Important Tips for Writing a Good Marketing Plan

•             Almost every marketing plan needs a good Cover Page. The Cover Page should include the following: plan name, company name, company address, company phone and fax, an email address and possibly a revision number or copy number.

•             It's always a good idea to include a Legal Page  ( Confidentiality Agreement)   with your marketing plan. This simple statement can help you protect your intellectual property. We suggest you contact a lawyer if you have real concerns about your legal position when distributing your marketing plan.

•             Although Executive Summary topic appears first in the plan, you normally write it last. Wait until you're almost done so you can include the main highlights. You should cover the most important facts, such as target markets, sales growth, and strategic focus, and those facts may change during the planning process.

The contents of the summary should include the main highlights of the plan. Make sure to address target markets, market needs, sales prospects, expenses, and strategy. Remember, as always, to match your plan to your purpose. This is business, not writing class.

•             Situation Analysis is addressing the key points that describe your current situation. It sets the scene. As you develop your marketing plan, this early section is critical to bring your plan up to speed on the key points to follow. This is where you inventory what your firm offers and introduce your marketing situation and the main components of the marketing plan. These components include your markets, competition, products, distribution channels, the microenvironment, and historical results. The most important single point is the market need. Every marketing plan should take a market-oriented strategic planning approach that focuses on the market need.

•             In case of proposing Target Market, keep in mind markets can be described in terms of geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes. Analyzing your market from this perspective can be a useful way to categorize what you know about the people you want as clients and can lead to identifying and confirming opportunities the market presents. You may find that your information is limited, and just capture what you know. This can also be an area that helps identify areas needing additional research.

Market Geographics - This factor addresses where your customers are physically located. A landscape architect may serve those people within a specific climate or region. If you are marketing your services over the Internet, your client's physical location may be irrelevant.

Market Demographics - Consumer wants, preferences, and the frequency of their purchases are often associated with demographic information. Demographics consider information about market age, gender, nationality, education, household composition, occupation and income. Think about the demographics of the people in your market. Are there common demographic factors that describe the people you expect to be potential clients?

Market Psychographics - The market can also be described in terms of psychographic information. It is more challenging than the previous categories because it is less quantifiable and more subjective. Psychographics categorize people on the basis of their lifestyle or personality attributes. For example, the lifestyles and personality attributes of people in a large metropolitan city are going to be quite different from those of a small agricultural-based community. Consider the general lifestyles or personalities that best describe your market.

Market Behaviors - Buyers can also be analyzed based on their knowledge, attitude, use, or response to a product. These behavioral variables may include the occasions that stimulate a purchase, the benefits they realize, the status of the user, their usage rate, their loyalty, the buyer-readiness stage, and their attitude toward the service you offer.

Document what you know about each of these areas. If you have an existing client base or previous experience with this market, think about your "best" clients. You may want to know where they live, their age, gender, occupation, what is important to them, and why they want your services. If you do not have historical information, check to see if there are resources that you can use to help you understand and describe the attributes of your market. Complete what you can and return to this section as you learn more.

•             Market Needs may be the most important topic in your marketing plan. Always emphasize the market need that you seek to fill. What value are you providing? Your marketing efforts will always benefit from focusing on the benefits you are providing your customers, rather that the benefits you are realizing. It isn't how you sell the product; but rather, what customer needs you are satisfying.

Value is realized in tangible and intangible forms. Are you saving your clients time, effort, or money? Are you enhancing their net worth, their self-confidence, or their potential? Are you enriching their skills, their sense of security, or their self-esteem? Are you minimizing their real or perceived risks, fears, or liabilities?

•             To describe Market Trends, think strategically. What factors seem to be changing the market, or changing the business? What developing trends can make a difference? Market trends could involve changes in demographics, changes in customer needs, a new sense of style or fashion, or other factors that may influence purchase behavior of your market. Much of this depends on what business you are in

•             Use this topic to explain and discuss Market Growth. Is the market growing, is it static, or is it shrinking? Documented market growth enhances the implied value and potential of your business. Ideally you will be able to cite experts, a market research firm, trade association, or credible journalists describing projected growth. This may be particularly important when your plan is used to communicate with those outside the marketing department or the organization, such as for investors, board members, or advisors.

