What is a Marketing Plan?
Marketing is all about matching the features and benefits your products and services can provide with specific customers and then telling those customers why they should buy them. Your marketing plan details how to do this. A Marketing Plan is a document that complements your business plan and brings together all your market research so you can determine exactly where your business is headed and how you’re going to get there.
Your plan must include:
- Goals.
- Details of the current market.
- A complete analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. (SWOT analysis.)
- Your plans to achieve your goals.
The plan must be flexible and able to adapt to meet changing market conditions.
Benefits of a Marketing Plan
Having a marketing plan will help you focus on your target market and find out if there are gaps in the market that open up new opportunities. Your marketing plan will also give you something to measure your progress. This can highlight the strategies that work for you and the ones that don’t.
A good marketing plan will also benefit you in that it gives your outside financiers the confidence that you know your market and know how to achieve your goals.
A good marketing plan will take care of getting new leads and creating new networking opportunities for your business. The bottom line means that your plan will define your business, as well as your clients and their future plans.
What is a good marketing plan?
A good marketing plan is really a blueprint for the action your company should take to achieve certain goals. It will identify the most profitable ways to perform certain functions and should show the best way to present your business to your target audience.
A good marketing plan will save you money by eliminating unnecessary spending, while also opening up new marketing opportunities. A good plan will work for your business to make sure that what you do fits within your budget and that your marketing push reaches your target audience.
Essentially it will keep all your activities and your budgets under control. If you don’t have a good marketing plan, you may not be taking full advantage of all the ways to reach your target audience. This will result in decreased sales.
A Marketing Plan must Reach People
Your marketing plan will provide you with a clue on which your business needs to run. It is similar to a flight plan for pilots. Your flight plan tells you the direction your plane is going to fly, where you are starting from, and the path you need to take to get to your destination.
A sports coach will have a game plan that lays out how the team will play on that particular day. The coach will work on strategies that will effectively frustrate and win over the competition so they can emerge victorious.
Your marketing plan should be designed in a similar way.
- It has to be built with an end result in mind.
- It must be tailored to the specific markets you are targeting, as well as the people in those markets.
- You have to be flexible to meet the needs of the people in the markets because those needs are constantly changing.
- You need to focus on people rather than products.
Always remember to develop a marketing plan designed specifically to reach people.
