Marketing Plan | Template | Sample | Outline
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There are three essential questions you have to ask yourself before you can even begin to write your Marketing Plan. The first is who do you think your most likely and most suitable potential customers are? The second question is how do you turn these suspects into prospects and then into customers? The last, and perhaps most important question of all is, after you’ve identified the right parties and convinced them to give you a chance, how do you make sure they stay with you?
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There are many Marketing Plan Templates available online. Most are advertiser supported and there is no charge to download them or to use them. The vast majority of them are designed to work with Microsoft Word, although there is no shortage of templates available for Google Docs and Apple.
You can customize most of these templates to some degree by inserting your own company and product names as well as target times. The problem, however, is that every marketing scenario is unique. There is very little likelihood of finding a template that is just right for your particular situation. However, Google is your friend, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t use the search engine to bring up canned Marketing Plan Templates, and you might very well find elements in some that are relevant to your company and your marketing goals.
How to Write a Marketing Plan
In creating your own unique Marketing Plan, after you’ve decided who your targets are, you have to decide what it is that is unique about what you offer. Is it the lowest price? Is it the highest quality? You must also decide on how to price your product or services.
Your Marketing Plan needs to access your strengths and weaknesses, and who your competitors are. You also need to consider what contingencies there are that might provide opportunities or portend threats to your plan.
And now comes the outline of your action plan. How much will you rely on word-of-mouth? Will you use telemarketing? Will you concentrate on internet-based marketing? Will you utilize SEO, and if so, will you do it internally or will you hire an outside firm?
Perhaps the hardest and most gut-wrenching part of any Marketing Plan is setting milestones. By when must you have received responses from a given number of prospects, and by when must you have made an agreed-on number of sales, By when must you have sold a given dollar amount of product or service. And, most difficult of all, by when must you be operating on a profitable basis?
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