What Is A Marketing Plan And How Can You Benefit From It

Ok, so first let’s start with Wikipedia’s’ description for marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a written document that details the necessary actions to achieve one or more marketing objectives. It can be for a product or service, a brand, or a product line. Marketing plans cover between one and five years. A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan.

What is a marketing plan?

What is a marketing plan?

So you came here because you’re asking yourself what is a marketing plan and how it can benefit your business.  What if I told you that just by having one, it can increase your business by at least double within 12 months?  A marketing plan is as important, if not more than creating a business plan.  You must know what is your marketing budget before you can even start any business.

If you’re not willing to pay for a customer, then you might as well not have a business.

It’s “Marketing 101″.  Experts say that a company should have a budget of no less than 5% of it’s gross income, ideally 10%.  If you want to be aggressive, then 15% would be the right investment for you.

So for this blog’s purpose, I’m going to use the average recommended of 10%.  There’s a reason why banks require a business plan prior to them lending you money to buy a business like a franchise or any other type of business.

So we should take this expectation as a good example that creating a business plan is essential for any type of business.  Doesn’t matter if you are venturing onto an online only business or a brick and mortar business.  Either way, you should know what to expect before you put all of your hard earned dollars into a business.

This is probably one of the main reasons why many businesses close within 12 months,

What is a marketing plan?

What is a marketing plan?

they don’t have a business and marketing plan in place.  By creating a business plan, you are creating a blueprint to success.  Having a blueprint is like printing money.

Let me explain; If you are starting a business, there’s a good chance that you TRUST the business model that you are about to embark.  Since you trust the model, then all you need to do is “reverse engineer” your goals.

So for example, let’s say that you are selling surf boards where you make a profit of $250.00 per surf board.  If you want to make $10,000.00 a month within 12 months, then you take your $10,000.00 goal, divide it into $250.00, which will give you a total of 40 sales per month.

Now that you know how many buyers you need, you then need to figure out how many “leads” or “prospects” you need that would be interested in buying your surf boards.   So if you know that for every 20 people that “look” at your surf boards, one will turn into a customer, you now know that if you want to make 40 sales, you will need 800 leads or prospects to “look” at your surf boards  (40 sales x 20 leads/sale = 800 total leads/prospects), make sense?

Offline marketing may be a little more difficult to bring an exact amount of leads to your business.  Newspaper ads or Yellow Pages don’t work like they use to, which is why I highly recommend having an online marketing campaign that includes PPC (Pay per click), social media and a blog. Through these marketing avenues, you can pinpoint exactly the amount of people that need to be coming to your site in order to achieve your $10,000 a month goal.

What is a marketing plan?

What is a marketing plan?

Now, the above part may be a trial and error period, however once you have narrowed down this phase, it will be like printing money as I said before.  Think about it.  If you knew that you needed 800 visitors to your site in order to get 40 sales each month and that each visitor could cost you anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 per visitor (via PPC), you can simply scale up as large as you want and as fast as you want.  Wouldn’t you agree? Again, it’s like printing money!

So as you can see, a marketing plan is essential for any business. If you ever start a business in the future and don’t create a business nor marketing plan and then your business flops, you will now know the answer why.

I hope I was able to answer your question on “What is a marketing plan“.  This blog is generating leads for my business in the same way it could generate leads for you.  To learn how I’m able to accomplish that, watch this video which will show you EXACTLY how I’m able to do it.

If you liked this post on “what is a marketing plan“, then please share with others.

Until my next post, bye for now…

Leonel Castro

~Leonel Castro

tag: what is a marketing plan


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