Many people think that marketing planning is very unnecessary and it is a waste of time and effort with no results or think that the results of the marketing plan are not in line with reality and they think it's just a matter of time. handling the current problems of the business to increase daily sales is okay. But is that true? The following article will help you learn online marketing and at the same time you know what a marketing plan is and how to make a marketing plan and its importance in business operations.
What is a marketing plan?
Before learning about the definition of a marketing plan, let's first understand the concept of Marketing. According to Philip Kotler: Marketing is a form of human activity aimed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange . This is an essential activity in the business process of the business and is an important factor that any business needs to pay attention and maximize to survive in the long term in the market.
A marketing plan is a written document that includes the implementation of the roadmap of marketing activities in the business. The marketing plan is built from the analysis and research from the environment and the market to set out big strategies with medium and short term goals for the whole company or for a specific group of products and services. the company.
In the marketing plan, it will clearly state the means to be taken, the actions to be taken, the budget to spend and receive to achieve the above goal. An effective marketing plan helps a company understand the market it targets and the competition in that space, and understand the impact and consequences of marketing decisions. The marketing plan will help businesses give directions for effective business strategies for the business in the future.
Marketing plans help businesses orient effective business strategies
Importance of marketing plan in business
The marketing plan plays a very important role in the business activities of the business. It helps businesses develop products and services within the business that meet the needs of the target market. Helping you implement the best marketing activities, thereby helping your business attract target customers compared to competitors. The benefits that your business receives when developing a marketing plan:
- Identify your target market and understand how your product or service meets their needs.
Determine what your competitors and target customers think about your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
- Position your brand, products and services so that your target market sees your business as better or different from your competitors.
- Set specific, measurable goals and timeframes for your marketing activities.
Help your business map out a strategy to reach your target audience, including the messages, channels, and tools you'll use.
Help everyone in the company act in the same direction of marketing efforts.
Developing an effective marketing plan can take time and money, but it is a very valuable process that can greatly contribute to your business success and is a very rewarding process. Essential that any business needs to do.
The marketing plan contributes greatly to the success of the business
How to create an effective marketing plan
Businesses may have different industries, products, services, business goals or business plans, but there are certain essentials that most marketing plans include:
Define business goals
To be able to determine business goals, you need to answer a few questions such as: Who is your target market? Potential market segment?... Knowing the market and customer needs will help you set out specific directions.
For example, if your business sells weight loss products, the target market will be postpartum mothers who want to lose weight to improve their figure.
Market opportunity analysis
Businesses need to find new market opportunities to create favorable opportunities, recognize what changes could become opportunities that businesses can exploit, or what environmental impacts may pose a threat to the business. Enterprises can use the SWOT analysis model to list advantages and disadvantages as well as opportunities and challenges in the development process; through analysis of factors in the marketing environment or through methods to identify market opportunities such as Richard M. White's "loophole" method, which is to uncover unmet needs Satisfaction of customers to satisfy or analytical method by product/market expansion network (market penetration, market expansion, market development, diversification),....
Businesses need to find new market opportunities
Select target markets
This is an extremely important step in marketing activities that businesses need to clearly define for their marketing plans. The questions you need to clarify in this step are:
- Who is your target customer?
- What needs and desires do they have that need to be satisfied?
- Do marketing strategies need to target all of the company's customers or a target group of customers?
At this step, the business needs:
- Measure and forecast market demand to ensure the feasibility of marketing efforts. The measurement of market demand helps businesses estimate the current and future needs of the market, the influencing factors help businesses decide how to enter the market.
- Market segmentation is the next job that businesses need to do because for each target customer market, there are heterogeneous factors depending on the characteristics of products and services of each business. such as gender, age, income level, socio-cultural level, etc. Depending on each factor, customers will have different needs and desires. Therefore, businesses need to divide customers into different groups (or market segments) to be able to clearly recognize the differences in needs and consumption behaviors called segments (or segments). market. Each market is made up of market segments.
- Finally, businesses need to position their business market compared to other competitors to find out competitive advantages in terms of characteristics, differentiating properties of their products and services to attract customers to the business.
Positioning the target market of the business
Deploy marketing - mix
After determining the objectives in marketing activities, the next job that businesses need to do is to implement marketing-mix activities. Marketing - mix (also known as Marketing mix) is the most popular tool to help Marketers find the right distribution channels and advertise in the market. This term refers to the set of marketing tools used by businesses to achieve marketing goals in the market.
Marketing - mix in the business usually includes 4Ps: Product (Product), Price (Price), Distribution (Place), Promotion (Promotions) and often add 3P in the service industry that is: Process (process), People (people), and Physical Evidence (facilities).
The order and structure of marketing - mix is deployed uniformly or differently depending on the identified marketing strategy option and is strongly influenced by the market positioning decision of the business.
Marketing - mix activities in the business
Organize and execute marketing strategies
After planning the implementation, the organization implements the above initial steps in the marketing plan. A good initial plan, but if the business does not know how to organize and act according to the plan effectively, it will not bring any value to the business. Some of the necessary skills in organizing marketing activities in your business you need to know are as follows:
- Organize the marketing department to coordinate with each other to implement marketing strategies.
- Organize the marketing department appropriate to the size of the business's marketing activities.
- Define and assign tasks to each specific department and employee.
- Developing a reward system to help motivate all departments in the enterprise to maximize their working capacity.
- Build a positive organizational atmosphere that motivates employees' entire efforts in achieving goals.
Enterprises implement the above initial steps in the marketing plan
Check marketing activities
Although marketing activities have been implemented and implemented effectively, businesses still need to regularly check each process of marketing activities to avoid serious errors. Besides, the needs of customers always change over time and competitors also constantly come up with different marketing strategies to manipulate the market.
Therefore, the inspection and evaluation of the results of marketing activities will help businesses learn from and adjust their marketing strategies better, quickly grasp the needs of customers, increase their advantages. enterprise competition.
Businesses still need to regularly check each process of marketing activities
Thus, we understand that Marketing plays a very important role in the development of the business, it is considered as the heart of business operations. Right now, technology and the speed of development are fast, businesses need to change to adapt.
Course "Make a professional marketing plan in 7 days"
This is a course taught in the form of online learning, designed based on the reality of companies when applying Marketing. The course provides students with basic to advanced knowledge of a standard planning process to highly applicable tactics.
Refer to the course "Make a professional marketing plan in 7 days"
After spending some money to study, we are sure that you will understand the basic concepts of Marketing, understand how to use the PEST, SWOT matrix to analyze the market, determine the right goals, strengths of products and services, pocket 12 pricing methods, pull and push strategies.
As a Marketer, it is certainly indispensable to have skills in building a Marketing strategy and building a marketing plan for your business to help you quickly and accurately reach the target audience, increase the number of customers and ultimately increase the number of customers. your profits.
In summary, in the above article, Unica has revealed to readers what the concept of a marketing plan is? How to create an effective marketing plan for your business. We hope that the information we provide will be useful to readers.
Good luck!
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