How to Create a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan can only be designed when you already have a product or service to market. Without it, there is no point devising a marketing strategy. If you have already come up with the final and market-ready version of your merchandise, the next thing you can do is to concentrate on the five P’s of marketing: product, placement, pricing, promotion and people.
1. Decide on how to effectively introduce the product to the market. If it is a new product in its entirety, you may also have to explain how the product works and, more importantly, how it benefits its target market. If it is an innovation of an older product of the company, you must base your marketing strategy on the proven benefits of its predecessors while emphasizing at the same time what makes this new version better.
2. Find out whom you are selling to and what they are looking for in the kind of product that you are selling. From there, your marketing plan must be designed in such a way that it will give your target market all the answers it needs.
3. Regard price as the most important element of a marketing plan, although that may be true in some cases, but not always. Sometimes, price can be based on the quality of the product and even the effectiveness of a promotional strategy. Just remember: never to charge your market beyond what it is able to afford. If, for example, your average customer is willing to pay $15 for product X, it is okay to charge $18 or $20 if you feel your product’s branding and other aspects make the additional cost worthwhile. Do not get carried away to the point that you are charging your customer twice the average cost of the product. That can only backfire in the worst way for your business.
4. Acknowledge promotion as the step you can take to “sweeten” the deal. Promotions can be anything from offering freebies to discounts to holding a meet and greet for customers with their favorite celebrity. Just make sure that the money you spend on promotions will not eat your entire profit.
5. Assign the best people for the job. Even the best marketing plan will not be able to run itself!