Marketing Plans

Marketing Plans just like Disaster Recovery Plans, are an often easily overlooked item that is very important to a business no matter its size.

What is a Marketing Plan?

A Marketing Plan is a detailed strategy and plan on how to market a product, services or entire company/brand.  Marketing Plans typically include SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, threats) analsysis, competitor analysis, consumer/user research, sales stats and other background research. 

The plan is then built including a pricing strategy, what media is going to be used, what tradeshows or events to attend and can include a complete detailed schedule or calendar for each marketing step.

Entrepreneur.com has a good article about the basics of a Marketing Plan:

Today we are all very busy so while it might be a daunting task to create a full Marketing Plan for 2011, one place to start would be a more basic Marketing Calendar.  

What is a Marketing Calendar?

A Marketing Calendar is a listing of important dates and marketing events over the upcoming year.  It can include newsletters schedules, tradeshows and events, seasonal products sales/advertising schedules.  A Marketing Calendar can be as simple as a wall calendar with events written on them to a more sophisticated spreadsheet listing a variety of marketing tasks and activities.

Here is a link to an example of a more detailed Marketing Calendar.

Its never too late to start your Marketing Calendar or Marketing Plan.