Marketing Plan

A marketing plan describes your product in detail, as well as how it will be sold to markets that will best use it and that you can best reach. A marketing plan identifies the key demographics your product or service will appeal to--the process of discovering this target demographic forces internal marketing people to look outward and examine the audience their message is intended to reach.

A good marketing plan will not only help a marketing staff determine who it is they are trying to reach and sell to, but also how best to reach said audience and to what that audience responds.

In this way a marketing plan can prevent "buck shot" marketing where a number of methods and sources are tried to see what works. Marketing plans prevent this waste of marketing dollars and narrows the scope of where marketing dollars are spent.

A marketing plan should be developed when a business first starts as part of its business plan, and it should be updated at least twice a year.

A new marketing plan might also be neccesary if your company is:

• Entering a new market
• Attempting to fix an old marketing problem with a new solution
• Marketing a new product
• Trying to market new improvements to an existing product

Most failures in marketing can be attributed to executive oversight, neglect, or lack of facts. A marketing plan consists of a total volume goal broken down by products, customer types, areas, and time periods - that is, how much of each product is to be sold to each type of customer in each territory over each month or quarter? How much profit is each product going to produce?

Good business organization calls for management to:

• Establish the business goal
• Analyze the market potential
• Plan a marketing program to get the job done
• Organize manpower, equipment, capital
• Train people to execute assignments
• Execute and administer the program
• Control goals, budgets, and performance as planned

Factors that must be consider in writing a marketing plan:

• What products and services are you selling?
• Where will you be located and why?
• How will you get or produce your products or services?
• What is the industry?
• What is the past, present and future outlook for the industry?
• Who will buy what you are selling?
• How many buyers are there?
• Why will they buy from you?
• How will you sell to them?
• How often will they buy from you?
• How much will they buy from you?
• How will they know about you?
• Where are your buyers located?
• Who are your competitors?
• What are your competitors selling and how are they selling?
• What will make you better then the competition?
• What suppliers or vendors will you need?