Writing an accurate marketing plan is a key to your business's success. It must be written and it must be an honest approach to reaching your market.

Marketing Plans

A marketing plan is a set of directives an organization will execute to achieve their marketing objectives and organizational success. It consists of a well-conceived, written formula and includes all aspects of your expected marketing efforts for the period.

If It Isn't Written, It Won't Happen

Like most goals, it's nearly impossible to acheive your objectives unless you can review them regularly. In order to review them, they MUST be written down. You should invest whatever time is needed to create a formal plan. You may have the best ideas but they're only ideas until they are expressed in writing.

Tales of a Marketing Company

One of the first questions we ask at our marketing company is "Do you have a business plan?" We follow that question up with "Do you have a marketing plan?" Small businesses almost always say "No" to both questions. Surprisingly, many mid-size companies do too. 

Before we take on a client, we do an internal study with a set of home-grown calculators to see if the business is viable. Check out this story:

We were approached by a man who had some software to sell. It's already developed and for sale on line. He wanted us to execute his marketing efforts. We spent 2 hours looking into his business, his market, and his competitors. We had to go back and tell him there was no way he could overcome his competition (Adobe) without huge investments. There was simply no way to make his product profitable. He had spend many hours and a pile of money developing his software. He didn't take the time to determine whether or not he could actually make a business out of it.

A marketing plan is key to any business. Take the time to develop it and make it your guide to success.

Resources

• Marketing Plan template