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What is A Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a report outlining your clear marketing strategy for the future, it could be your plan for the next year, next quarter, next month, next week etc. In the report, your plans and goals are broken down in detail.

As a business owner/admin/marketing manager, part of coming up with a marketing plans includes evaluating how you did in the previous year, what worked and why, what did not work and why, emerging opportunities and so on. By the end of the thorough analysis, the leadership can come up with recommendations that will drive the business.  These are the strategies for the next business year/quarter. With such informed decisions, the chance of business thriving is higher.

As part of creating the marketing plan, here are some tools you can use that can help to bring perspective to how your business is currently performing. This is part of the internal and external analysis of the plan

SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of a business. It is a marketing model that helps the business identify areas where they are doing well as well as areas needing improvement.  The great thing about this tool is that it provides a business with both the internal and external perspective to help create a strategy.

PESTLE Analysis

Any marketing strategy runs through a PESTLE Analysis. This is a tool used to monitor and analyse environmental factors that may have an impact on the business. This is vital because businesses are impacted wholly by the state of the environment they are situated in. PESTLE stands for Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Legal and Environment factors.

Take for instance the social state of a country. It is in the interest of the business to understand the general demographic characteristics, norms, customs, trend and values within which they operate. One needs to understand trends such as career attitudes, lifestyle, cultural beliefs, income distribution, age groups among other things. With this knowledge, the marketing plan will entail strategies that are consumer-based and have a higher possibility of yielding returns.

SWOT vs PESTLE

7 Ps of Marketing

Initially known as the 4Ps of Marketing, These elements include Product, Price, Place, People, Promotion, Process and Physical Evidence. This mix helps the business strategize on how to become competitive in the market. They ensure that value perception is accurate and the target market is satisfied.

Importance of Marketing Plan

Budgeting

Having known the activities you need to carry out for your business, you will be able to project a budget to cover up costs. In addition, you will be in a position to know how far the business can spend against income projected through marketing plan.

Improved Operations

Marketing cuts across most if not all departments in one way or the other. The internal operations will be improved due to the clarity of the goals set for marketing. For instance, the finance department will be able to plan well in advance, customer success will be well prepared to handle potential customers and so on. All operations supporting marketing will have ample time in preparation to offer the support needed to achieve marketing goals.

Focus – Objectives are Achieved Faster

The concerned parties will have a clear direction as far as the business is concerned.

Prediction of Business Future

Both success and failure are predictable. Having a marketing plan after carrying out market analysis with the above mentioned tools and even more, will enable the business to determine its future.

GET YOUR FREE 2023 MARKETING PLAN CALENDAR

How to Get Started

Ardy Marketing created a Marketing plan template which you can get by clicking the button below. The calendar template will aid you in coming up with Smart goals. Through the tool, you will be able to break down your goals into activities and set timelines to complete them.

You can Reach Out to us for assistance on how to perform a Market Audit for your business.

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