Marketing Plan Example

Business owners need to avoid considering production of materials, products or services without a marketing plan example. In recent times, several business owners are well aware with the fact that a victorious marketing venture marketing plan exampleneeds an effective marketing plan example.As soon as resources in firms stiffen, a marketing plan becomes a necessary to rank and pick the best opportunities. Furthermore, an effectual marketing and business plan may definitely influence the result. One of the business plan outline of how to write a business plan is writing a marketing plan.

According to a research, companies with a good marketing plan example experience around 24 % to 30 % advancement in sales in comparison with others, who do no use marketing plan example.A marketing plan example and in business plan examples also does not require being excessively complex, instead it needs to be appropriate and reasonable.

Important Sectors Covered by Marketing Plan Example:

Below mentioned are certain sectors, which firms or businesses need to explore in marketing plan examples:

Market Research

For promoters, to their task of developing and maintaining customers, they need to carry out research to get familiar with their market requirements. Business executives may do this through constant research and appraisal of their services and products. This will greatly help companies to understand what customers want.

Positioning

A secure market place and apparent value scheme creates the base for the development of a good marketing plan. A good market research may guide for how to position the firm and how to locate a secure position in the market.

Strategies and Tactics

Business people usually create marketing strategies while trading existing products in existing markets, introducing new products in new markets, or while expanding existing products marketing to new market areas.

A strategic marketing plan example contains:

· Public Relations

· Direct Marketing

· Database Marketing

· Strategic Marketing

· Customer Retention

· Market Analysis

Businesspeople with the help of sound marketing strategies may experience a consistent set of tactical business operations. Furthermore, with the help of these strategies and tactics, the entities, finances, and resources for the marketing plan examples are obtained.

Metrics

Metrics also form a vital element of a marketing plan example, as they offer a medium to evaluate growth. With constant measurements of actual marketing performance over time against the metrics, firms may find out their closeness with their marketing targets and can go for any possible modifications in their strategies, if required.

To be efficient, a marketing plan example recognizes alternatives, resources and helps to sort the best opportunities. It acts as the base for the business activities that develop and foster an assurance of value to the customers.

How To Start An Ice Cream Business Plan - example 1

Example number one of how to write a business plan is this website which deals with creating your own ice cream business - did you ever dream about it? It's very interesting and so much to learn about it in other businesses.

How To Start A Lawn Care Business - example 2

This is example number two of how to write a business plan. This website deals with creating your own lawn care business - This is a great example that envolves lots of fianace issues.

How to Start a Gift Basket Business - example 3

The last example of how to write a business plan which deals with creating your own gift basket business - It is fun and easy to read it and to learn so much about writing a business plan and so much more about the business world.

Marketing strategy

Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. A marketing strategy should be centered around the key concept that customer satisfaction is the main goal.

Key part of the general corporate strategy

Marketing strategy is a method of focusing an organization's energies and resources on a course of action which can lead to increased sales and dominance of a targeted market niche. A marketing strategy combines product development, promotion, distribution, pricing, relationship management and other elements; identifies the firm's marketing goals, and explains how they will be achieved, ideally within a stated timeframe. Marketing strategy determines the choice of target market segments, positioning, marketing mix, and allocation of resources. It is most effective when it is an integral component of overall firm strategy, defining how the organization will successfully engage customers, prospects, and competitors in the market arena. Corporate strategies, corporate missions, and corporate goals. As the customer constitutes the source of a company's revenue, marketing strategy is closely linked with sales. A key component of marketing strategy is often to keep marketing in line with a company's overarching mission statement.

Basic theory:

1. Target Audience
2. Proposition/Key Element
3. Implementation

Tactics and actions

A marketing strategy can serve as the foundation of a marketing plan. A marketing plan contains a set of specific actions required to successfully implement a marketing strategy. For example: "Use a low cost product to attract consumers. Once our organization, via our low cost product, has established a relationship with consumers, our organization will sell additional, higher-margin products and services that enhance the consumer's interaction with the low-cost product or service."

A strategy consists of a well thought out series of tactics to make a marketing plan more effective. Marketing strategies serve as the fundamental underpinning of marketing plans designed to fill market needs and reach marketing objectives. Plans and objectives are generally tested for measurable results.

A marketing strategy often integrates an organization's marketing goals, policies, and action sequences (tactics) into a cohesive whole. Similarly, the various strands of the strategy , which might include advertising, channel marketing, internet marketing, promotion and public relations can be orchestrated. Many companies cascade a strategy throughout an organization, by creating strategy tactics that then become strategy goals for the next level or group. Each one group is expected to take that strategy goal and develop a set of tactics to achieve that goal. This is why it is important to make each strategy goal measurable.

Marketing strategies are dynamic and interactive. They are partially planned and partially unplanned. See strategy dynamics.

