Integrated marketing will assist you in creating a marketing plan that is tailed for your business.
When writing the business plan, the Marketing Plan section explains how you’re going to get your customers to buy your products and/or services. The marketing plan, then, will include sections detailing your:
· Products and/or Services and your Unique Selling Proposition
· Pricing Strategy
· Sales/Distribution Plan
· Advertising and Promotions Plan
Products and/or Services
This part of the marketing plan focuses on the uniqueness of your product or service, and how the customer will benefit from using the products or services you’re offering. Use these questions to write a paragraph summarizing these aspects for your marketing plan:
What are the features of your product or service?
Describe the physical attributes of your product or service, and any other relevant features, such as what it does, or how your product or service differs from competitive products or services.
How will your product or service benefit the customer?
What is it that sets your product or service apart from all the rest? In other words, what is your Unique Selling Proposition, the message you want your customers to receive about your product or service that is the heart of your marketing plan? The marketing plan is all about communicating this central message to your customers.
Pricing Strategy
The pricing strategy portion of the marketing plan involves determining how you will price your product or service; the price you charge has to be competitive but still allow you to make a reasonable profit.
The keyword here is “reasonable”; you can charge any price you want to, but for every product or service there’s a limit to how much the consumer is willing to pay. Your pricing strategy needs to take this consumer threshold into account.
The most common question small business people have about the pricing strategy section of the marketing plan is, “How do you know what price to charge?”
Basically you set your pricing through a process of calculating your costs, estimating the benefits to consumers, and comparing your products, services, and prices to others that are similar.
Set your pricing by examining how much it cost you to produce the product or service and adding a fair price for the benefits that the customer will enjoy. Examining what others are charging for similar products or services will guide you when you’re figuring out what a “fair” price for such benefits would be. You may find it useful to do a breakeven analysis.
The pricing strategy you outline in your marketing plan will answer the following questions:
How does the pricing of your product or service compare to the market price of similar products or services?
What kind of ROI (Return On Investment) are you expecting with this pricing strategy, and within what time frame?
Continue on to the next page to learn how to put together the Sales and Distribution part of the marketing plan.
Sales and Distribution Plan
Remember, the primary goal of the marketing plan is to get people to buy your products or services. The Sales and Distribution part of the marketing plan details how this is going to happen.
How is your product or service going to get to the customer? For instance, will you distribute your product or service through a Web site, through the mail, through sales representatives, or through retail?
What distribution channel is going to be used?
Advertising And Promotion Plan
Essentially the Advertising and Promotion section of the marketing plan describes how you’re going to deliver your Unique Selling Proposition to your prospective customers. While there are literally thousands of different promotion avenues available to you, what distinguishes a successful Advertising and Promotion Plan from an unsuccessful one is focus – and that’s what your Unique Selling Proposition provides.
So think first of the message that you want to send to your targeted audience. Then look at these promotion possibilities and decide which to emphasize in your marketing plan:
Advertising – The best approach to advertising is to think of it in terms of media and which media will be most effective in reaching your target market. Then you can make decisions about how much of your annual advertising budget you’re going to spend on each medium.
What percentage of your annual advertising budget will you invest in each of the following:
· the Internet
· television
· radio
· newspapers
· magazines
· telephone books/directories
· billboards
· bench/bus/subway ads
· direct mail
· cooperative advertising with wholesalers, retailers or other businesses?
Include not only the cost of the advertising but your projections about how much business the advertising will bring in.
Sales Promotion – If it’s appropriate to your business, you may want to incorporate sales promotion activites into your advertising and promotion plan, such as:
· offering free samples
· coupons
· point of purchase displays
· product demonstrations
Marketing Materials – Every business will include some of these in their promotion plans. The most common marketing material is the business card, but brochures, pamphlets and service sheets are also common.
Publicity – Another avenue of promotion that every business should use. Describe how you plan to generate publicity. While press releases spring to mind, that’s only one way to get people spreading the word about your business. Consider:
· product launches
· special events, including community involvement
· writing articles
· getting and using testimonials
Your Business’ Web Site – If your business has or will have a Web site, describe how your Web site fits into your advertising and promotion plan.
Other Promotion Activities
Your promotion activities are truly limited only by your imagination. If you plan to teach a course, sponsor a community event, or conduct an email campaign, you’ll want to include it in your advertising and promotion plan. Remember, sporadic unconnected attempts to promote your product or service are bound to fail; your goal is to plan and carry out a sequence of focused promotion activities that will communicate with your potential customers.
No business is too small to have a marketing plan. After all, no business is too small for customers or clients. And if you have these, you need to communicate with them about your products and/or services.
