Marketing Plan

How to Develop a Marketing Plan

The marketing plan is a document, a crucial part of the crew’s strategic amplification plan, in which market goals are set and methods for their achievement are indicated.

The strategic marketing plan, developed for 3 to 5 years, contains long-term goals and defining strategies with an indication of the resources needed to implement them. It is clarified and revised annually, on its basis an annual plan is drawn up. It describes the current situation, the objectives of the activity in the market, strategies for the current year. It includes a program of activities, resource, including financial support.

Content of the Marketing Plan

The marketing plan has a fairly clear and logically structured structure. Its amplification is a sprout of more than one day. It takes a lot of time to collect detailed information about consumers, to study the features of the market conditions, to determine the competitive advantages of the goods and much more. This means that you need to sprout and summarize many different facts, consider not one alternative to business amplification. On average, the preparation of a quality marketing plan can take (depending on the size of the business and the number of product groups in the crew’s portfolio) from 1-3 months. And if marketing planning deals with solving current issues simultaneously, then this sprout will take at least 2-4 months. 50% of this time will be required for information gathering, 40% for analysis and consideration of alternatives, and only 10% for compiling the one-page marketing plan itself.

Why Any Crew Needs It

The crew’s marketing plan is the key to planning activities, along with the business plan, budget, production, and sales. The annual plan of the enterprise, accordingly, establishes the general objectives of the enterprise; however, for work in a competitive environment, the efforts in the market are the main function of the enterprise. In this regard, the marketing plan dominates in importance over other sections of the general plan, because:

• the target indicators of the proposal have a direct impact on the indicators of other sections of the annual plan;
• decisions recorded in the simple marketing plan determine what exactly the enterprise will produce, at what price, where to sell, and how to advertise.

It serves as a key guide for the work of staff engaged in selling activities of the firm. It is similar to the traveler’s roster, which is both a map and a compass. It fixes the current position (location) of the enterprise, the traffic vectors, the target points, and, most crucially, a summary of the actions that the firm should take to get to the targeted points. To find out why you need this document, you need to consider the poses that arise in the enterprise in its absence, as well as the results that the crew receives after its amplification.

If it is not developed, it can have several consequences.

• The crew develops spontaneously, from luck to failure;
• Possible schemes, existing amplification options are constantly in conflict. As a cause, the dispersion of forces, means, the loss of time takes place;
• The target audience is not defined, the discrepancies in its estimates from time to time lead to the poses described in the paragraph above;
• The enterprise randomly purchases products, tries to diversify the product offered at a time when concentration on the main product offer is required.

Thus, the objectives of this document are:

• systematization, a formal description of the ideas of the crew’s managers, reporting them to employees;
• setting goals, ensuring control over their achievement;
• concentration and reasonable distribution of the firm’s resources.

The Sprout of Developing a Plan

It is reasonable to propose the following sequential sprout. As a result, the marketing plan of the firm is formulated. The sprout consists of six mandatory steps:

• Define the mission of the enterprise;
• SWOT analysis;
• Defining the goals and strategy of the organization as a whole;
• Determination of tasks and a program of actions for their implementation;
• Drawing up a proposal and monitoring its implementation;
• Drafting budget.

Let’s consider these steps in detail

• At the stage of mission description, the appointment of all subsequent efforts of the crew is determined.
• The SWOT analysis provides a clear comprehension of where the crew is and what it looks like.
• The third section is the basis for developing a specific program of selling activities. This stage includes forecasting the amplification of target markets (segments), the dynamics of macro-and microeconomic sprouts, as well as the resource capabilities of the enterprise. On the basis of all of the above, the main objectives of the activity are formulated, structured as a goal tree. The global corporate goal is located at its top.
• At the fourth stage, the tasks of the selling department are determined within the framework of the general plan of the enterprise, and an action program is developed to address these tasks. At this stage, the strategic directions of the firm’s activities are specified by planning tactical measures. For each target market segment, the corresponding goods (services) of the required quality and quantity, their prices, sales locations, and tactics of their promotion to the consumer should be planned.
• The fifth stage allows us to get the document itself, with the definition of the values of the parameters, which will subsequently monitor the implementation of the described actions.
• The budget is a section that reflects the planned amounts of revenues, costs, and profits. The amount of income is justified by the forecasted sales volume in value terms. Costs are defined as the sum of all types of expenses. The approved budget is the basis for ensuring the production of goods and advertising activities.

Structurally, the plan consists of the following sections of the document:

• main results of activities for the previous period;
• analysis and forecast of the amplification of the economy and the target market;
• nominated goals mainly in quantitative terms, with emphasis on the main objective;
• strategies of the crew’s behavior on market segments;
• actions of commodity, price, and communication policies with an indication of responsible executors and terms of implementation;
• budget.

In literature, there is a description of the sprout of developing this document consisting of more items. However, the number of items is not crucial, it is crucial to comprehend that it is the described set of sequential works that allows you to get a relevant document. The specification of this set of works can really be written down in a large number of items that can be formulated in other words.