How do I write a marketing plan?

How the heck to I write a marketing plan?

Like a Business Plan, writing the Marketing Plan is usually a dreaded task. But, both are unavoidable necessities for a successful business, and must compliment one another. Where the Business Plan is the constitution of your company, the Marketing Plan supplies the specific road map to success and longevity.

This strategic plan will provide you with focus and direction in fulfilling the mission and vision you outline in your Business Plan. A well-defined plan will concentrate on both publicity and marketing efforts that create that are cost-effective and productive. It is also establishes the critical measurements to track progress versus plan.

With the help of local Marketing guru John Powers, President of Bottom Line Marketing, here is a step-by-step guide to writing a Marketing Plan.

STEP 1: What’s the sitch?

Start your plan with a description of your problem or opportunity. What business objectives are motivating you to embark on marketing activities? Are you a new business? Are you seeking to grow revenues overall? Are you rolling out a new product or service? Are you feeling the heat from your competition? Remember, it is NEVER too late in the life of your business to write or rewrite a marketing plan.

Enlist the help of your team and advisors to spell out your circumstances in very specific language. Use this exercise to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (S.W.O.T.) involved in your business venture. This will help identify the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving your objective.

STEP 2: Who loves you, baby?

Define your best customer if you are already in business by itemizing their traits. “Best” almost never means highest revenue. More often, it means things like:

Places high value on your service
Requires a reasonable amount of staff effort vs. revenue generated
Pays their bills timely
Uses more than one of your products or services
Refers you to other businesses
Has high, positive name recognition in the community
Is located close enough to you to facilitate sales and service

If you’re a new business, you can still draw a profile of your ideal prospect. In either case, this list is not exhaustive. The important thing is to build a comprehensive prospect profile. Remember, this will drive all your marketing efforts.

STEP 3: Bull’s-eye!

Define your target audience. You will never hit the target you don’t draw. You have created the profile of your ideal customer. Now your job is to go find people who look just like it. Be specific… married women with no children earning an annual income of greater than $50,000, morticians, left-handed retirees.

Closer is always better. If all other things are equal, start with prospects nearer your base of operations to minimize your cost of sales, service and communications. You can worry about ruling the universe later.

STEP 4: Define Your Edge

The SINGLE greatest mistake businesses make is failing to accurately define their competitive advantages. A close second, rolling out a bunch of tired sales platitudes like “great customer service” or “quality” or “focus on the customer’s needs.”

You can have the greatest product/service in captivity and a crystal clear picture of your ideal targets. But if you can’t simply and briefly explain to them why they should do business with you, plan on early bankruptcy.

There are two important steps to take in identifying your edge. First, ask your customer. After you’ve identified your five “best” clients, take them to lunch and ask them why they do business to you. They’ll tell you what your edge is. If you’re starting a new enterprise, ask five potential customers for their help and expertise, and ask them what factors drive their purchasing decisions for your product or service.

Second, convene your most trusted employees, advisors and mentors with some bottles of red wine and cheese cubes. For the duration of the meeting, outlaw hackneyed sales speak and talk about the real root reasons people will buy from you. Buying is part logic and part emotion. Focus on the latter to find the factors that segregate you from your competition.

Note, price is NOT the reason. If your marketing program revolves around being the lowest cost provider, prepare for low market esteem and non-stop wheedling. You have just become the lowest life form on the business food chain – the vendor.

STEP 5: What are your goals?

A goal is a statement of direction that is determined by your business objectives. Marketing efforts are only productive when associated with well-defined goals on the front end, and strict metrics on the back end. Once again, maximum specificity is critical. Here are examples of a few general goals:

Increase sales of Product X by 15% annually for the next four years.
Capture 30% of the Pooler market by 2010.
Generate 12 new clients per quarter from new direct mail campaigns.

A caution. Goals are not science fiction. Avoid the temptation to write goals to impress and investor or your brother-in-law. Instead make them realistic yet aggressive. And remember to celebrate heartily and share the wealth with all your players every time you achieve one.

STEP 6: Develop your strategies.

