DEVISING A MARKETING PLAN
It is good practice to develop a written guideline that sets out their marketing strategies for the coming year. Your plan should focus on your prospective clients and concentrate on increasing sales. Planning ensures that you undertake a systematic approach to developing your services to meet the needs of your customers. If implemented properly, your plan will assist you in achieving business objectives.
Planning Your Plan
Your Marketing Plan outlines how you intend to reach your targeted customers, and how you will effectively market your service to them. You should incorporate a calendar that ties in your marketing and sales activities setting out the specific steps you will take.
Questions To Ask Yourself
It is important that you research your target market, identify your companies competitive advantage and study your marketing options. Start by asking yourself the following questions:
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"Who are your target clients?" |
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Develop a profile of your target customer and summarise how you are going to get your message to these people.
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"What sources of uniqueness or positioning in the market place do you have?" |
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List your strengths and weaknesses thus enabling you to focus on areas of opportunity. |
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"How will you implement your marketing and promotion?" |
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What marketing mediums (print, web, community, staff) will you utilise? |
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"When will your marketing spending plans occur?" |
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Identify the best times to implement your marketing strategy. This might be affected by seasonal and economic factors. |
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"How many sales and what profits do you want to achieve?" |
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What are your sales projections and forecasts. |
Objectives
Your objectives must be rewarding, possible to implement and monitor. Objectives may include:
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Increase the number of new listings to five per month by June 2008 |
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Expand your area of influence to cover the regions of xxxx, xxxx and xxxx within two years. |
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Increase your customer base to 350 within the next six months. |
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Enhance your profile in your respective industry. |
Structuring Your Plan
Your plan should include a description of each objective, how you plan to achieve each objective through marketing and promotion, costs and the results you are aiming for. Your plan can cover as little as a year or as many as five years, generally broken down into months or quarters. It can be one page long or many.
Tracking Your Results
Once you have started to implement your plan, it is important that you monitor the results. Ask customers how they heard of your office and why they came to contact you. Your plan must be under constant review and if necessary, modified and adjusted. If results aren't clear, revise.
Need Help?
By no means is the above information a complete guide to creating a Marketing Plan - entire books are written on the topic! There are also a number of software packages available that guide you through the process step by step and cost around $150.Some even offer free trial versions which can be downloaded from their websites.
And finally...
While the marketing plan itself cannot cause change, it is a powerful vehicle for creating an environment in which change can take place. Goodluck!
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