Why is this important?

Planning is a critical part of success and yet so many businesses choose to ignore it. However, if you’re looking to reduce your costs, maximise your investment returns and drive your business forward you can’t afford not to develop and maintain a marketing plan.

From a marketing point of view, planning not only crystalises your thoughts and draws attention to aspects that may have otherwise been overlooked, it ensures a continual flow of customers travelling through your sales pipeline and saves you from spending money when and where you don’t need to.

What to do

There are many ways to structure and write a marketing plan. The most successful plans – ie. the ones that don’t get thrown in the bottom draw – are succinct and easy to follow; they explain where you’re coming from, where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.

The following guide walks you through how to develop a marketing plan. To simplify the process even further, download our Marketing Plan template and refer to this guide as you work your way through the template.

1. Introduction

The introduction of a marketing plan should provide a brief background into the business including its history and general information (Who you are, What your business does, When you were established, Where you’re located, and Why provide your offering).

2. Current situation

The second section of the marketing plan should provide a snapshot of the current business environment (both domestic and overseas if applicable) and performance of the business. Consider utilising the following sub-headings:

Market overview: Drawing on your market analysis, explain the market size, trends and the political, economic, social and technological forces that are operating within it.

Competitor overview: Drawing on your competitor analysis, provide an overview of the competition in your industry, including main players; what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and where their strengths and weaknesses lie.  

Issues: Identify your business’s weaknesses, any problems that need to be overcome and any threats arising from your competitor’s actions and/or market forces.

Opportunities: This sub-section should include information about how you can leverage your businesses strengths and exploit any opportunities or gaps in the market to your advantage.

3. Your offering products/services

Including an outline of your product/service offering in your marketing plan is essential. Not only because it provides context to your marketing strategies, but also because marketing goes hand in hand with product development. It’s a good idea to explain here how your product fits into your overall offering, how you differentiate it in the market and where it is in terms of its market life - new/unknown in market vs. well known service/commodity.

4. Pricing structure/model

Your marketing plan needs to incorporate your current pricing structure as this will help to determine your marketing strategies and activities.

5. Placement: distribution channels

In this section, briefly outline:

• the distribution channels you use to take your product/service to market, e.g. wholesalers, sales representatives, retailers, resellers etc
• the distribution strategy you use: exclusive, selective or mass outlet(s)/reseller(s)
• how these channels profit eg mark-up on selling price, commission etc
• who holds the power in the relationship eg the manufacturer/service provider in the case of a unique product or maybe the retailer as in the case of supermarkets

6. Branding

Your brand is your business’s identity and includes all the identification markers of your business; from your values and workplace culture to your logo, colour use and marketing messages.

While most marketing plans limit branding details to the main marketing message, you can use the development of your marketing plan as an opportunity to take stock of your brand collateral – especially, if like many small businesses, you don’t have a formal branding guide.

Consider including:

• business values and culture: What are your business values? How would your describe your business’s workplace culture?
• main marketing message: Essentially this is single sentence answer to the question 'What does your business do?' and explains what you do, the needs your offering addresses and the solutions you provide.
• unique Selling Proposition: Your unique selling proposition (USP) is a statement that defines what makes you truly outstanding.
• logo
• colour palette: What colours do you use in your logo, brochures, uniforms etc to provide a consistent look?
• tone and style: How would describe the tone of your written/audio messages (eg conversational, polite, professional, fresh)?
• look and feel: How would you/your customers describe the visual aspects of your branding (eg fun and funky, formal, warm, friendly etc)?
• imagery: what types of pictures or graphics do you use to develop your brand (eg photos of happy smiling people, cartoons, icons etc)?

If you can’t answer many of the questions above, consider making brand development part of your marketing action plan. Visit How to build your brand.

7. Promotion: current marketing activities (optional)

When it comes to developing your marketing plan, including a list of current marketing activities is not essential, but having this information in one central location does make developing marketing strategies for moving forward a lot easier. Activities to list here include: 

• Advertising
• PR
• Events and networking
• Sponsorships
• Alliances
• Online presence: website and social media
• Database marketing: direct mail, email marketing and mobile technology
• Marketing collateral: brochures, posters, sales kits etc
• Packaging/point of sale material
• Exterior signage, branded uniforms, cars, banners etc.

8. Target market

This section should incorporate the results of your customer research and be used to outline who your current and potential customers are. Information covering your customers’ demographics, characteristics, tastes, preferences, perceptions and buying processes would be most valuable here.

Helpful hint: Segment and list your customer according to how valuable they are.

9. Business objectives

To achieve ongoing success, your marketing activities MUST be aligned with your business objectives. It would therefore be remiss not to mention your business objectives in your marketing plan.

10. Marketing objectives and strategies

The role of marketing is to create an effective environment for sales to take place. Therefore your marketing objectives should be one or more of the following:

• increase sales
• grow market share
• build your brand

Helpful hint: In setting your objectives, make sure they’re SMART. That is they’re Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This will ensure you stay focussed and remain on track.

Examples of SMART marketing objectives include:

• Increase market share from xxx% in 2009 to yyy% in 2010
• Achieve volume of xxx units in 2009, and sales of $yyy

Your marketing strategies should then address how you’re going to achieve these objectives. As a general rule they should incorporate the 4 P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Placement (distribution) and Promotion, and are broad, umbrella action points designed to make developing your marketing tactics and action plan easier.

11. Marketing budget

Failing to set a marketing budget is a common mistake made by businesses. A budget provides you with parameters for determining the right marketing mix (advertising, events, PR etc) and ensures you can deliver your strategies to their full potential. Finding out there aren’t sufficient funds to deliver a campaign when your half way through can be detrimental to your results and overall strategy.

