Marketing Plan

Posted by in Marketing

Having a clear and well thought thru marketing plan is key in order to be able to make it in the market. Without it, you are missing out on a lot of good information, ways to assess competitors and “best-practice” that will help you take the right decisions.

What should your marketing plan consist of?

  1. Executive Summary
    Write a short summary about the contents of your marketing plan. This paragraph is great for managers who want to grasp the overview without having to dig thru the details of the entire document.
  2. Current situation and trend
    Describe the market situation from a political, economical and socioeconomic view. What is happening right now? Does the market move in any direction?
  3. Performance review
    For existing products, it’s good to describe how well the product did perform last year, what market share it had and what revenues it brought.
  4. Key issues
    Using the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) modell to describe the product/service.
  5. Objectives
    What objectives are the product/service trying to meet? A specific market share? A special amount of sold items? A certain level of customer satisfaction? It’s crucial to set the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators).
  6. Marketing Strategy
    • Environmental analysis
    • Industry analysis
      • Using Porters 5 Competitive forces
        • Bargaining power of suppliers
        • Bargaining power of customers
        • Threat of new entrants
        • Threat of substitute products
        • Rivalry among existing competitors
    • Market Segmentation
      • Identify a homogenous segment that differs from other segments
      • Specify criteria that define the segment
      • Determine segment size and potential
      • Evaluate potential target markets:
        1. Choose criteria to measure attractiveness and competitive position
        2. Weight attractiveness and competitive position factors to reflect their relative importance
        3. Asses the current position of each potential target market on each factor
        4. Project the future position of each market based on expected environmental, customer and competitive trends
        5. Evaluate implications of possible future changes for business strategies and resources requirements
      • Marketing Mix using the 4P’s (McCarthy, 1960)
        • Product
        • Promotion
        • Place (Distribution)
        • Price (Price is set using a combination of positioning and strategic pricing)
        • Marketing Strategy
          • Choose to be the pioneer or the follower
          • Choose from one of Miles & Snows Prospector, Analyzer, Defender and Reactor strategies
          • Choose flanker, frontal attack, leapfrog, encirclement or a combination
  7. Action Plan
    • A good action plan contains a list of activities, who does them and descriptions.
  8. Controls
    • There needs to be certain controls in place in order to provide data on how the plan is going. This can be done by certain dashboards provided to managers. This needs to show the decided KPI’s above and if they are under certain thresholds, it needs to trigger a response in form of a:
  9. Contingency plans
    • How to handle risks responses
    • What to do if the product/service is not performing as planned