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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
RSS for Chari's articles - Visit Chari's website

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.

Click here to visit Chari's website
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Related Forum Posts
Marketing Strategies Marketing Strategies - Hello, I'm building a web development business plan and I'm starting to think about the marketing it. That is, in order to get my business up and running, I'm going to have to market myself. So I've got questions: What kind of agencies should I be looking for? What's the most cost effective way to marketing myself? How can I research marketing agents to see who's got the best success records? Does anybody have any good answers to these questions, or just addition advice?
Contest Contest - I really like Kai's suggestion on this one. And as you said, Evan, I feel a marketing/business competition would be much more beneficial than a SEO contest. SEO is extremely important, obviously, but it's something that can be outsourced to specialized SEO companies when starting a business. This isn't something extremely crucial that needs to be learned by an entrepreneur. However, writing a marketing/business plan is much more valuable in regards to learning. I'm sure that we can come up with a fair way to judge this type of competition. Unfortunately, only about, what, 5 people have respsonded to this thread, so it's rather difficult to get a feel for how everyone feels on this idea. Like Kai said, the business plan competition can be graded and evaluated just like it is in entrepreneurship colleges and classes; it is graded upon the viability of the idea, and more importantly, the depth and presentation of the actual plan. The judges can be made up by a select panel, or the community as a whole. Crap - I better get back to paying attention in class. Apparently the professor is calling on students to answer questions, and I'm not going to lie, I don't have a clue what is going on [except for the fact that the guy sitting besides me needs to brush his teeth]. Daggone entreneurship website! -Brandon
Re: Is A Business Plan A Waste Of Time? Re: Is A Business Plan A Waste Of Time? - We should have a poll here - who has a business plan and who doesn't. I think I contributed to this thread when it first started, but I agree with our recent contributors to the thread. A Business plan is simply a must. If you fail to plan... you plan to fail.
Re: Entrepreneur Competition Re: Entrepreneur Competition - [quote="Evan":onrvj2s5]It doesn't have to be a SEO competition. I liked the idea because it's easy to monitor who is winning and it can be tracked. I love the idea of doing something with a marketing / business plan - how can we track it so everyone can see who is winning? It should be something as easy as the search engine challenge.[/quote:onrvj2s5] Yes, I understand what your saying. How about this, at interim times, the contestants must upload a certain portion of their business plan to the website, where it is rated by the masses? The final product can be evaluated by a judge panel. 60% of the total score could be evaluated by the expert judges on the final product, and the remaining 40% could be rated by the community when the portions are uploaded to the website at the interim points. For example, on Feb 19th the contestants send in their Operations Plan, which will be scored by the community, followed by the rest of the plan at interim points. Once the final and complete business plan is sent in, the judge panel evaluates the finished product and gives their input. After the community and judges have finished marketing the plans, the winners are announced. Let me know your thoughts.
Re: HRPreneur Re: HRPreneur - Hi Joey - what does your marketing plan look like right now?


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