s financial ability to carry out its marketing proposals. It defines the extent and the impact of marketing budget in the realization of the company’s projected plans. It is a precursor to the actual launching of products and services. It presents a projection of the potential success of the plan. It also shows time lines and organizes schedules.

With the steps and suggestions mentioned beforehand, you can now formulate your own marketing plan.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to ensure that your resources are properly targeted to achieve the required objective. If you read my earlier articles, it’s about identifying where you are now, establishing where you want to be and the road you need to take to get there.

The format of any marketing plan will follow roughly the same structure which should be logical, starting with an in depth look at the current position, the setting of the overall goal and the strategies which will be employed to achieve that goal. It will go on to look at the specific tactics that will be used and this will be at a micro level. By this I mean that consideration will have to be given to the individual elements of the marketing mix which will involve a minute examination of the product itself, the packaging, methods of distribution etc.

All this will come about as a result of the careful planning process. What is the target market, how will it be reached, what “angle” could be used.

Objectives

I covered mission statements in an earlier article but simply put, this is a statement of what the company is trying to achieve, its raison d’être and should provide the organisation with a sense of purpose and direction. Before these can be properly established, certain agreements will have to be made following on from the marketing audit and SWOT analysis, they will involve collating all the information and coming up with a set of criteria. In larger companies many people may have input into the plan and they could have conflicting views about what it is that competitors may do, they may be more bullish about the trading position and all these views need to be formulated into a consensus.

The plan does need to challenge people but it also needs to be realistic and achievable; there is no point planning your entire business on the basis of a 10% market share if you are only likely to get 1%. Critical analysis at this point is vital; assumptions should be challenged to ensure that everyone in the process is comfortable that what is being suggested is “doable” even if it will take some effort to get there. Objectives should focus on the market or markets in which the organisation trades and the products that are available to service that market.

You will, I am sure, have heard many times that objectives should be SMART; they must be specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and timely. So “we want to be the best supplier of product X” is not a proper objective. Sales of product X to increase by 10% on last year over the course of the next trading year however, is all of those things; it’s very specific, there is a measure, it’s not unreasonable on the face of it so it is a realistic goal and it has a time span.

Summary

Using the quadrant example so loved by marketers again, we are looking here at spelling out what is required for;

Existing products in existing markets New products in existing markets Existing products in new markets New products in new markets

Conveniently they probably rank from 1 to 4 in the degree of difficulty and effort that will be needed to achieve the objective.

Planning is an integral part of all things that people do. It serves as a guide for the goal to be achieved. With that being said, it is no different from marketing. Marketing plan should be existent in order for a company to be successful. It serves as an instruction manual on what to do so that things would not deviate. A good marketing plan is structured in a way that it is very clear on its goal. It must also be realistic on its target. Therefore, the goal should be attainable at the current standards.

A business with a great promotion plan is a business that is destined for greatness. Fortune 500 companies have a great marketing diagram that it is best for small or medium scale business to emulate. Most people would frown on this idea because it is very difficult to copy fortune 500 companies because they have a big budget compared to small scale businesses. That is a very wrong notion because there are some ways to level the competition. One avenue of doing it is maximizing the power of the internet. On the World Wide Web, everything is equal. With that being pointed out, the plan must be centered on the use of the internet. A lot of people would say that the internet is the greatest equalizer when it comes to doing business. The reason for that is because it is easy to set up and plus it is relatively cheap. Small scale business would love to take that equalizer so that they would be at par with the big companies.

A plan centered in maximizing the use of the internet, is a perfect idea for marketing. In this way it would give importance on the millions of users who are ready to be tapped and be turned into customers. You probably most remember that almost all people of the world have already access to the internet. It would be safe to say that there are billions of people that have gained access to the internet. For a small or medium scale business, capturing even a small fraction of that market would make them very happy people.

In contrast, the plan without integrating the use of internet would surely have a hard time positioning in the global market. It would also be safe to say that if this plan is followed, this would end up failing. This kind of plan for marketing is not structured well and it is bound to fail.

The marketing setting of today is much different from the marketing setting of 5 years ago because there are a lot of changes in terms of doing business. You must not forget that in making a sound marketing strategy, you must be sensitive of the change that is happening around.