Goals are the “what”; strategies are the “how”. There are four indispensable components of a strategy:

Define the task
Set the timetable
Assign the responsibility
Monitor progress

A few other points:

Most goals involve multiple strategies.
Strategies are stretched out over the life cycle of the goal.
Strategies often overlap.
Long term goals should be charted of a project time line.
GOALS ARE NOT SET IN STONE. Marketing conditions, competition, the economy, acts of God, new technologies… these and numerous other factors dictate your need to be nimble enough to tweak goals and strategies midstream.

Using the goals under Step 5 above, here are some examples of corresponding strategies:

Increase sales of Product X by 15% annually for the next four years

Strategy	Deadline	Who
Hire two new sales reps	4th Quarter	Sales Mgr
Launch radio ad campaign	June 2008	Ad Agency
Direct mail to morticians	Mar 2008	Bill, Ron

Capture 30% of the Pooler market by 2010

Strategy	Deadline	Who
Weekly Ad in Pooler Neighbor	ASAP	Al
Join Pooler Chamber	Jan 2008	Phil

Generate 12 new clients per quarter from new direct mail campaigns

Strategy	Deadline	Who
Train sales in direct mail follow up	Outside trainer	Al to locate

Step 7: Choose your options

The array of vehicles for communicating your edge is staggering. Your job is to find the combination of methods that will best convey your message to your carefully constructed target audience as effectively as possible. In addition to the obvious task of allocating your limited marketing budget cleverly, you will need to decide:

Which strategies can be executed in house, and which will have to be outsourced.
Which outside resources to use.
The sequence in which you will execute the strategies.
How to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

Your options appear below. They range in cost from free to astronomical. In the arena of pay advertising, every vendor will tell you they offer the best sales return per marketing dollar invested. All but one of them are lying. Seek the counsel of business peers, an ad agency, governmental and quasi governmental business assistance agencies and soothsayers… anybody who can help you separate the wheat from the chaff.

What percentage of your budget should you allocate for marketing? Give ‘til it hurts. There is no set formula, but on marketing, more than anywhere else, you get what you pay for. You can craft a killer message and send it to all the right people, but if you print if on paper towels… unless you’re selling paper towels.

Public relations
Printed collateral materials
Direct mail
TV and Radio
Sponsorships/community involvement
E-mail/E-zine
Website/Internet marketing
Billboards
Electronic information (CD’s)
White papers
Public presentations
Teaching
Special promotions
Trade publications
School-related activities
Business networking
Social/community networking

None of your potential customers suffer from a shortage of attention to their pocketbooks. They are assaulted daily with all of the above, and more. If you have taken the time to single out a prospect as highly desirable, take time to craft a package of sophisticated marketing techniques. Be aggressive but not annoying, clever but not silly, reinforcing but not redundant and most of all CREATIVE. No sense having a clearly defined edge that gets lost in a poorly conceived and executed marketing muddle.

STEP 8: Monitor

Evaluation of the Marketing and PR Plan should be conducted at a minimum of twice a month at regularly schedule meetings. Attendance must be inviolable. Review the effectiveness of every part of your total program in the harsh light of its impact on the bottom line. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, purge ruthlessly. It’s your money.

You MUST train everyone in your organization to ask every new customer, “How did you hear about us?” Amazingly, some very sophisticated companies overlook this indispensable step. Without this information, you are completely unequipped to make any intelligent decisions about how the components of your overall program are performing. Hits, reader inquiries, proposals requested… none of these measure anything important. There are only two things that matter in determining what’s working:

Which marketing methods produced which sales
How much marketing money did you have to spend to make them (Your R.O.M.)

Nothing else matters.

Remember your costs are not just ads for ads and collateral materials. You have to factor in things like memberships, travel, entertainment, vehicle costs, postage… all the stuff traditionally known as “Cost of Sales”. Measure scrupulously, and carefully track expense vs. return in every marketing endeavor.

These are general guidelines. When it comes time to craft your marketing plan, it’s no time for false pride. Ask people who’ve been there, and a few who have failed. And if it seems wise, don’t hesitate to retain some outside help.