This is a road map document well written to direct the implementation of your business strategies. Businesses that are successful have a good marketing plan and they invariably started with a marketing plan. Small businesses can get by with a half-dozen sheets of nicely drafted business plan while large companies can have plans with hundreds of pages. Refer to your plan frequently (monthly) or at least quarterly. Leave a column for putting in monthly reports on sales/manufacturing; this will enable you to track performance as you follow the plan.

Why you need a marketing plan

A good marketing plan helps in answering key questions that arise about the business, and act as a reference or foundational document to help you to implement or execute marketing strategy. It also helps to develop a structured method or approach to creating products and services that satisfy customers’ needs.

When writing your marketing plan you need to be clear and precise about your marketing objectives and how to achieve them. Your objectives should be realistic and measurable, includes budgets and action plans, allocate responsibilities and time bound. 

Your marketing plan should include the following elements:

• A summary of the marketing plan
• Analysis of your business and market
• Objectives and strategy
• Marketing mix
• Action plans and budgets
• Contingencies and Organisational implications
• Evaluation and monitoring strategies
• Supporting documentation

Keep it up to date

Planning your marketing should be a continues (ongoing) business process (activity). As market conditions and business change, you will need to revisit many of the points and strategies listed (outlined) in your marketing plan. By regularly referring to your plan, you ensure that your business keeps moving in the right direction.

How to Use a Marketing Plan Template

Prior to completing the marketing plan template, carryout the following:

Put together your key business documents. This includes your business plans, resumes, forecasts, budgets and registration documents. Having the right information on hand mean you would be more accurate in your forecasts and analysis as you move through the marketing plan template.

Take time to consider your specific needs. Start by deciding the sections that are relevant for your business and set aside the other sections. You can always come back to the other sections at a later date. Work through the template at your own pace.

Decide on your audience. It’s very important to consider your target audience when writing your marketing plan. Deciding on the objective of the plan can help you target your answers appropriately. Strategies like online marketing, social media marketing can be used to get to targeted audiences.

Seek/ask for some assistance. If you aren’t confident in completing the marketing plan template yourself, you can always seek the help of a professional (i.e. business adviser or accountant) to scale through your plan and provide you with necessary advice.

What is included in the Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan should demonstrate that your product production has been carefully considered or that you provide a service that is unique, innovative and marketable. There are many different marketing plan templates that you can use but put in mind that a good marketing plan captures basically the same information. The contents of your marketing plan should include:

A background analysis

Provide some background about your company/business. Detail the challenges and opportunities that your business has come across or seal through. This helps to define your business's capabilities and identify opportunities within the market. It will also act as key player in helping you to meet your customers’ needs.

Your marketing objectives    

Refers to what you want your marketing plan to accomplish? Try to be specific. The objectives may be financial, marketing focused to create and build a brand, having as goal to increase sales and/or increase awareness of your product. The best and most effective way to define your marketing objectives is to follow the ‘SMART’ acronym:

• Specific: have clearly defined objectives
• Measurable: what will you use as a measure of success and how?
• Achievable: are the set objectives attainable for the business?
• Realistic: have the knowledge of resources to achieve or attained your objectives?
• Timely: set a time-frame in which you intend to achieve your objectives.

Marketing Strategy and Marketing Mix  

An effective marketing strategy helps you to define the overall direction for your marketing program. It will also provide details on how you are going to carry your products and services to market in ways that will satisfy your customers.

Marketing mix refers to the elements that make up your marketing strategy. In this case our mix will include the 7P’s of marketing i.e. product (or service), position, people, process, pricing, promotion and physical environment.

Actions Plans and Budgets    

Strategies and marketing goal are theoretical objectives. It’s your budget and action plans that bring them to life. The action plans and budgets are the key tools for implementation and realization of the marketing plan. To ensure that they are successful they should be outlined, detailed, definitive and revisited regularly.

Organisational Implications    

Organisational implications are often not considered or overlooked when business owners tackle a marketing plan but it is vital. For example, if you have as goal to increase your customer base by 10% within the next couple of months and therefore your staff by 5%. Will you be able to house them in your current offices? Can you outsource some tasks? It’s important to consider and document these decisions in your plan.

