 How Do You Make A Marketing Plan? There are many different ways of making a marketing plan, individual business have different areas that are most important to them. Any plans you make should have emphasis on the areas you feel are most important to your business. The key aspects of a plan are to describe each area, look at the best opportunities for your business, and come up with a sensible objective (and hopefully ideas on how to achieve it). This will give you a number of objectives across all areas of your business. Even if an objective is to “Keep marketing costs as near to level with last year as possible”, you will have a set written goal, and will therefore be more likely to achieve it.
Remember, a marketing plan may just mean writing down your current strategies, there may be no need for change. However, the plan will still help, as it will show you that the strategy is ok, and, may point to ways of ensuring it continues to be successful in the future.
They key areas of marketing that all plans should look at are the following:
PRICE
(i) Pricing Strategy
What part of the market are your prices aimed at? Are you attempting to gain lots of profit from each sale; sell lots of items at a low price, or aim for somewhere in between?
You need to look at whether your current pricing is effective, and whether you believe your strategy needs to be changed. Perhaps just making your image appear more upmarket could increase high profit sales without lowering the price.
By setting an objective on your price strategy you can help plan for unexpected sales growth or reduction.
Example Objective: “Maintain our high profit strategy by promoting our superior product. However, if our competition drops their prices, we should be prepared to do the same to maintain sales.”
(ii) Pricing Against Competition
In the vast majority of markets, the way customers view your prices is based not only on the direct cost to them, but also the cost compared to similar products (I.e.: Your competition).
Your prices may be cheap, but if the competition is offering a near identical product for 20% less then you still risk losing a lot of customers.
You need to look at how your price compares to the rest of the market. If you are more expensive, do you need to emphasize the quality of your product, or if you are cheaper do you need to assure people that quality is not compromised? Would altering prices make you more competitive?
Example Objective: “Remind customers that although we are cheaper, our quality is comparable with models over 30% more expensive.”
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