Building a Business Plan

Building a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a written document summarizing what the marketer has learned about the marketplace and indicate how the firm plans to achieve its marketing objectives. It contains tactical guidelines for the marketing programs and financial allocations over the planning period. It is one of the most important outputs of the marketing process.

Marketing plans are becoming more customer and competitor oriented, better reasoned and more realistic that in the past. They draw more inputs from all the functions and are team developed. Planning is becoming a continuous process to respond to rapidly changing market conditions.

Most marketing plan covers one year in 5 to 50 pages. The most frequently cited shortcomings of current marketing plans, according to marketing executives, are l ack of realism, insufficient competitive analysis, and a short-run focus.

Let us now look at the contents of a marketing plan:

Executive summary

The marketing plan normally opens with a brief summary for the senior managers. This entails the main goals and recommendations . This is followed by a table of contents which outlines the rest of the plan and all supporting rational and operation detail.

Situations Analysis

This is the section that present background data on the market, competitors, sales, cost, and the various forces in the microenvironment. How the market is defined, how big it is and how fast is it growing? What are the relevant trends? What is the product offering and what critical issues do we face? All this information is then used to carry out at SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis.

Marketing Strategy

This is where the product manager defines the mission, marketing and financial objectives, and groups and needs that the market offerings are intended to satisfy. The manager then establish the product line's competitive positioning, which will inform the "game plan" to accomplish the plan's objectives. All this requires inputs from other areas, such as purchasing, manufacturing, sales, finance and human resources.

Financial Projections

Financial projections include a sales forecast, an expense forecast, and a break-even analysis. On the revenue side, the projections show the forecast sales volume by month and product category. On the expense side, they show the expected costs of marketing, broken down into finer categories. The break-even analysis shows how many units the firm must sell monthly to offset its monthly fixed costs and average per- unit variable costs.

Implementation controls

The last section of the marketing plan outlines