Business Insights

January is the planning month:   business owners normally find themselves rejuvenated after the holidays and ready for a better new year. And they asked themselves: what should I do better this year? This is when planning comes in.

These days this is even more true, as we have to put the difficult 2009 behind us. If you followed our previous posts, you understood that planning is the single most important management tool for success. We wrote about business plans, marketing plans, strategic plans and so on. In fact everything should be included in the business plan. And the marketing plan is the most essential component of the business plan.

Even if each marketing plan is unique as it has to respond to the needs of a particular business, there are few essential components that all plans should have. Drawing from Guerrilla Marketing and other excellent processes for creating a marketing plan, such as Duct Tape Marketing, I condensed the essentials in the following points:

• The purpose of your marketing - What you really want your prospects to do, when they are reached by your marketing. It’s the focus of your strategy
• Your unique selling proposition - Your remarkable difference from the competition
• A competitive analysis - It is fundamental to know how the competition is placing its products in the market
• Your target market - Define your ideal customer, through analyzing market’s demographics, needs and forecast future trends and growth.
• Your market niche - This is also called market segmentation. Often the market is too big and to differentiated to address it all at once and with the same marketing tactics.
• Your marketing tactics - Develop your marketing strategy based on the market needs and using a variety of marketing tactics at the same time.
• A marketing calendar - Or action plan, with the results expected from each tactic, date of deploying it and who is responsible. And its cost.
• A sales forecast - Based on the marketing tactics you want to deploy, for each product, region and sales force utilized, the sales forecast should include sales projections month-per-month and a comparison with actual numbers.
• The  marketing budget - From the marketing calendar you should add up the cost of all the marketing activities, month-per-month, and track it versus actual.

Even if it seems now a daunting task to gather all the above information, especially referring to the market analysis, remember that the main purpose of the plan is to get positive results for your business. This is why it is so important to track in details the performance of the strategy and the tactics employed, so that one can drop what is not effective and focus on what bring results.