A marketing plan is a complete and comprehensive manuscript that describes to all those activities which company plans to do to reach its objective for the upcoming year. It actually summarizes the complete plan for the advertisement of the company. Here are five important steps to create a perfect marketing plan:
1: Analysis of the current situation of the company
A perfect marketing plan starts with the analysis of the current scenario of the company. It begins with the description of your own business, products & services you are offering, and what is the distinction that differentiates you from your competitors.
In order to state your competitive advantage, you should be very clear about the products and services of your competitors. Then you will be able to analyse your product and differentiate it from the competitor’s by explaining that how you are providing superior products or services. At this step, you should also do the SWOT analysis of the company so that you must be aware of your own strengths and opportunities and also, ways to overcome your weaknesses and threats.
2: Define your market & target audience:
After doing a situation analysis, you must work to define that which type of audience you want to target for your products. You can define your targeted audience through demographics while creating your customer profile or by defining their customs and buying patterns. This step is really important because it will be really helpful in determining the best-fit medium for the marketing of the business.
3: Define your goals:
The whole process of developing a good marketing plan is aimed at achieving the goals of the business. So you have to set your goals first that what you want to achieve through marketing strategy. Goals are set to give clarity to your marketing and business plan.
Goals set must be realistic, achievable and measurable. Going towards perfection both short term and long term goals should be set so that it will be easy to measure your success rate at any point of time.
4: Set your marketing strategies:
After defining your target market and setting your goals, next important step is to make good marketing strategy so that you may know how you are going to attract your targeted audience and how you are going to achieve your goals.
At this stage, you must plan that how you are going to attract a new audience and how you are going to close your sales with your targeted customer.
5: Marketing financial plan
This step holds a lot of importance in creating a good marketing plan as you must be very clear on this point that how much you can afford to pay for the marketing of your products and services. You should allocate an affordable budget for your marketing proposal. If you are going to start a new business, you have to arrange the finance for marketing by yourself or through borrowing. If you are creating a new marketing plan for already running business, you can allocate a portion of your sales for it.
