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6. Produce a plan for marketingA Marketing Plan contains information covering the following topics:
Marketing Objectives Objectives should be SMART i.e. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound. Objectives may be e.g.:
Each of these statements can be measured and at a certain point in time, it can be decided if they were successfully achieved. Your Marketing Strategy will probably contain objectives relating to each of the following:
In Marketing people frequently talk about the “Marketing Mix” or you may have heard talk of “the four Ps” – these relate to the same thing – how you intend to market your product or service to your target market(s).
The Marketing Mix - The 4 P's You should have a very clearly defined, and detailed plan for your product:
The answers to these questions will differ depending on whether you want to sell a product to a consumer or to the commercial market; it will also depend on the price of your product e.g. bottled water at £1 can be sold to consumers via retail outlets with purchases of such a low cost product requiring little thought or commitment i.e. these are frequently impulse purchases with little brand loyalty. If however you intend to sell a very expensive car with a price tag in excess of £25,000 – this represents a significant purchase, a high degree of commitment and customers will want to be reassured during the purchase process, meaning a sales person should be on hand to offer high level support and information. This will require distribution chains for your product across countries. Pricing is crucial to a new business – you must be competitively priced in your new market, but the mistake of many new businesses is incorrectly assessing their costs – your price must cover all your costs (manufacture – raw materials, electricity, labour, packaging, distribution, marketing and promotional spend etc) and ideally allow you make a profit too! Your pricing strategy and decisions will be determined by various internal and external factors. These factors interplay to establish what are known as floor and ceiling prices for each product in each market, for example a café in North Belfast could charge £1.20 for a coffee but a hotel in Dublin may charge €8 (approx. five times dearer). These may be the ceiling prices for a similar item in two different markets – the floor price is the break-even price - referring back to the coffee example, the floor price in the North Belfast Café might be 45p. There are various pricing strategies available to you, their suitability depends on your product/service, your market how well established you are etc. How will you promote or make your product or service known? Will you advertise in local newspapers, trade journals, on local radio or television? What communication channels or media will best assist you in delivering your message to your chosen audience? You also need to consider the cost of these different options, your available budget and also what promotional tools best suit the products or services that you wish to promote! For example, if you want to sell chocolate Easter Eggs and novelties, a large pink bunny in a television commercial and press ads may be appropriate; if however you were establishing an accountancy practice, this would not be the most appropriate promotional tool! Once you undertake any promotional activity, you should always monitor results to help you assess what methods are most cost effective in terms of generating most sales in relation to expenditure – see section 6.4.
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