Marketing is not just about presenting products to target audiences. It is identifying the right audience, learning them, and even determining which products or services will best meet their needs. These complexities make creating a marketing plan rather interesting. 

So what’s a marketing plan? First, let’s say that a marketing plan puts businesses in the right shape for their marketing activities. And back to the question, it is a highlight of individual procedures, related steps, relevant regions or platforms, and time schedules. 

All together, a good plan will serve in the promotion, selling, and distribution of a business’s merchandise. But it’s never as easy as it sounds. Being so, we’re going to help simplify the work by revealing marketing plan items you must know. 

Marketing Plan Outline

#1. Business Summary

A business summary is as simple as it sounds. It is a short, descriptive detail of a company, what it stands for, and the services or products it offers. This marketing plan item should rightly be the first thing on the list. The reason? It familiarises viewers (such as investors) with the company before they proceed with other details of the plan. 

#2. Business Initiatives

Business initiatives are a documentation of department-specific goals. An initiative like this is both far-reaching and in-depth in the sense that it looks into every department of the organisation and it also presents meaningful and comprehensive analysis or suggestions for each department to reach their goals. 

#3. Customer Analysis 

If you know anything about marketing, you will understand when we say that customer analysis is crucial. There are three ways to go about making this analysis. 

The first way is to collect customer data. Care must be taken not to violate any customer’s rights or regulatory law when doing this. Once this is done, the next step is to organise collected data to allow easy referencing and to avoid missing any information. 

The actual analysis comes last. Here, customer data is inputted into a high-power tool that processes and presents the data in an insightful form. Business owners consider this output when making and taking relevant decisions. 

#4. Competitor Analysis 

Aside from making customer analysis, good marketing involves watching and learning about your competitors. This is what is referred to as competitor analysis. 

Who are your competitors? What are they known for? What do they do differently? All these questions are prerequisites. They give rise to data which business owners can use to improve and reposition their own companies. 

#5. Perform SWOT Analysis 

The popular business acronym “SWOT” stands for strength, weakness, opportunities and threats. It is a priority item for every marketing plan. In making a SWOT list, a business highlights its talent, expertise, and unique capabilities as strength. 

It also highlights its incompetence as weaknesses. Furthermore, it determines events or circumstances that could improve its chances as a business. These are placed under opportunities, while events or circumstances that could ruin the business or impact it negatively are registered as threats. 

#6. Decide on a Market Strategy

What’s a marketing plan without a detailed marketing strategy? Also, you may ask, “what differentiates a marketing plan from a marketing strategy.” The answer to the first question is absolutely nothing. A marketing plan would be a piece of incoherent writing if it didn’t contain a strategy. 

As for the differences, a marketing plan is a more comprehensive outline telling how a business would conduct its marketing whereas a marketing strategy is just one piece in the plan. The former contains everything we highli in this article. On the other hand, the latter talks about 

#7. Create a Realistic Budget

Marketing and finance go hand in hand. That said, a realistic budget is one of the things to consider when drafting a marketing plan. Creating a budget provides an avenue for you to review all your preferred marketing channels and the specific methods you will use in those channels. For example, whether you will market on Facebook, and if you’d like to use Facebook ads for this or simply publish advertisement posts on relevant groups. 

Another good side to budgeting is that it keeps your business from getting stuck and unable to complete a marketing operation. It also keeps businesses from incurring debts during such operations. 

#8. Decide on Marketing Channels

We have mentioned that budgeting encourages businesses and teams to look into their marketing channels. Now we are saying that outside budgeting, businesses have to make an in-depth choice on their marketing channels. This is fundamental in every marketing plan. 

Some of the things that influence a business’s marketing channel decision is;

1. How much time the team can dedicate on a channel 
2. How much money the team can invest in a channel
3. How much skill or expertise the business has in using a channel, and
4. How useful or profitable the business projects a channel to be

#9. Make Your Financial Projections 

Before you begin your financial projection properly, you can write down the nine items in this outline. Next, make a guess of the possible budget for each item. For example, how much it will cost your business to buy competitor analysis tools.  

This guess-result is not what you will actually work with. It is only supposed to give you a rough idea of your expenditure. Additionally, it will serve to express your company’s priority. 

The final projection with a more accurate result will require you to analyze every item in your marketing plan for their monetary cost and profit. 

Conclusion

Marketing channels, customer and competitor analysis, company bio, strengths, weaknesses, strategy, and general financing are the points to take home. They make up most of what a marketing plan should contain. Sketching an air-tight description on each of these items is paramount. 

And how would this help your startup? First, a solid marketing plan builds your company’s reputation in the eyes of investors. Earning this kind of reputation can translate into receiving massive funding. That’s not all. A successful marketing plan will almost certainly mean that you get to determine your target market, reach them, and sell. 

If that sounds like what you’ll love, then go ahead and create your own marketing plan. Remember that it has to be unique to your type of business, your type of customers, and your business capacity. You can also look around for more  insightful articles on marketing in our blog.