Cite growth rates in terms that fit the available information and your industry. Determine if growth is best expressed in the number of potential customers, projected dollar sales, projects completed, website projects, tax reporting hours, yards to landscape, or whatever best fits your business and your audience.

•             A valuable step in your Situational Analysis is to assess your firm's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). A SWOT analysis is a helpful method to complete this assessment.

The SWOT analysis begins by assisting you in conducting an inventory of your internal strengths and weaknesses. You will then note the opportunities and threats that are external to the organization, based on your market and the overall environment. Don't be concerned about elaborating on these topics at this point. Bullet points may be the best way to begin. Capture the factors you believe are relevant in each of the four areas. You will want to review what you have noted here as you work through your marketing plan.

•             About Competition, describe your major competitors in terms of the factors that most influence revenues. This may include their size, the market share they command, their comparative product quality, their growth, available capital and resources, image, marketing strategy, target markets, and any attributes you consider important. Industry associations, industry publications, media coverage, information from the financial community, and their own marketing materials and websites may be good resources to identify these factors and "rate" the performance of each competitor.

Your access to this information will vary. Competitors that are publicly traded may have a significant amount of information available. Competitive information may be limited in situations where your competitors are privately held. If possible, you may want to take on the task of playing the role of a potential customer and gain information from that perspective.

Use this topic for a general comparison of your offering as one of several choices a potential buyer can make.

•             Under Product Offering section, list and describe the product(s) of your company offers. For each business offering, cover the main points including what the product is, how much it costs, what sorts of customers make purchases, and why. What customer need does each product fill?

It is always a good idea to think in terms of customer needs and customer benefits, as you define your product offerings, rather than thinking of your side of the equation -- the products you sell -- first.

•             The idea of Keys to Success is based on the need for focus. You can't focus efforts on a few priorities unless you limit the number of priorities. In practice, lists of more than three or four priorities are usually less effective. The more the priorities (beyond three or four), there will be less chance of implementation.

Virtually every marketing plan has different keys to success. These are a few key factors that make the difference between success and failure. This depends on who you are and what services you offer.

•             We will bring the four areas of the SWOT analysis together to formulate Critical Issues affecting the marketing plan. The objective is to leverage the strengths of the business to take advantage of the available opportunities, offset or improve the stated weaknesses, and minimize the risk of potential threats. Your marketing plan should address the critical issues to place you in an optimal position to succeed -- optimizing revenues with the allocated marketing resources.

•             Marketing Strategy is a summary chapter, introducing the discussion of strategies to follow. The strategy chapter normally includes objectives, mission, target market strategies, product positioning, strategy pyramids, and detailed discussion of the marketing mix.

As a summary paragraph, this topic should introduce the others to follow. You should include the most important highlights, for sure, because this first topic might be used to summarize the whole chapter.

Remember, strategy is focus. It isn't a complete list of what you want to do, but rather a prioritized list of your main items of focus. You will go into detail in your positioning, mission statement, and the other topics included in the chapter. Don't try to include everything here, just the highlights.

•             A brief Mission Statement will keep your plan focused. Use your mission statement to establish your fundamental goals for the quality of your business offering, customer satisfaction, employee welfare, compensation to owners, and so forth. A good mission statement can be a critical element in defining your business and communicating to employees, vendors, customers, and owners, partners, or shareholders.

•             Use this topic to set specific Marketing Objectives. Think about sales, market share, market positioning, image, awareness, and related objectives.

Remember to make your objectives concrete and measurable. Develop your plan to be implemented, not just read. Objectives that can't be measured can't be tracked and followed up, so they are less likely to lead to implementation. The capability of plan-vs.-actual analysis is essential.