Types of strategies

Marketing strategies may differ depending on the unique situation of the individual business. However there are a number of ways of categorizing some generic strategies. A brief description of the most common categorizing schemes is presented below:

* Strategies based on market dominance - In this scheme, firms are classified based on their market share or dominance of an industry. Typically there are four types of market dominance strategies:
o Leader
o Challenger
o Follower
o Nicher
* Porter generic strategies - strategy on the dimensions of strategic scope and strategic strength. Strategic scope refers to the market penetration while strategic strength refers to the firm’s sustainable competitive advantage. The generic strategy framework (porter 1984) comprises two alternatives each with two alternative scopes. These are Differentiation and low-cost leadership each with a dimension of Focus-broad or narrow.
o Product differentiation
o Market segmentation
* Innovation strategies - This deals with the firm's rate of the new product development and business model innovation. It asks whether the company is on the cutting edge of technology and business innovation. There are three types:
o Pioneers
o Close followers
o Late followers
* Growth strategies - In this scheme we ask the question, “How should the firm grow?”. There are a number of different ways of answering that question, but the most common gives four answers:
o Horizontal integration
o Vertical integration
o Diversification
o Intensification

A more detailed scheme uses the categories:

* Prospector
* Analyzer
* Defender
* Reactor
* Marketing warfare strategies - This scheme draws parallels between marketing strategies and military strategies.

Marketing effectiveness
Marketing effectiveness is the quality of how marketers go to market with the goal of optimizing their spending to achieve good results for both the short-term and long-term. It is also related to Marketing ROI and Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).
Marketing effectiveness has four dimensions:Corporate – Each company operates within certain bounds. These are determined by their size, their budget and their ability to make organizational change. Within these bounds marketers operate along the five factors described below.Competitive – Each company in a category operates within a similar framework as described below. In an ideal world, marketers would have perfect information on how they act as well as how their competitors act. In reality, in many categories have reasonably good information through sources, such as, IRI or Nielsen. In many industries, competitive marketing information is hard to come by.
Customers/Consumers – Understanding and taking advantage of how customers make purchasing decisions can help marketers improve their marketing effectiveness. Groups of consumers act in similar ways leading to the need to segment them. Based on these segments, they make choices based on how they value the attributes of a product and the brand, in return for price paid for the product. Consumers build brand value through information. Information is received through many sources, such as, advertising, word-of-mouth and in the (distribution) channel often characterized with the purchase funnel, a McKinsey & Company concept. Lastly, consumers consume and make purchase decisions in certain ways.
Exogenous Factors – There are many factors outside of our immediate control that can impact the effectiveness of our marketing activities. These can include the weather, interest rates, government regulations and many others. Understanding the impact these factors can have on our consumers can help us to design programs that can take advantage of these factors or mitigate the risk of these factors if they take place in the middle of our marketing campaigns.


There are five factors driving the level of marketing effectiveness that marketers can achieve:

Marketing Strategy – Improving marketing effectiveness can be achieved by employing a superior marketing strategy. By positioning the product or brand correctly, the product/brand will be more successful in the market than competitors’ products/brands. Even with the best strategy, marketers must execute their programs properly to achieve extraordinary results.
Marketing Creative – Even without a change in strategy, better creative can improve results. Without a change in strategy, AFLAC was able to achieve stunning results with its introduction of the Duck (AFLAC) campaign. With the introduction of this new creative concept, the company growth rate soared from 12% prior to the campaign to 28% following it. (See references below, Bang)
Marketing Execution – By improving how marketers go to market, they can achieve significantly greater results without changing their strategy or their creative execution. At the marketing mix level, marketers can improve their execution by making small changes in any or all of the 4-Ps (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) (Marketing) without making changes to the strategic position or the creative execution marketers can improve their effectiveness and deliver increased revenue. At the program level marketers can improve their effectiveness by managing and executing each of their marketing campaigns better. It's commonly known that consistency of a Marketing Creative strategy across various media (e.g. TV, Radio, Print and Online), not just within each individual media message, can amplify and enhance impact of the overall marketing campaign effort. Additional examples would be improving direct mail through a better call-to-action or editing web site content to improve its organic search results, marketers can improve their marketing effectiveness for each type of program. A growing area of interest within (Marketing Strategy) and Execution are the more recent interaction dynamics of traditional marketing (e.g. TV or Events) with online consumer activity (e.g. Social Media). (See references below, Brand Ecosystems) Not only direct product experience, but also any stimulus provided by traditional marketing, can become a catalyst for a consumer brand "groundswell" online as outlined in the book Groundswell.
Marketing Infrastructure (also known as Marketing Management) – Improving the business of marketing can lead to significant gains for the company. Management of agencies, budgeting, motivation and coordination of marketing activities can lead to improved competitiveness and improved results. The overall accountability for brand leadership and business results is often reflected in an organization under a title within a (Brand management) department.
Exogenous Factors - Generally out of the control of marketers, external or exogenous factors also influence how marketers can improve their results. Taking advantage of seasonality, interests or the regulatory environment can help marketers improve their marketing effectiveness.

