Owners of new businesses shouldn’t skip any kind of planning and they need to work hard from the start to make sure that their businesses could survive and could actually generate enough profit to cover for the high initial expenses. Marketing plan is one of those many plans that new businesses should have to make sure that their overall operations can work properly. Marketing is often delivering messages that consumers want to hear, while being able to actually fulfill the promise. Good marketing plan is needed for a solid business foundation that can ensure sustainable growth. Bad marketing plan could cause us to waste precious money and time.
Good plan is always a good thing to have and without it, we won’t have a proper roadmap that can give us a real pathway towards success. Without a good marketing plan, we also don’t know which direction that we need to take. Circumstances change and a good plan is able to ensure high degree of flexibility. Just with any plan, marketing plan should be based on our vision and the end goals. Vision can be generated by knowing what we are trying to achieve and what kind of future that we want for our company. We should think what we want to achieve in 1, 5 and 10 years in the future; and even beyond that.
We should be able to think bold and big, when creating vision statement that can excite everyone. We may start with a paragraph and try to condense into a single meaningful sentence. We should be able to put our thoughts in a single vision statement. It may take weeks or even months to make sure that we can come up with a vision that help employees and consumers to visualize what we want. After being able to come up with proper vision statement, we need to define our market. And it’s a core question in any marketing decision. In fact, characteristics of consumers define how products and services should be designed to meet their needs.
We should ask ourselves about the market we are in and how we are supposed to define it. It is important for business owners to think outside themselves and take external approaches whenever necessary. This will allow them to see opportunities in the marketplace and make the most suitable solution to solve any kind of problem. After we are able to define the market, it is important to know whether the primary market is suitable for our company. If the competition is so intense, we should consider choosing a niche that allows our product to reach consumers. Many small businesses need to focus on a niche first before choosing a larger market. We should know whether we should become a specialist or generalist. The latter may make less money because we deal with fewer consumers, but it could be a better choice if we can identify a group of people who are not yet served by major competitors in the market.