The benefits of a marketing plan

What is a Marketing Plan?

Marketing is all about matching the features and benefits your products and services can provide to specific customers and then telling those customers why they should buy them. Your marketing plan details how to do this. A Marketing Plan is a document that complements your business plan and brings together all of your market research so you can pinpoint exactly where your business is going and how you’re going to get there.

Your plan must include:

  • Goals.
  • Current market details.
  • A complete analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. (SWOT analysis.)
  • Your plans to achieve your goals.

The plan must be flexible and able to adapt to meet changing market conditions.

Benefits of a Marketing Plan

Having a marketing plan will help you focus on your target market and find out if there are any gaps in the market that open up new opportunities for you. Your marketing plan will also provide you with something that will allow you to measure your progress. This can highlight the strategies that work for you and the ones that don’t.

A good marketing plan will also benefit you in that it gives your outside financiers the confidence that you know your market and know how to achieve your goals.

A good marketing plan will take care of getting new leads and creating new networking opportunities for your business. The bottom line means that your plan will define your business as well as your customers and future plans.

What is a good marketing plan?

A good marketing plan is really a blueprint for the action your company should take to achieve certain goals. It will identify the most profitable ways to perform certain functions and should show you the best way to present your business to your target audience.

A good marketing plan will save you money by cutting out unnecessary spending while introducing you to new marketing opportunities. A good plan will work for your business to make sure that what you do fits within your budget and that your marketing push reaches your target audience.

You will essentially keep all your activities and your budgets under control. If you don’t have a good marketing plan, you may not be taking full advantage of all the ways to reach your target audience. This will result in decreased sales.

A Marketing Plan Must Reach People

Your marketing plan will provide you with a clue as to what your business needs to run on. It is similar to a flight plan for pilots. Your flight plan tells you the direction your plane is going to fly, where you’re starting from, and the path you need to take to get to your destination.

A sports coach will have a game plan that lays out how the team will play on that particular day. The coach will work on strategies that will effectively frustrate and win over the competition so that they can emerge victorious.

Your marketing plan should be designed in a similar way.

  • It has to be built with an end result in mind.
  • It needs to be tailored to the specific markets you’re targeting, as well as the people in those markets.
  • It has to be flexible to meet the needs of people in the markets because those needs are constantly changing.
  • You need to focus on people rather than products.

Always remember to develop a marketing plan specifically designed to reach people.