A marketing plan is a strategic document developed to achieve specific marketing objectives. It outlines a company's advertising and promotional activities for a defined period, describes the organization's current marketing position, and identifies the target market and marketing mix that will be used to achieve stated goals.

Marketing plans are typically developed by marketing managers in collaboration with product managers, product marketing managers, and sales teams.

Objectives

Acquiring marketing share, increasing customer awareness, and building a favorable business image are some of the objectives that can be related to marketing planning. The marketing plan also helps layout the necessary budget and resources needed to achieve the goals stated in the marketing plan. It is able to show what the company is intended to accomplish within the budget and also makes it possible for company executives to assess potential return on the investment of marketing dollars.

The marketing plan offers an opportunity for a productive discussion between employees and leaders of an organisation. The marketing plan also allows the marketing team to examine their past decisions and understand their results in order to better prepare for the future. It also lets the marketing team to observe and study the environment that they are operating in.

Components

Marketing plans start with the identification of customer needs through a market research and how the business can satisfy these needs while generating an acceptable return. Recent industry research has highlighted the role of briefing in this process, suggesting that unclear or poorly constructed marketing briefs can lead to misalignment between stakeholders and reduce the effectiveness of marketing execution, while well-defined briefs may improve strategic alignment and outcomes.This includes processes such as market mix, research, situation analysis, segmentation, strategies, budgets, financial forecasts, competitive strategies, objective setting, and results monitoring. The marketing plan also shows the actions that will be taken, and the resources to be applied, in order to achieve planned goals.

  1. Executive summary
  2. Market research
  3. Market environment (e.g. economic, legal, governmental, technological, ecological, sociocultural, supply chain)
  4. Market analysis (e.g. market size, segmentation, industry structure, competitive analysis)
  5. Consumer analysis (e.g. participants, demographics, psychographics)
  6. Internal analysis (e.g. company finances, people, time, skills; objectives, mission statement, vision statement; organizational culture)
  7. Situation analysis (e.g. external threats and opportunities, internal strengths and weaknesses, critical success factors, sustainable competitive advantage)
  8. Objective setting
  9. Marketing Strategy
  10. Product management (e.g. unique selling proposition, product mix, perceptual mapping, product life cycle management and new product development, branding; product portfolio analysis: BCG analysis, contribution margin analysis, GE multifactorial analysis, quality function deployment)
  11. Segmented marketing actions and market share objectives
  12. Pricing (e.g. objectives, strategy, discounts and allowances, price elasticity, price zoning, break-even analysis)
  13. Promotion (e.g. promotional mix, advertising, sales promotion, publicity, public relations, word-of-mouth marketing, viral marketing)
  14. Distribution
  15. Implementation (e.g. personnel, financial, management information systems, results monitoring, contingencies, project management)
  16. Financial Summary (e.g. pro-forma monthly income statement)
  17. Scenarios
  18. Controls (e.g. performance indicators, feedback mechanisms)

Research

Marketing research can be either internal or external. Internal research refers to creating better experiences and products for existing customers, while external research involves looking to gain new customers.

Objective setting

James Quinn defined objectives as "stat[ing] what is to be achieved and when results are to be accomplished", but not "how the results are to be achieved". Marketing objectives typically relate to what products will be where in what markets, based on customer behavior in those markets. Other objectives in a marketing plan include those for pricing, distribution, and advertising. Quinn describes marketing plans as generally concerned with "8 Ps": Price, Product, Promotion, Place, People, Physical environment, Process, and Packaging.

It is important to put both quantities and timescales into the marketing objectives.

Implementation

Marketing plans typically use budgets, schedules and marketing metrics for monitoring and evaluating results. With budget, they can compare planned expenditures with actual expenditures for given period. Schedules allow management to see when tasks were supposed to be completed and when they actually were. Marketing metrics tracks actual outcomes of marketing programs to see whether the company is moving forward towards its objectives. Apart from metrics, a specific action plan allows a marketing plan to better measure results and that criteria are met.

Elements of marketing performance that may be tracked include sales analysis, market share analysis, expense analysis, and financial analysis (including figures such as profit, return on investment and contribution).

See also

  • Business plan
  • Marketing
  • Marketing management
  • Strategic management
  • Product differentiation

References

Further reading

  • H. A. Simon, "Rational decision making in business organisations," American Economic Review
  • J. Pfeffer and G. R. Salancik, The External Control of Organizations
  • K. Paolo Sumagaysay, "The oversaturated world"