How to Make a Marketing Plan
A successful business always makes a marketing plan before launching a marketing activity which can help in understanding the impact of various marketing decisions on its performance. Apart from analyzing current and past marketing decisions, this plan also provides direction for prospective marketing endeavors. In order to make a successful marketing plan, appropriate feedback is required from different departments of an organization such as finance, supply chain, and manufacturing department.
This feedback is necessary in order to identify that whether a plan will become successful in the future or not. Carrying out a successful marketing plan also requires gathering relevant data. Data collection is necessary to congregate information about various market changes. You must have data related to budget, sales figures, profit/loss, and current products or services.
After gathering adequate information to make a plan, you are required to make an executive summary that involves what should be done and how it should be done. Specify your marketing objectives as well in this plan. These objectives should be very concrete for example if you have illustrated that your plan will increase your sale then you should give concrete figures of this increase in sales as well.
In other words, you should define your objectives in quantitative terms. Using quantitative terms help in clarifying your goals and objectives. You are also required to become specific when you are depicting time period of making that plan till its implementation. The end results should also be made very clear and specific. Specificity in expressing your goals, objectives and results is necessary because it contributes in reducing ambiguity and vagueness of a this plan.
An analysis of the external and internal environment is also necessary to carry out a marketing plan. A SWOT analysis is one of the successful means of exploring strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. An investigation of various opportunities present in the environment actually helps an organization in capitalizing them. However it is not possible for a firm to exploit every single opportunity from the environment, however a company must look into its strengths. The SWOT analysis also helps in deciding how to deal with various threats present in the market.
Defining target market is one of the important aspects of a marketing plan. Defining a target market involves various factors such as demographic variables and psychographic variables etc. The four Ps of marketing involve product, price, place and promotion. When making a marketing plan, it is also necessary describe that how these 4Ps will be designed to carry out a plan. Firms use various marketing activities to promote their product such as advertising and public relations. In the end, you will discuss how you are going to evaluate the success of your marketing plan.
Therefore marketing plan is an important step in giving an overview of planning, analysis and various other marketing activities.
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