A marketing plan

A marketing plan serves as a roadmap for your marketing activities to reachyour goals. To lay out an effective plan, begin with understanding the marketand then plan out the tactics and strategies required to reach out to yourultimate customers. To put it succinctly, a marketing plan should cover thestrategic four 4Ps- Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Chalk out your marketing plan by following a simple step by step procedureas under.

 1. Identify Your Business Goal
 The first step is to spell out your business goal in your marketing plan.Say if you are company producing shoes, then your business goal could be like,“producing 1000 units per month” or “diversifying you business to othersectors”. The objective should be clear, feasible and realistic and notexaggerated or overambitious.

2. Define Your Target Customer
 The marketing plan should have a clear picture of the target customer. ‘Arethey individuals or a company’. Lookout for some clearly identifiable and uniquecharacteristic features. Do they fall into a certain age group, income group orgeographic location? How do they buy your type of products or services? Howoften do they buy them? What features are they particular about?

3. Leverage Your Product’s USP
 You do not market the product or the service, you market the benefitsattached to them. Describe these here. Do mention the distinctive and uniquefeatures (USP) that your product has which sets it apart from your competitor’sproduct. While thinking of the USPs, you must keep in mind to market thestrengths of your product and minimise your product’s weakness and at the sametime develop strategies to take advantage of your competitor’s weakness.

4. Position Your Product
 It is very important to understand as to how you want your product to beperceived or positioned in the minds of your end customers and yourcompetitors. Base your positioning on the benefit your product provides, yourcustomers and the positioning of your competitors. Ask yourself- Do you want topromote your product as one having the best quality with little reference toprice or do you want to promote your product as the cheapest in the industry?

5. Decide Your Marketing Tactics
 Here, you should describe the marketing tactics that you intend to use toreach out to your customers. Take for example advertising (print, radio,television), public relations, sales promotion, Classified ads, Contests,Public relations, Free samples and many others “The means of marketing should dependon the type of product that you are selling. Online or web marketing is bestsuited for us” says Mr. Vishal Bisht, CEO, Marksman Technologies, a companyinto E-learning and IT services.

6. Budget Your Marketing Expenditure
 Here you need to mention the amount of money that you plan to invest in yourmarketing activities. You can break it into monthly, quarterly or annual basis.The amount that you have allocated for your marketing activities will depend onyour type of business and the goals that you have set. Keep track of howeffective a marketing tactic is as you need to get maximum returns on yourinvestment.