Clear Seas Marketing Effectiveness Research Marketing Effectiveness

On the way to work today you were likely exposed to hundreds if not thousands of marketing communications from endless types of manufacturers, associations, service providers, charities, politicians, etc. Some of these messages achieve national coverage while others are more locally based. The shared commonality is the desire to capture your attention even if only for a few seconds, and to make an impression, even if subconscious, so that you will remember and seek them out when the need arises.

Ensuring that your marketing communication is effective, rises to the top in terms of recall with the target audience and causes them to take action is a major challenge today. At Clear Seas Research we partner with you to test your communications pre and post campaign launch to confirm the message will:
Break through the noise.

* Identify the most impactful medium(s) to deliver the message
* Identify which concepts are most relevant and memorable
* Determine if the proposed messaging is in line with brand image

Engage the target.

* Confirm that your marketing communications are impactful
* Ensure the target audience understands what you are communicating
* Redefine the target if necessary to increase interest

Drive activity.

* Achieve messaging that results in forward action
* Establish a time frame for desired behavior to occur
* Identify the triggers associated with the preferred activity

Increase momentum.

* Continue to positively grow brand presence
* Generate greater sales related activity
* Maximize the return on your marketing communication investment

By evaluating each integral area of your marketing communication strategy, we will work closely with you to create a customized solution that fits your needs – and makes the complex clear

Product marketing

Product marketing deals with the first of the "4P"'s of marketing, which are Product, Pricing,

Place, and Promotion. Product marketing, as opposed to product management, deals with more outbound marketing tasks. For example, product management deals with the nuts and bolts of product development within a firm, whereas product marketing deals with marketing the product to prospects, customers, and others. Product marketing, as a job function within a firm, also differs from other marketing jobs such as Marcom or marketing communications, online marketing, advertising, marketing strategy, etc. A Product Market is something that is referred to when pitching a new product to the general public. The people you are trying to make your product appeal to is your consumer market. For example: If you were pitching a new video game console game to the public, your consumer market would probably be the adult male Video Game market (depending on the type of game). Thus you would carry out market research to find out how best to release the game. Likewise, a massage chair would probably not appeal to younger children, so you would market your product to an older generation.

Role of product marketing

Product marketing in a business addresses five important strategic questions:

What products will be offered (i.e., the breadth and depth of the product line)?

Who will be the target customers (i.e., the boundaries of the market segments to be served)?

How will the products reach those (i.e., the distribution channel)?

How much should the products be priced at?

How to introduce the products (i.e., the way to promote the products)?

Product marketing vs. product management

Product marketing frequently differs from product management in high-tech companies. Whereas the product manager is required to take a product's requirements from the sales and marketing personnel and create a product requirements document (PRD), which will be used by the engineering team to build the product, the product marketing manager can be engaged in the task of creating a marketing requirements document (MRD), which is used as source for the product management to develop the PRD. In other companies the product manager creates both the MRDs and the PRDs, while the product marketing manager does outbound tasks like giving product demonstrations in trade shows, creating marketing collateral like hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets, and white papers. This requires the product marketing manager to be skilled not only in competitor analysis, market research, and technical writing, but also in more business oriented activities like conducting ROI and NPV analyses on technology investments, strategizing how the decision criteria of the prospects or customers can be changed so that they buy the company's product vis-a-vis the competitor's product, etc. In smaller high-tech firms or start-ups, product marketing and product management functions can be blurred, and both tasks may be borne by one individual. However, as the company grows someone needs to focus on creating good requirements documents for the engineering team, whereas someone else needs to focus on how to analyze the market, influence the "analysts", press, etc. When such clear demarcation becomes visible, the former falls under the domain of product management, and the latter, under product marketing. In Silicon Valley, in particular, product marketing professionals have considerable domain experience in a particular market or technology or both. Some Silicon Valley firms have titles such as Product Marketing Engineer, who tend to be promoted to managers in due course. The trend that is emerging in Silicon Valley is for companies to hire a team of a product marketing manager with a technical marketing manager. The Technical Marketing role is becoming more valuable as companies become more competitive and seek to reduce costs and time to market.

Marketing Mix

The marketing mix is generally accepted as the use and specification of the 'four Ps' describing the strategy position of a product in the marketplace. The 'marketing mix' is a set of controllable, tactical marketing tools that work together to achieve company's objectives. One version of the marketing mix originated in 1948 when James Culliton said that a marketing decision should be a result of something similar to a recipe. This version was used in 1953 when Neil Borden, in his American Marketing Association presidential address, took the recipe idea one step further and coined the term "marketing-mix". A prominent marketer, E. Jerome McCarthy, proposed a 4 P classification in 1960, which has seen wide use. The four Ps concept is explained in most marketing textbooks and classes.