•             Financial Objectives are very different from marketing objectives, and generally easier to measure. A financial objective might be to increase 2003 profits by 10%, or sales by 10%, or contribution margin by 5%, or gross margin by 10%. Financial objectives might also be holding spending to a specific level, as a percent of sales.

•             In Target Markets, you should introduce the strategy behind your market segmentation and your choice of target markets. Explain why your business is focusing on these specific target market groups. What makes these groups more interesting than the other groups that you've ruled out? Why are the characteristics you specify important?

•             Under Marketing Positioning statements, the positioning statements should include a strategic focus on the most important target market, that market's most important market need, how your product meets that need, what is the main competition, and how your product is better than the competition.

Consider this simple example:

For [target market description] who [target market need], [this product] [how it meets the need]. Unlike [key competition], it [most important distinguishing feature].

•             In Marketing Recharge discuss what market research you need. Think about what market research you need on a regular basis. This might include customer surveys, market surveys; market forecast reports, market share reports, trends, etc.

•             Financials section is a summary paragraph for the rest of the chapter. This chapter contains your expense budgets, sales forecasts, and breakdowns by category. Normally it is mainly tables and charts, with texts to explain the numbers in them.

As a summary, cite the main points. Sales are expected to grow to what, from what level? Expenses are to be held at some level, which is only XX% of sales? Many of your readers will just browse these main paragraphs, some will browse the charts as well, and only a few will go into the tables in detail.

•             As your strategy is implemented, you will need to track your results (Controls) and monitor new development in the internal and external environments.

Is your plan on track with your revenue generation objectives? It is important to monitor your progress based on comparing your performance to the goals and budget expectations for each month or quarter. This variance will provide feedback on the impact of your programs. Are the programs accomplishing your goals? Programs that are not working need to be changed. Programs that meet or exceed expectations should be replicated. This is where the value of a dynamic marketing plan benefits you most.

What is happening in the market environment? You want to know as things change and how quickly those changes take place. A static internal and external environment will not be as demanding as those that are rapidly evolving. If these factors have changed since you created your marketing plan, or have not evolved in the direction you anticipated, you will want to review your plan to make certain it is still viable.

The control section of your plan also provides a way of checking to see that your programs are supporting your tactics and strategies and are consistent with the key objectives of your marketing plan. Reviewing your results throughout the year will enable you to have the opportunity to evaluate and modify your marketing plan as necessary. It is critical to compare your actual to your budget on a scheduled basis, and you may want to add this to your marketing calendar as a reminder. Monitoring your progress takes some discipline and it may prove to be the most valuable function of the marketing plan.

•             Implementation  is the heart of your marketing plan; make it as concrete and specific as you can, in this text as well as the accompanying table and the Gantt chart.

Include as many specific programs as possible. Give each program a name, a person responsible, a milestone date, and a budget. Marketing Plan Pro will automatically set up similar areas for evaluating the actual results and the difference between plan and actual results, for each program (PREMIER Only) You have a place to track spending and milestone dates, and you can also create a table based on categories that are meaningful to you, such as by the person responsible, milestone date, budget, and department. Good work on your implementation milestones can also be a valuable tool to keep the person that is responsible also accountable.

•             When the time to think Contingency Planning, think the following questions:

What will you do if things don't work out? Do you have a contingency plan? Explain what happens if things go wrong. What factors are most likely to cause trouble? What trouble could they cause? How are you going to react?

Try to predict the problems that might come up. Think of internal problems first, like losing a key person, funding falls through, some portion of the plan falls apart. Then think about external problems, such as the entry of a new competitor, changes in technology, price wars, or difficulty getting product. Contingency planning encourages you to think about the challenges ahead and consider alternatives. The objective is to avoid or minimize the negative impact on your marketing plan, and keep you ahead of these changes.

Hope the above guidelines help you to think and write an accurate as well as specific marketing plan. Good Luck to your innovative marketing plan assignments or projects!