Guesswork can play havoc when it comes to sales and marketing

marketing_on_budget-1

A comprehensive and detailed marketing plan not only ensures traction for your business, but can also help you save considerable time and money you invest in it. Best marketing plans are based on best industry insights. Vertical-specific industry reports, data and trends are invaluable help you to nail which strategies can best serve your business (or case study).

Here is what a good marketing plan looks like:

1. Executive summary

The first page of your business marketing plan, it is a quick overview of your entire plan. As the name suggests, it contains the summary of all the other sections of your document and is often written at the end of your plan writing process.

In this section, you should describe:

  • Introduction of your company or business, its goals and objectives, its mission statement, products and services you offer, and your USP (Unique Selling Point) or value proposition.
  • Talk about your target customers and markets you serve. It can include the demographics you serve and their purchase processes.
  • Analyze the situation and touch upon your positioning strategies. You can mention your competition, distribution channels you have chosen, prevalent financial conditions and any other external forces that might influence the sales of your product or service.
  • Growth strategies you will employ such as your marketing plan, distribution plan, your conversion strategy, referral strategies you will use etc.
  • In the end, you can conclude your executive summary with financial projections.

2. Define your business goals and objectives

Identifying business goals is the actual point where you begin your marketing plan assignment writing process. Business goals might be defined as creating a market for a new product, penetrating a new market and breaking away customers from more established competitors, and expanding online or offline product distribution channels.

Outlining real numbers to achieve add gravity to your goal-setting objectives. You might aim to ‘grow revenue by 15% each quarter’ or ‘add 200 customers per month’ or ‘increase repeat purchases by customers by 10% every month’.

3. Mission statement and value proposition

Many people confuse Mission or Vision Statement with the Value Proposition of a company. A Mission Statement defines what a company is about and what it does. A Value Proposition tells the customer why he or she should buy your product or service (and not your competition).

To write your value proposition, you might try to finish the sentence, “We are better than our competitors because…”

4. Target customers

Customer demographics and psychographics play crucial roles in helping you define the perfect marketing strategies for your kind of product or service.

You can detail the age, gender, income, family status, geographic location, educational qualification, languages spoken, and hobbies of your target customers. You might also want to define things like what kind of lifestyle they have and what kind of books, movies, magazines, television shows, and websites they browse through.

All these details can help you position your brand as well as create and place ads appropriately.

Customer profiles are based on what kind of benefits your product offers to the customers, who will use it and how, when, and why it will be used. Once you know who will buy your product, it becomes easier to define their purchasing process:

Also read: Simple, successful marketing strategies for entrepreneurs on a budget

  • Who and how will one decide which product to buy?
  • What sources of information do they use?
  • At which point of their decision-making and purchasing process do they actually buy the product?
  • Who pays the bill?
  • Who and what can influence their buying decisions?

5. Situation analysis

In this section, we define where we stand vis-à-vis our competitors in the market. It includes attributes of your product that makes it unique, its pricing and discount schemes (and incentives offered to wholesalers and retailers), the distribution channels employed, and promotional strategies used to position the product in the market.

Mentioning real numbers here makes the plan look more solid and concise.

It also includes analysis of the competition, current sales and profitability analysis, and marketing expenses.

6. Pricing and positioning analysis

Positioning and pricing of your product is based on your situational analysis. You might want to develop exclusive product lines with specific distributors or offer special discounts to customers buying through your partner distributors or make certain items available only through direct orders.

One of the biggest mistakes a management student can make while writing a marketing plan assignment is to not defining a unique selling proposition (USP) and not do a thorough customer research.

Guesswork can play havoc when it comes to sales and marketing. Coming up with an effective marketing plan is a long-drawn process that requires both creativity and experience. Hence, you might hire experts or consultants to help you create a marketing plan and test it (with the help of A/B testing method) before launching it completely.

—-

Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Featured Image: 123RF Stock Photography

The post Get started with writing your own awesome marketing plan with these 6 steps appeared first on e27.