So what is a marketing plan?

It:

• Helps you to understand your customers: then you can put together a marketing action plan to meet your sales targets.
• Is a key part of business success: it helps you to decide which customers to target and how to reach and win new customers.
• Helps you to focus on keeping your existing customers happy.
• Assists you in constantly reviewing and improving activities so that you can stay ahead of your competitors.
  Looks at your business's overall strategy and its environment.
• Explores your business's strong points and weak points to work out what the best marketing approach should be and how any weak areas can be strengthened.
• Also helps to identify competitors and assists in the identification of new markets that could be targeted.
• Most importantly a marketing plan sets out clear marketing objectives and explains how they can be achieved.

That’s why you need MarketingPlanWiz!  Our marketing plan tool is so easy to use, planning becomes enjoyable.  Building your marketing plan online means that the process is interactive and you'll be surprised how many ideas you come up with.

Why use a Marketing Plan?

Your first experience of formal planning for your business was probably when your bank manager asked you for a business plan. Unless you’ve done one before, you almost certainly had no idea what it entailed. But your bank manager was all smiles and helpfulness, gave you a little chat about borrowing other people’s money and then gave you a CD about business plans and a paper template to complete. It all had you tied up in knots, took ages to do and when it came to the dreaded Cash Flow Forecast you lost the will to live. You vowed you’d never to do it again! Familiar?

Planning = “boring and too much hard work”, in many people’s minds. Consequently it doesn’t get done.

But ... you do plan:

• you decide you need more finance;
• you see that you can change your product;
• you decide to employ more staff;
• you wonder vaguely about what your business might look like in two years time.

So where is your marketing plan?

We suspect that you haven’t written it all down somewhere in a structured format: it’s swimming around in your head.

The benefit of writing your marketing plan is that you can:

• see it;
• touch it;
• read it;
• use it as a guide;
• change it when you need to;
• and other people have access to it.

“But I don’t have the time it takes to set it all down”, you say. The good news is: use MarketingPlanWiz to make the process easy.  Then you only do ALL of it ONCE (unless, of course, you are embarking on a completely new project). After that you keep carefully modifying various parts of it. Using word processors that shouldn’t be difficult. Do you still say you haven’t got time?

Consider:

Planning for your business is time spent on your business.

Just for once, you remove yourself from the day-to-day, hurly-burly, reactionary process that is a modern business and THINK about your business and where it’s going to take you. Then you write it all down so that you don’t forget anything.

Then you act on it.

Easy!

For extra ideas, why not have a look at our marketing tips?