You would find that the successful firms always tend to start with the marketing plan. Such companies make plans consisting of hundreds of pages and their basic purpose is to show a clear path and strategies that could be used in order to achieve the business marketing objectives. Marketing plan plays a significant role in bringing all your market research together so you could take important and effective steps in order to work out where your business is headed and how exactly is it going there.

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How to use marketing plan:

There are three types of audiences involved:

External users: The customers or users who are using the product or service and could easily be divided into target groups and market segments.

Internal users: Workers, employees and professionals of the institutions are included as the internal users.

Providers:

The producers of the material, financial and personnel resources needed to implement the process. The administrative personnel and the national leadership of facilities also take part in the implantation of the changes through the strategic and political decision-making.

Afterwards, you need to analyze the types of audience you have:

• What positive outcomes and benefits you could expect out of the changes?
• What could be the possible disadvantages that might occur because of the changes?
• What costs would be involved?

Design the message:

Based on the market segmentation, you need to cater all your users differently depending on their needs and concerns. If you want to increase sales of your product and services then it is important that you emphasize on the positive outcomes and benefits that could be obtained out of it.

Promotional strategy:

You need to choose a proper communication medium, place and time in order to transmit the message. The medium that could be used for this purpose:

Mass Communication: Television, radio, posters and pamphlets
Interactive personal communication: Take help from seminars, home visits and interviews Campaigns: By combining several media

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How to make marketing plan?

While making a marketing plan, you need to keep in view the below mentioned things:

The size of market
Availability of resources
Availability of capital
The sales potential
The trends, resources and tools that are prevailing in the market
Complete detail of the current market
The budget of marketing that includes the advertising and promotional plan
The whole description of your product and services
The location of business and what are the advantages and disadvantages of your company location in terms of marketing
Market segmentation
Analysis of your strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats
Company objectives
The marketing approach that could be used to achieve the above mentioned things
Why is it important?

The marketing plan acts as a guide to promote and grow your business. If you have made a proper and effective marketing plan then you would be able to answer and resolve any problem regarding your business. Moreover, you would also get a deep insight that how you need to position your organization in a market and what necessary steps you could take to differentiate your company from competitors and gain competitive advantage. Where and how to advertise and what should be your sales goals and objectives are also defined in marketing plan.

Marketing plans play an important role in monitoring and keeping a track at the marketing strategies of the company for a particular product or service. By making use of marketing plan, owners or management make sure that the strategies that have been made are being implemented in a proper manner. The company could also get a fair idea that how well a particular product or service is doing and if an improvement is required then it would provide a proper guide that how the marketing strategy should be revised further.

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You could also make marketing plan a part of the business plan and if you really want an effective and helpful plan then it is important that you make strong strategies for your product or services. If you have defined all the required actions in the marketing plan you have made but didn’t mention anything regarding strategies then your plan would be no use.

A good and effective marketing plan would help you to save money by leaving out all the unnecessary expenses and providing you with new marketing opportunities.If you have done a good job in making a marketing plan then you would get a fair idea that whatever activities are being undertaken under the roof of an organization are being done according to the budget and your marketing drive is reaching your target audience.

In other words, it would make sure that all the activities and budget is right on track and being monitored constantly. However, if you get failed in designing an effective marketing plan then you won’t be able to get full advantage of all the means you could have in order to reach your target audience and as a result of this, your company would have to face loss due to the rapid decrease in the sales. Hence, you should always design a marketing plan that is meant to reach all the people and is focusing more on the people rather than the products or services.