Elements of the marketing mix are often referred to as 'the four Ps':

Product - A tangible object or an intangible service that is mass produced or manufactured on a large scale with a specific volume of units. Intangible products are often service based like the tourism industry & the hotel industry or codes-based products like cellphone load and credits. Typical examples of a mass produced tangible object are the motor car and the disposable razor. A less obvious but ubiquitous mass produced service is a computer operating system.

Price – The price is the amount a customer pays for the product. It is determined by a number of factors including market share, competition, material costs, product identity and the customer's perceived value of the product. The business may increase or decrease the price of product if other stores have the same product.

Place – Place represents the location where a product can be purchased. It is often referred to as the distribution channel. It can include any physical store as well as virtual stores on the Internet.

Promotion– Promotion represents all of the communications that a marketer may use in the marketplace. Promotion has four distinct elements - advertising, public relations, word of mouth and point of sale. A certain amount of crossover occurs when promotion uses the four principal elements together, which is common in film promotion. Advertising covers any communication that is paid for, from cinema commercials, radio and Internet adverts through print media and billboards. Public relations are where the communication is not directly paid for and includes press releases, sponsorship deals, exhibitions, conferences, seminars or trade fairs and events. Word of mouth is any apparently informal communication about the product by ordinary individuals, satisfied customers or people specifically engaged to create word of mouth momentum. Sales staff often plays an important role in word of mouth and Public Relations (see Product above).

Broadly defined, optimizing the marketing mix is the primary responsibility of marketing. By offering the product with the right combination of the four Ps marketers can improve their results and marketing effectiveness. Making small changes in the marketing mix is typically considered to be a tactical change.Parm Bains says Making large changes in any of the four Ps can be considered strategic. For example, a large change in the price, say from $19.00 to $39.00 would be considered a strategic change in the position of the product. However a change of $130 to $129.99 would be considered a tactical change, potentially related to a promotional offer.

The term 'marketing mix' however, does not imply that the 4P elements represent options. They are not trade-offs but are fundamental marketing issues that always need to be addressed. They are the fundamental actions that marketing requires whether determined explicitly or by default.

Marketing communications

Marketing communications is defined by actions a firm takes to communicate with end-users, consumers and external parties. Marketing communications encompasses four distinct subsets, which are:

Personal sales

Oral presentation given by a salesperson who approaches individuals or a group of potential customers:

Live, interactive relationship

Personal interest

Attention and response

Interesting presentation

Clear and thorough.

Sales promotion

Short-term incentives to encourage buying of products:

Instant appeal

Anxiety to sell

An example is coupons or a sale. People are given an incentive to buy, but this does not build customer loyalty or encourage future repeat buys. A major drawback of sales promotion is that it is easily copied by competition. It cannot be used as a sustainable source of differentiation.

Public Relations

Public Relations (or PR, as an acronym) is the use of media tools by a firm in order to promote goodwill from an organization to a target market segment, or other consumers of a firm's good/service. PR stems from the fact that a firm cannot seek to antagonize or inflame its market base, due to incurring a lessened demand for its good/service. Organizations undertake PR in order to assure consumers, and to forestall negative perceptions towards it.

PR can span:

Interviews

Speeches/Presentations

Corporate literature, such as financial statements, brochures, etc.

Publicity

Publicity involves attaining space in media, without having to pay directly for such coverage. As an example, an organization may have the launch of a new product covered by a newspaper or TV news segment. This benefits the firm in question since it is making consumers aware of its product, without necessarily paying a newspaper or television station to cover the event.

Advertising

Advertising occurs when a firm directly pays a media channel to publicize its product. Common examples of this include TV and radio adverts, billboards, branding, sponsorship, etc.

Marketing communications "mix"

Marketing communications is a "sub-mix" within the Promotion aspect of the marketing mix, as the exact nature of how to apply marketing communications depends on the nature of the product in question.

Accordingly, a given product would require a unique communications mix, in order to convey successfully information to consumers. Some products may require a stronger emphasis on personal sales, while others may need more focus on advertising.

What is Marketing?

In popular usage, "marketing" is the promotion of products, especially advertising and branding. However, in professional usage the term has a wider meaning of the practice and science of trading. The American Marketing Association (AMA) states, "Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organizationincludes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research. The scientific study of marketing is a wide and heav and its stakeholders. Marketing practice tends to be seen as a creative industry, which ily interconnected subject with extensive academic publications. Marketing methods are also informed by many of the social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and economics. Anthropology is also a small, but growing influence. Market research underpins these activities. Through advertising, it is also related to many of the creative arts. The marketing literature is also infamous for re-inventing itself and its vocabulary according to the times and the culture.