Evaluation and Monitoring plan

To ensure continues improvement it’s critical to test and measure the results of your marketing activities. Whatever strategy, method or technology you choose to use, formal procedures of evaluation and monitoring will help you to understand the effectiveness of your marketing and return on investment.

Summary of the Plan and Supporting Documentation 

Your marketing plan should have a summary that summarise the key components of your plan. Look at it as a quick reference tool that you can refer to regularly to keep your goals and vision on track.  

The Benefits of a Marketing Plan

A good marketing plan, on the other hand, is a goal setter. It provides you with several major benefits which include:

• Rallying point: Your marketing plan provide your team something to rally behind. This makes them feel confident that you (captain of the vessel) has the charts in order, knows how to run the business, and has a goal or vision for the business. Companies often undervalue the impact of a "marketing plan" on its own people, who want to feel belonging to a team engaged in an exciting and complicated joint endeavor. If you want your team (employees) to feel committed and belonging to your business, it's important to share with them your vision of where you want the company be or be headed to in the years to come. People don't usually understand financial projections, but they can get excited and motivated about a well-written and well-thought-out marketing plan. Consider releasing your marketing plan, perhaps in an abridged version. Do it with some fanfare and generate some excitement for the adventures to come. Your team will appreciate being involved.
• Chart to success: We all do understand that plans are imperfect things. How can you determine what's going to happen 12 months or five years from now? Putting together a marketing plan maybe look upon as an exercise in futility, waste of time better spent meeting with customers or increasing and fine-tuning production? Yes, possibly although only in the narrowest sense. If you don't plan, you're doomed to fail, and an inaccurate plan is far better than no plan at all. To use a sea captain analogy, it's better to be 5 or even 10 degrees off your destination port than to have no destination at all mind. The main purpose of writing a marketing plan is to make be able to measure your progress and without a marketing plan, you won’t be able to track your progress and therefore you won’t be able to determine the direction of your business. Businesses without a marketing plan are rarely remembered for discovering anything but the business failure.
• Company operational instructions: Your TV set and your new phone came with a set of instructions, and your business is far more complicated to put together and run than either of them. The marketing plan is a step-by-step guide for your business' success. It's far more important than a vision statement. To develop a genuine marketing plan, you have to assess the business from top to bottom and make sure all the pieces are better implemented and working together in the best way. What do you intern to do with this enterprise called the company in the following year(s)? Consider it a to-do list on a grand scale. It assigns specific tasks for a year.
• Captured Thinking: You don't leave your financial people to keep their numbers off hands. Financial reports are the lifeblood of the numbers side of any company, no matter the size. It has no different with marketing. The written document lays out your game plan. If hire new employee or fire some team members, if memories falter, if events bring pressure to alter the givens, the information in the drafted marketing plan stays intact to remind you of what you'd agreed on.
• Top-level Reflection: In the daily hurly-burly of competitive business, it's difficult to turn attention to the big picture, especially those activities that aren't directly related to the daily operations. The need to take time periodically to really think about your business; whether it's delivering to you and your employees with what you want, whether you're getting all you can out of your products, your sales staff and your markets or whether there aren't some innovative wrinkles you can add. Writing your marketing plan is the best time to do this high-level thinking. Some businesses send their top marketing people away to a retreat. Some go to the home of a principal. Others do marketing plan development at a local motel, away from children, phones, TV and fax machines, so they can concentrate themselves solely to thinking hard and drawing the most accurate sketches they can of the immediate future of the business.

Generally, after writing your marketing plan and implemented it for a year, it is advisable to review it again. Judging from your set objective and level of attainment, you will be able to see the progress of your business. The will be some weak and strong strategies, challenges and opportunities you may want to foster or change. It is wise to try different marketing strategies (Read my article on the Top 10 Marketing Strategies) and stick to those that work best for your business. Of course, sometimes this is hard to make time for (there is that annoying real world to deal with), but it provide an unparalleled objective view of what you've been doing with your business life over a number of years.