Wednesday | May 23, 2012
The Essential Contents of a Marketing Plan
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By
6 June 2005
Excerpt from On Target: The Book on Marketing Plans by Tim Berry and Doug Wilson
Every marketing plan has to fit the needs and situation. Even so, there are standard components you just can’t do without. A marketing plan should always have a situation analysis, marketing strategy, sales forecast, and expense budget.
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Situation Analysis:
Normally this will include a market analysis, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), and a competitive analysis. The market analysis will include market forecast, segmentation, customer information, and market needs analysis.
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Marketing Strategy:
This should include at least a mission statement, objectives, and focused strategy including market segment focus and product positioning.
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Sales Forecast:
This would include enough detail to track sales month by month and follow up on plan-vs.-actual analysis. Normally a plan will also include specific sales by product, by region or market segment, by channels, by manager responsibilities, and other elements. The forecast alone is a bare minimum.
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Expense Budget:
This ought to include enough detail to track expenses month by month and follow up on plan-vs.-actual analysis. Normally a plan will also include specific sales tactics, programs, management responsibilities, promotion, and other elements. The expense budget is a bare minimum.
Are They Enough?
These minimum requirements above are not the ideal, just the minimum. In most cases you’ll begin a marketing plan with an Executive Summary, and you’ll also follow those essentials just described with a review of organizational impact, risks and contingencies, and pending issues.
Include a Specific Action Plan
You should also remember that planning is about the results, not the plan itself. A marketing plan must be measured by the results it produces. The implementation of your plan is much more important than its brilliant ideas or massive market research. You can influence implementation by building a plan full of specific, measurable and concrete plans that can be tracked and followed up. Plan-vs.-actual analysis is critical to the eventual results, and you should build it into your plan.
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Will Simmons said:
It is really great to know that world’s best university Stanford has involved facebook in its courses. It will really help to enhance the knowledge of social media and other technological channels in students. The trained students will boost the technology of their country. in the world. Custom Coursework |
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I’m interested to see if other colleges will start to implement the same type of idea. If it works for Stanford, who says it can’t work for other Universities that have the passion and time to do a similar feat?
I’m curious to know how they came up with the ideas for the applications. Did they first identify a need in the marketplace or just take a wild guess, some getting lucky while others didn’t.
It’s definitely good to see college kids making a difference because of something that was learned while attending a class. I’ve found that many of the classes I took in college were simply based on theory. This was discouraging to me as an Entrepreneur because many of the teachers spoke about what might happen in a professional setting, without actually having the experience of working in that setting.
Great post!
Chris from Brain Smart Success