The Marketing Plan is a Step-by-Step Guide for Your Organizations Success: (It's Not Optional, Part 2)

The Marketing Plan is a Step-by-Step Guide for Your Organizations Success:

The marketing plan is the primary roadmap for business success.  Because of competitive pressures and changing customer needs, organizations are constantly making course corrections and sometimes going in new directions to unfamiliar destinations. Would you take a trip to a place where you never had been without doing some research, downloading a map or knowing how long it takes to get there? Of course not. That is why a marketing plan is so essential.

The marketing plan assesses your company from top to bottom and makes sure all the pieces are working together. Consider it a to-do list on a grand scale. It assigns specific tasks, with accountability. It tracks results and objectives such as sales volume, return on investment, etc.  It is a systematic roadmap to the near future destination of the organization. (To be continued.)

The Marketing Plan Defines How You Intend to Succeed (It's Not Optional, Part 1)

The Marketing Plan Defines How You Intend to Succeed:                        

It was President Dwight Eisenhower, the architect of D-Day and planner of our interstate road system that said “Plans are useless but planning is essential.” Because conditions are never static, Eisenhower was pointing out the importance of a plan so that no matter what happens there is a foundation point to make changes and build upon. 

The marketing plan is the pathway to your organization’s destination.  It demonstrates the steps that will be taken and the results that are expected.  It is not positive thinking but practical tactics. It is the record of how your organization intends to succeed.

It's Not Optional (Introduction)

“Would you take a trip to a place where you never had been without doing some research, downloading a map or knowing how long it takes to get there?”

It’s Not Optional:

I’ve heard many of the excuses for not having a marketing plan:

“Our business is evolving and changing too quickly.”

“I know where we are going and that’s good enough.”

“We don’t have the time and resources to plan and draft one.”

“I don’t come from a marketing background.  I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Seem like reasonable objections; right?  The only problem is that the primary attribute of all successful companies, both large and small, is planning.

Let me counter those objections with several great reasons to have a written marketing plan.  (To be continued.)