The Business Marketing Plan

There are key factors that need to be taken into account when developing a business marketing plan.

First, assess your desired outcome. What is your business objective and what do you want marketing to do for you in your business? By clearly defining, up front, what you want marketing to do for you, you are in a better position to assess whether or not the marketing activities you employ are working or not. They’re either taking you closer to your desired outcome or further away, which is it?

Second, you need to review the macro environment within which your business marketing plan is being developed. What’s happening “out there” that could have an impact on you, but over which you have no control. For example is there a strong chance that a change in legislation could significantly impact your ability to run your business profitably. Look at all the macro issues to ensure nothing catches unawares.

Third, clearly define who your target market is. A lot of business marketing plans define “everyone” as the target market. But this clearly cannot be the case. It’s just lazy strategy development. Challenge yourself, and your marketing team, to describe the type of people that have problems that you can provide the solution to. Clear focus here will ensure the rest of your business marketing plan will be effective. Lack of focus here will deliver a business marketing plan that is wishy-washy, unstructured and ineffective.

Last, look at what you want to tell these people about you that will make them sit up and take note. For example what are the benefits of your products/services in assisting your target market to solve their problem?

People only buy products and services because a need exists (real or perceived). In developing a business marketing plan your job is to determine what that need is and then work with your organization to deliver the solution to the need … profitably!

Business Marketing

How can business marketing assist you in driving a more profitable business? This is an intriguing subject and one that is constantly challenging to many small business owners. For us we like to think of business marketing as the one thing that increases income within your business. All the other business disciplines of finance, human resources, production etc are all expenses that are incurred in the delivery of your product/service, but only marketing truly generates income.

For a lot of people however they don’t see the benefit of business marketing because they’ve never developed a structured marketing plan that takes them through a thought process that would ensure their marketing was more effective.

A business marketing plan does not have to be lengthy, academic or take a long time to put together. This is definitely a case where size does not count. What does matter is that the plan follows a structure that leads the team through a logical thought process to ensure all possible elements have been discussed and debated. The plan then documents what the expectations are and how they’re to be achieved.

If every organization just got that right, marketing would be more effective and the bottom line would show the increased results that marketing is really capable of.