Business Plan Tutorial, Part 7
Marketing Plan

Tutorials 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Intro

Many people get discouraged when they consider business planning activities. Doing it right involves work and takes time away from your other tasks. A lot of people can't find the time to do it in one burst of activity. For that reason, we're breaking this business plan tutorial into nine sections so that you can pace yourself and make reasonable progress while still taking care of everything else you do. If you're just getting started, see Part One. The plan itself will cover:

Now you're ready to write your marketing plan.

Identify the basic need that your product or service is going to solve for your customers. Then state how you are going to solve that problem. If you are planning to start a pizza restaurant, that basic need is hunger. You are going to solve it by making fresh, hot pizza. If you plan to start a carpet cleaning company, your customers will want clean carpets. You provide the service by going to their house or business and making dirty carpets look, feel and smell clean.

Who is your customer? And why is he or she going to buy your product? You can get pretty specific about this. If you're setting up your pizza restaurant in a neighborhood that's filled with families, you may want to tailor what you offer especially to those families in order to get a competitive advantage over other restaurants that simply sell pizza. If you're selling carpet cleaning, who is most likely going to be a frequent customer? Is it going to be the little old lady who lives alone or is it going to be someone with high traffic on their carpets? What can you do to convince them that they will get better results using your service?

How big is the market for your product or service? Can you break it into market segments? If you are looking at the entire market of hungry people, some of them are going to be much more profitable for your business than others. You can best provide the offerings that will meet their needs if you understand who they are, group them logically into market segments and then produce offerings that will meet their needs and generate good profits for your business. One "right" market for you may not be the right market for one of your competitors. What are your best customers? needs? Are they men? Are they women? How old are they? Are they willing to pay for quality with your offering? What kind of service do they want?

How are you going to position your product? Is it top of the line? Is it mass market? What kind of value will it offer? What kind of quality will your customers experience?

Who is your competition? Who could potentially compete with you?

Do you have an unfair advantage? that will make it difficult for your competitors to provide the same level of value, quality or service to customers at the price you can set?

How are you going to get the product to them? Are you going to sell directly to the end user? Or will you need distributors, wholesalers and retailers to get the product to your final customer? Both?

Who are your strategic partners going to be? A strategic partner is a company that provides a product or service that can help you sell your product or service-and your product or service help their business as well.

How are you going to sell your product or service? How is it going to make money for you? Next, how are you going to brand your business? Branding means making your customers be able to clearly what your product does and why it is different (better) than your competitors offering.

How are you going to sell your product to your customers? Will you sell through a mass market effort or will each sale be personally done by a highly trained salesperson? There are many steps in between, from direct sales to complicated cooperative marketing with your distribution channel. Set up a sales plan (should correspond to your revenue projections) so that you know how many sales you will make to each of your customer segments and the timing for those expected sales.

Once the sale is done, the work can really begin. How are you going to bring that customer back for more? How will they be treated if the product is defective? How will you handle it if they're just not happy? Sales support can provide them with great experiences and they'll share that with the people they know. If you don't plan for it, though, you can get nailed with them telling a LOT more people how badly your company bungled a simple job.

If you're in a high tech business, make a three year sales forecast. If you're not in a high tech business, make it a five year forecast.

Keep your marketing plan to three pages or less, though you may have a lot more information (such as your sales forecast) that can go in the appendix. When possible, make good quality graphs that will convey a better "big picture" than rows of numbers or information buried deep in the wording of a paragraph.

-Cynthia Nemeth-Johannes