Ron Heywood - New-Media Consultant.
The Marketing Plan
Essentially a Marketing Plan is a route planner for your business. It should provide the answers to Three key Questions
- Where are you now?
- Where are you going?
- How are you going to get there?
Where You Are
There are two aspects to planning a route, determining where you are, and determining where you want to get to.
So from this we can deduce that in compiling a marketing plan that tells us how to get to our chosen goal, we must first establish where we are now.
These are the questions you need to address:
- What is your product or service
- Who are your customers or prospects
- Who are your competitors
- What information is available about my business
These questions may seem superficial, and the answers may seem obvious. Their meaning changes significantly when it comes to writing them down.
You'll find there are many things you have to go and look up, research and quantify.
In addition conducting this research focuses your attention on the questions, helping you discover things you may never have consciously recognised, bringing weaknesses and opportunities to light.
The reason you need to establish where you are now, apart from that certain people you deal with will want to know, is to help you identify the risks and challenges you will face as you grow your business.
It would be dangerous to land a major contract that requires you to delegate a lot of work and responsibility, only to realise that you have no-one in your company or list of contacts that you can trust or rely upon to take on that responsibility.
This may seem like an obvious risk but for many companies it only becomes obvious when they take time to think about it. The process of drawing up a marketing plan helps focus your attention on the obvious things you may have ignored up until now. And having identified these risks you can formulate a strategy to get around them, whilst time is on your side.
Remember: Marketing is about asking questions, and testing the answers.
Where Are You Going
We have discussed how, in planning a route it is essential to know where you are starting from.
The next step of course is to establish your destination. Not some loosely defined goal of "to be the number one supplier in our market" but:
- What are your "Critical Success Factors"
- What are your objectives
- What is your sales forecast
Critical Success Factors
What things are you required to get right in order for your business to succeed and grow?
The clichéd answers "Competitive prices", "Quality", "Customer Service", "Speedy Delivery" may turn out to be incorrect. You wont know until you test them.
If your product is exceptionally well presented in a market where image is valuable, competitive prices may not be a critical success factor - They aren't for the iPod.
You may be selling discount clothing, where quality can be sacrificed for a lower price.
But you may assume that one of these examples applies to your business, only to discover that your customers see something else.
Objectives
Much of the material you will use to establish your objectives will come from your knowledge of where you are now.
In working on the first part of your plan, you will identify risks and opportunities you wish to address. Maybe a new market , or an additional range of skills in your staff. These are your objectives and you should write them down.
They can be large or small, whether to move into new premises or open another branch. Franchise the business or take on additional staff.
You will need to refer to your "Critical Success Factors" to establish and refine some of these objectives. Price or Quality may dictate the need to source a new supplier for example. That becomes an objective.
Sales Forecast
Compiling a sales forecast can be daunting, but it is one of the most important parts of any business.
Describing the techniques of compiling sales forecasts is a whole article in itself.
How are you going to get there?
It may seem that there has been little "Marketing" up to this point. You may have come looking for ways of reaching out to your customers, and instead found yourself turning your focus in on yourself.
Well "How are you going to get there" is the essence of a Marketing plan, which in itself is a core component of the business plan we have been developing up until now.
This stage takes what you know about your business, and what you now know you need to achieve to develop your business, and analysing the specific steps of the journey. When you have done this you will know answers to the following questions:
- Exactly what do I do to achieve each objective
- How often will I do it
- How much will it cost
- What benefits will I receive after each action
These are difficult questions, and the answers are valuable, but you can only establish the answers to these questions once you have answered the first 2 key questions.