Marketing Plan Template
by Ingrid Cliff

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Marketing plans sit within an overall business plan – they are one of the vehicles to help you deliver your business goals and objectives. Without a clear business direction and strategy, your marketing plans will never be 100% effective. Always start with gaining clarity on the direction of your business before filling in your marketing plan template and the activities you will undertake.

If you are clear on your overall business direction, your first step in planning your marketing is research.

Competition research

Find your direct and indirect competitors – yes everyone has a competitor in business. Find them and learn from them. Find out:

• what they are doing and where they are marketing – try and get copies of their marketing material,

• the sort of customers they attract,

• what they are doing better than you,

• the things you do better than them,

• how they price their products,

• why people choose to buy from them and not you.

If you really want to get into depth, explore their website source code to check out the keywords they are using and get a Google alert set up so you can be kept up to date with what they are doing.

Customer research

Next you need to research your customers. The more you know and understand them and their needs and wants, the better positioned you will be to be able to satisfy what they are looking for.

Discover who your customers are, their age and gender, where they live, how much they earn, what they value, what is important to them, what they dislike, how often they buy products or services like yours and what they look for in a business and a product.

Make sure you define your perfect "A" client – right down to attitude and personality if this is important to you. For example – my "A" clients generally are entrepreneurs, constantly full of great ideas and need help in focusing and taking the ideas to completion. They may be slightly "scattered" in approach, value knowledge and experience and appreciate holistic solutions rather than task solutions.

Really get inside your customers mind. Check out demographic research on things such as Generation Ys, Neo's and grey nomads to understand what makes them tick. After all – you are in business not just to make money, but because you want to make a difference, make people happy and solve their problems.

Product/service research

Once you know your customers and your competitors better, take time to look back at your products and services. Impartially look at each one and ask yourself what is great and not so great about each one. Why do you have that service/product and what need is it trying to fill? Why do people buy it? Why don't they buy it? What results does your service or product achieve for people?
Other research
Yes ... still more research is needed before you can begin to plan. How effective is your current distribution method? What is working and what isn't working? What about your production process? How about your sales process?

Once you have all of this data, you can start planning for the coming year.

Many of the marketing planning tools available were written before internet marketing became big ... and don't address the challenges of running an internet business. This means you are only getting part of the story. All modern businesses need to plan for both on-line and off-line marketing.

Online marketing is much more than a website – it includes things such as affiliate programs, auto-responders, blogs, e-books, shopping carts, social networking sites and a host of other things.

Print marketing is what many people think of when they think about marketing and yes it is still important. This includes things like marketing collateral such as brochures, flyers, business cards, corporate gifts and posters. It also includes direct mail and customer mail. These two areas are some of the most overlooked and most profitable forms of marketing you can do. Print marketing also includes things such as books and articles.

Advertising both on-line and off-line needs to be considered in your marketing plan. Always make sure you calculate return on investment by tracking results and measuring the response you get. If you are not at least making back the cost of the campaign each and every campaign you are throwing money away unnecessarily – there are much better methods available than expensive brand advertising.

PR is another area you need to address. What events will you hold or be part of? What is your press release cycle? Will you run seminars/teleseminars/webinars? Will you exhibit at a tradeshow or sponsor someone or a cause?

Then there is a more general category of marketing from where you can create massive amounts of customer traffic. This includes alliances, client nurturing, upselling, competitions, joint ventures, referrals and a whole lot more.

The bottom line with marketing is you need to do a little bit every day. Work out the areas you want to tackle, plan them into your calendar, get advice on how to do it and then implement and measure the results.

Author's Bio
Ingrid Cliff is a Brisbane freelance writer and the Chief Word Wizard of Heart Harmony - her writing services studio that helps put your business into words. Read another of Ingrid's articles about your Marketing Plan Template.