Marketing Plan

Marketing Plan

Introduction

In order for a business to prosper, it needs clear guiding principles, an aim, a goal and an overall objective of what it wants to achieve. A marketing plan is a vital part of this business plan. It seeks to explore the current market standing of an organization and sheds light on the marketing strategies it will adopt in the near future. The fundamental purpose of a marketing plan is to explain the steps an organization would be taking to specifically achieve its marketing objectives (Luther, 2001). It is perhaps one of the most important plans produced by the marketing department, as it is utterly detailed, heavily relied upon and critically important in analyzing where the company envisages to be in the future.

A marketing plan is divided into various parts, each of which collectively seeks to explain the bigger marketing goal of the organization. Each part has its own importance. Though, many people use different names to describe the various aspects of the marketing plan, but the ideology remains the same. The broad areas amidst which the marketing plan is divided into are: The executive summary, business challenge, market, strategy and budget and the conclusion (Tanner, 2012).

Discussion

The Executive Summary

The focal point of including an executive summary section in the marketing plan is to give a brief introduction about what the company is all about and what plans are discussed in the entire plan. Any person who reads this section of the plan should get a clear understanding of what the business is about, what is seeks to achieve and most importantly how it seeks to achieve it. It is basically a summary of the entire plan. Mostly, people don't have much time to go through the comprehensive report, in such instances executive summary comes in handy. This is because when an idea is presented to any investor, they don't have time to go through the lengthy report, so they usually go through the summary, and if it gets them interested, then only do they go ahead to read the entire report (McDonald & Wilson, 2011). Even though an executive summary marks the beginning of a marketing plan, but it is written at the very end. Since it is a sort of a summary, a very important one, thus in order to make sure that nothing is overlooked, it is usually written at the end.

The Business Challenge

This section sheds light on the offering on the company. It goes on to describe the offering in detail and serves as an introduction to the entire marketing plan. It talks about how the offering fits in with the ideology of the business; why would investing into this project would be important for the company, both in terms of earning handsome financial returns, as well as achieving the overall goals of the business. Since, this section primarily acts as an introduction, thus is imperative for this section to answer the question of “Why investing in this plan a good ...