Marketing plans detail how your company intends to identify potential customers, introduce your products to them and make it easy for them to make purchases. You can break down the work to be done to implement such a plan into 12 steps that take you from market segmentation to evaluating which strategic elements were successful. Using these 12 steps ensures that you cover all the bases and increases the chances of a successful marketing campaign.

To be able to satisfy your customers, you have to find out who they are and what they want. Market research based on surveys, public statistics and purchased data can guide you in developing profiles of the markets you are targeting.

Competitors and Competitive Advantages

Identify your competitors, their strengths and their weaknesses. Any actions you take in the market may result in competitive counter-measures. If you match your strengths with areas where your competitors are weak, such counter-measures will be less effective.

Based on your market research and the needs expressed by your potential customers, you can examine your product's characteristics and identify what features your customers value. Any of those features that are unique to your product represent a competitive advantage.

Target Markets

Your ideal target market is one with weak competition in which customers need products with features unique to your company. You have to identify target markets closest to this ideal and which are accessible for your company at low cost for publicity and promotion.

From your market research and selection of your target markets, you know what features your customers want. You may have to add some characteristics to your product to complete the list of features you will promote.

Set your price to cover your costs, be competitive in the market and affordable for your target customers. If you find that you can't meet all three characteristics, you may have to reduce your costs to be able to improve your pricing.

Your marketing plan has objectives that allow you to meet overall company goals. Set down targets for the plan in specific numbers for sales, profitability and customer satisfaction.

A key decision for your marketing plan is how to sell the product. Think about what sales channels are the most convenient for your targeted customers and plan to carry out direct sales, wholesaling, retailing, mail order or online sales accordingly.

The publicity section of your marketing plan specifies how you will inform customers of your product and where it is available. You have to detail activities such as press releases, press conferences, direct mail and the distribution of flyers. Your promotional activities have to emphasize the product features that appeal to your target markets.

Feedback and Evaluation

Once you start promoting your products and selling them in your target markets, you need feedback on the effectiveness of your ads and on customer satisfaction. You can plan to survey customers and use objective measures such as the number of calls to customer service and the number of warranty claims.

Your evaluation strategy takes inputs from all your activities and measures the results against targets. You evaluate sales, costs, profits, customer responses and customer satisfaction to see if your marketing campaign has met its goals.

Corrective Action

Most campaigns don't hit all their targets. Your evaluation shows you where you are successful and what aspects of your campaign need more work. Your can plan to take corrective action as result of your evaluation and commit additional resources where necessary to meet all your targets.
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