Without a budget, you also run the risk of spending money when and where you shouldn’t and it can make reviewing performance, and therefore maximising return on investment, much more difficult.

In tackling the budgeting issue, at the very least you need to determine your total marketing investment/spend. Ideally you should also break this down so you have marketing budgets for each of your product/service offerings (or each range/group if you have an extensive offering). This can be further broken down according to the marketing channels you intend to use. For assistance with developing your marketing budget, download our Marketing Budget template

Note: The marketing budget isn’t always included in the marketing plan, however having this information stored alongside your marketing plan does make developing, monitoring and revising your marketing strategy much easier.

12. Action plans: marketing activities and schedules

It’s time to put brainstorming into full swing and develop the tactics you’re going to use to achieve your marketing strategies.

A good approach to developing your action plan is to use a table format; listing the marketing strategies, suggested tactic, tactic description, resources required, activity commencement date, budget and status.

Helpful hint: if you’re looking for ways to get the brainstorming ball rolling, try:

• Historical approach: revisit your current marketing activities; what worked well and is worth repeating and what could work well with some revisions.
• Tactical approach: Looking at each of the promotional activities in the marketing mix – advertising, events, direct mail etc – consider how you could use each to achieve your marketing goals.

Once you have developed a tactical plan, you need to develop a marketing activity schedule or calendar for the next 12 months. Gantt Charts, where you list the months as the column headings at the top of your table and the activities down the rows on the side, provide an effective structure for presenting your schedule.

By mapping out the activities in this way, you’ll be able to easily assess the spread of your activities and whether you need to look at revising your schedule according to resource availability, busy times and quiet periods e.g. Christmas time, end of financial year etc.

See how it’s done

Case study - Insights from Beechworth Honey

Beechworth Honey, a member of NSW Business Chamber, is proudly one of Australia's icon brands, and a national and international success story with a 120 year history.  With over four generations of knowledge of Australian honey, uncompromising quality standards, and a fairness to all along the supply chain, Beechworth Honey prides itself on its unequalled passion for producing only 100% Australian honey.    This passion can be seen at Beechworth Honey Experience*, a concept store with Australia’s largest range of Beechworth Honey specialty products.

Jodie Goldsworthy, Director, shares her insights……

Do tough times call for businesses to be more flexible and think of new or creative strategies and tactics to make sales?

“I believe that your marketing and sales plans and strategies should always have enough flexibility to take into account different market responses and conditions, and need to be fine tuned accordingly.  ‘Tough times’ is just one different market response which will require perhaps more creativity, but is an opportunity for you to put yourself in your customers’ shoes - which you should always be doing constantly anyway.

I believe sound results come from closely monitoring what you’re doing and making the most of innovative opportunities as they arise; or creating them if they don’t.”

What are you doing differently in your business?

‘We are expanding into a range of different market channels, for example the tourism industry, and though very timely, this was actually planned as part of a longer term strategy.  We used the opening of the Beechworth Honey Experience* as a great brand building and promotional strategy

We are also focusing on online sales to boost sales opportunities and working towards the expansion of our premium products into higher end and export segments.”

 Do you believe customers are currently shopping for products or services differently? 

 “I believe that customers are more carefully assessing the value of products.  They have always done this, but I believe their focus on value is particularly important at present.”

Did you have any risk strategies in place around sales, to better prepare you should sales become harder to make?

“Yes. We have intentionally developed different market segments and a range of different products to cater for a range of different demographics, and a spread of market channels and customers.”

Beechworth Honey has won numerous prestigious awards - what do you consider are the benefits of entering and winning awards in relation to making sales and getting your brand known and respected?

“Over the years these awards have been of huge benefit to our business. Firstly the process of entering offers the opportunity to rigorously assess many key factors which assist in delivering good products and good service and leads to successful business.

Secondly if you’re lucky enough to win, this creates an external stamp of approval that what you’re doing is effective and this leads to the opportunity to showcase this success through numerous publicity opportunities. Winning also assists in building the business and product profile and links the business into really useful networks.”

Are there any other sales related insights or experiences you would like to share with other members?

“Always look long term.  Don’t be afraid to make a tough decision, even if it seems like a crazy financial decision, if you think it’s best for the customers in the long term.  Sometimes it’s easy to take shortcuts but they’re just not worth it in the long run. During the ongoing droughts and shortages of Australian honey we could have been tempted to use imported honey instead of Australian honey but quality is just too important to us.  Sticking with 100% Australian honey….always! has now become one of our defining attributes and has positioned our product and company well to grow into the future.” 

 SIX TOP SELLING AND MARKETING TIPS

1. Know your customer, put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if you would buy your product.
2. Look critically at your product and see if you can improve it or your value offer in any way to make it more attractive.
3. Educate your customer on the benefit of your product over your competition.
4. Look for innovative and cost effective ways to build your brand and product loyalty.
5. Always put product quality and the customer first, if it’s not up to scratch don’t try to sell it to someone else.
6. Focus in on your communication with your customers, look for more positive ways to promote your product and connect with your customers.

Where to go for help

Do it yourself

Download our marketing plan template

Marketing Success

You can find handy tips for business marketing activities at the Marketing Success blog

Or contact the NSW Business Chamber’s Marketing Success team to get practical marketing assistance at a price you can afford - call 1800 505 529

Online Business Directory

NSW Business Chamber Online Business Directory connects you to thousands of businesses across NSW. With exclusive access to special offers and great deals, you will find a service provider, business partner or supplier who can meet your needs. Listing on the Online Business Directory is open exclusively to NSW Business Chamber members.

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