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What is a marketing plan?

Written by: Chari Darneal

Article Overview: A marketing plan is a plan for how you will market your service/product or introduce a new service/product into your market niche. Use this article to find out what to include in your marketing plan.

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What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a plan for how you will market your service/product or introduce a new service/product into your market niche. The plan consists of:

Outline or Table of Contents
Executive Summary
Situation Analysis
Objectives
Strategies
Tactics
Budget
Outline or Table of Contents
This page provides the organization for the plan. Remember to include page numbers as it will help during meetings or conversations to reference the exact pages.

Executive Summary
This page offers you a place for grounding the reader. This is a one page summary of the circumstances and principle recommendations within the plan. This will help the reader to locate where they may find further information of a particular subject.

Situation Analysis
This sections describes your current situation. This includes an explanation of past sales, competitors, recent sales, and profit results. The strengths and weaknesses in relationship to competitors also appears here. Finally, there should be a projection of the future for the particular industry; this involves a discussion of opportunities and potential threats.

Objectives
This area addresses the purpose for the marketing plan: is it to launch a new service/product or line of services/products, to boost revenue from existing services/products, or to implement new ways of marketing your services/products?

Each objective is quantified and has a limited time frame. This helps to measure the goals and their success. This also aids in comparing one marketing plan with another previous plan.

Strategies
Strategies help you accomplish goals. These are methods that can be used to get from point A to point B. Strategies are best used when they can be broken down to apply to other areas; for example, increasing sales through increasing your market share.

Strategies will also come in handy if your market changes. This will prevent your business from losing out on opportunities.

Tactics
Tactics are ways for following through with strategies. These are specific actions that will accomplish the goals of your business. In other words, tactics are a tangible fulfillment of a marketing vision, objective or strategy. For example, a commercial is the tactic for increasing exposure.

Budget
The budget is where you total all the costs of your tactics.

If your projected costs are more than your working capital or company worth, then prioritize the objectives, goals, strategies and tactics, also known as a revenue projection. Here you subtract the cost of goods for tactic A from the projected additional revenue using tactic A. The total is your gross additional revenue. Subtract the cost of tactic A from the gross. The remainder is the net revenue. For example:

Projected additional revenue using tactic A: $ 10,000
Cost of additional goods sold: 6,000
Gross additional revenue: $ 4,000
Cost of tactic A (an ad): 3,000
Net revenue: $ 1,000

After making such projections for each tactic, you will have a better understanding as to which would be most profitable or too risky.

In it’s entirety, the plan is a projected profit-loss statement. The profit side consists of the number of new services/products sold and the average net profit. The loss side is the cost of production, marketing, and distribution.

As overwhelming as it may seem to develop and customize a marketing plan for your business, keep this one fact in mind: If you plan to spend no money or time on marketing, then you lose profit share and potentially face an unstable future.

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About the Author: Chari Darneal
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Chari Darneal is currently Vice-President and a Senior Business Coach of BusinessCoach.com. Chari is a passionate expert of organizational design, corporate culture, employee satisfaction, strategic planning, leadership and teambuilding. Chari coaches clients, provides training and co-develops other business coaches for the organization. Chari co-created the redesigned version of the workbook that BusinessCoach.com uses with their clients: The Complete Business Coaching Workbook: Valuable Tools for Creating Success & Fun in Business. She is also an experienced keynote speaker, speaking before private and public organizations of groups as small as 5 and as large as 2500. In addition to her responsibilities as the Senior Business Coach, Mrs. Darneal participates in on-going training and development to further her knowledge of the ever changing business world. Education B.S. Communications, Emphasis in Organizational Communication University of California, Davis Affiliations Chari is currently and active participant of the Sacramento Area Commerce and Trade Organization and the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches.

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