Five Step Marketing Tool

5 Step Marketing Plan Tool:

A marketing plan is an efficient way to illustrate out the marketing for your product or service. The over all information that has to pertain to your market including your target market, segmentation, and a specific step-by-step process on how you will build your strategy. Not only does a marketing plan guide your strategy but it also helps you stay on track for building more successful business. It is important to build a solid marketing plan because it can help you through the year and let you focus on creating business and concentrate on the strategies and systems in place.

Below I have developed a simple 5 step tool to making a successful marketing plan:

Step 1: Situation Analysis

• This first section of the marketing plan describes your situation. This is where you would describe your products and/or services. Also, this is where you would show how you differ from your competition and the importance of your features and benefits. You would also include segmentation and your target market into this section of the marketing plan. Make sure that you analyze all your company’s strengths and weaknesses. What gives your firm a competitive advantage? What makes people go to other company’s? It is important to mention any external opportunities that you can capitalize on such as expanding your product/service to a new market. Lastly you want to position your product/service, first analyze your product/service and distinguish how it is different from competitors. Secondly decide what kind of buyer is going to buy your product.

Step 2: Target Audience

• This part of your marketing plan is one simple paragraph that describes your prospective customer. You can speak in terms of demographics- age, race, sex, family structure, earnings. It is important to know your customer- are they business leaders? Are they more conservative versus innovative? Introvert or extrovert? This are all important questions you need to ask yourself about your target audience when making your marketing plan. Remember in a business to business setting your target market may not be a specific person. Your target market may be a specific job title, geographic location or a larger business.

Step 3: Marketing Goals

• In this segment of the marketing plan you need to list all the marketing goals you want to achieve as a firm. This is an important aspect because it involves everyone in your company. Sitting down and brainstorming marketing goals will bring your firm together and everyone will be on the same page when it comes to what your mission is. What do you want your marketing plan to achieve? This is the main question that you are trying to solve in this segment of the marketing plan.

Step 4: Communication Strategies and Tactics

• This is the lifeline of your marketing plan. This is the section describing how you are going to execute your marketing strategies. In the previous section, you made a list of goals you want to accomplish- in this section you are going to describe how you are going to achieve those goals. Good marketing strategies and plans use tactics that can be useful in any part of a sales cycle. Cold prospects would prefer to see some sort of direct marketing, or advertising something to get them generally interested. Warm prospects- these may be people you already have a relationship with, are more interested in getting a personalized message or a customer based loyalty membership. To complete this section, outline all strategies you can use to reach anybody at any point during the sales cycle.

Step 5: Budget

• After developing tactics and strategies to reach potential customers you then need to budget your plan. New businesses may find that you are going over budget when making a marketing plan, simply go back and adjust until your plan and your budget match up.