A business plan charts and guides the operational functions of your business; a marketing plan charts and guides the promotion of your business. Both are vital to a successful operation. Failing to develop a marketing plan can result in budget problems, low customer volume and, in a worst-case scenario, the closure of a business.
Uncoordinated Promotion Strategies
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If you don’t have a strategic marketing plan in place for your business, chances are your advertising, marketing and promotion efforts are haphazard. A marketing plan helps you assess your market, determine your target audience and select appropriate marketing vehicles for promoting your company. A good deal of marketing plan creation includes research and comparison shopping for ad rates. Without this in place, your marketing plans can be ineffective.
Ineffective Tracking
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A good marketing plan not only charts a course of action for promoting your business, but it also helps you track, or follow, which marketing approaches result in the highest flow of business. If you don’t have a marketing plan in place, you won’t have a formal system for assessing where your leads and customers come from. This means you won’t know which of your marketing approaches works. You could be wasting money on marketing and advertising venues that don’t work for your business while underutilizing effective marketing vehicles at the same time.
Budget Problems
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A comprehensive marketing plan includes a marketing budget. The budget helps you assess how much money you have to apply to various marketing strategies, and, with a tracking feature in place, it can help you calculate how many customers result from each marketing initiative. If you randomly place ads, run commercials and print promotional materials with no real goal in mind, you can overpay and see poor results. A marketing plan that explores and defines the best marketing approaches allows you to time your ad campaigns, buy advertising in bulk and saturate your market for the best possible returns.
Low Traffic
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The worst-case scenario of not having a marketing plan in place is that your business fails to attract enough customers to warrant keeping the doors open. If consumers are not aware of your business, they will not patronize your company. This can lead to a slowdown in business, employee lay-offs, the inability to pay creditors and the eventual closure of your operation.
