When you think of going for a tour, you plan the trip using a map. Similarly, while beginning any marketing initiative, creating and using a marketing plan is necessary. This is the virtual roadmap for the effective functioning of your marketing strategy.
Why is a marketing plan essential and what objectives does it serve? Let us explore A marketing Plan and its objectives in today’s post.
Why is the Marketing Plan necessary?
Whether you are just a startup business or a large multinational enterprise, a marketing plan is quite essential for running it effectively and efficiently. A clearly outlined marketing plan can help you achieve better results by providing you with a means of leveraging the resources and reaching out to a large chunk of your targetted customer base at a minimal cost.
A marketing plan can help you work through your marketing goals and lets you understand how you can reach your goals. The appearance and makeup of a marketing plan can vary to a considerable extent and can be available in different options. It can either be in a generalized form or may be in a detailed format.
In essence, a marketing plan is expected to let you know who your clients are and how to reach them. While creating a marketing plan can take a considerably easy route and does not need much time and effort, it can offer you a huge pay off when it comes to the profits and getting a lot of customers.
What are the objectives of Marketing Plan?
Before you can even move to create a marketing plan, you need to have a business plan in place. This is what would set the foundation for your business. Once you have a business plan in place and it is working effectively, you will be able to develop A marketing plan with the assistance of this marketing plan.
The major objectives of marketing plan can be outlined through the following detailed analysis.
1) Forecast future uncertainties and minimize them
The main aim of the marketing plan is to close the gap between the current status of the business and the anticipated position. A marketing plan should be one of the best options to forecast the possible uncertainties and issues that you may come across in the future.
A perfect marketing plan should provide you access to take the right decisions even before any eventuality strikes you so that you can minimize the losses to a greater extent. Thus, one of the major objectives of marketing plan is to minimize the losses and effects of future uncertainties.
2) Better Coordination within teams or departments
A successful business is possible only with effective coordination between the multiple departments. A well-placed marketing plan can help you achieve the best possible coordination between the departments and divisions of the enterprise.
The coordinated efforts of all the departments would help improve the efficiency of your business and marketing strategy as a whole. A marketing plan also ensures that the quality of work also stands improved.
3) Streamline processes and control operations
A marketing plan ensures that all the activities of the multiple departments are streamlined and controlled. A marketing plan will focus on setting up the objectives for achieving the standard goals in terms of marketing, and the actual performance is measured against the planned standards.
Periodical measurement of the achieved marketing standards against the pre-determined standards will help you analyze the results and apply any corrective actions if needed. These periodic checkpoints will help the teams and departments stay focussed on the tasks and goals.
4) Maintain healthy competition within the organization
A well laid out marketing plan will help you configure the tasks for each of your employees. The marketing plan will also be helpful in establishing a relationship between the employees and departments. This will set out responsibilities and duties for each of the employees in specific and certain terms.
This will help have a cordial and healthy relationship between the employees and departments. Since the employees are suitably rewarded for the efforts that they have put in, this can bring about a considerable level of healthy competition between the employees.
5) Minimize Wastage
A marketing plan is designed to determine the major objectives of the organization and thus prepares the plans and procedures for the activities handled. As we already made it clear in the above discussion, it both specifies the responsibilities and outlines the control mechanism for the activities efficiently.
The efforts are streamlined towards ensuring the maximum results. This will ensure that wastages are minimized to the least possible level. In addition to helping you streamline your efforts towards a focussed business strategy, it also helps you check all the wastages in the enterprise.
6) Keeping customers happy & satisfied
One of the objectives of marketing plan is focused on formulating the strategies from the customer point of sale. The ultimate customer satisfaction and maximization of profits to the maximum possible extent are what would make a marketing plan more efficient.
The marketing plan should ideally focus on making an all-out effort to ensure that the regular supply of the products and services is maintained in the market. Reasonable pricing that ensures a reasonable profit is key to a good marketing plan. It will also help provide efficient after sales services as well.
7) Increasing employee efficiency
One of the major objectives that a marketing plan needs to focus on will involve increasing the efficiency of the employees of an enterprise. A well-designed marketing plan will assist you in setting the responsibilities for all the employees as we have already outlined in the above discussion.
The employee responsibilities are set, measured at regular intervals and compared with the guidelines stipulated to arrive at the achievement by each of the employees. This activity should enhance the degree of efficiency of your employees as they will feel responsible for the tasks assigned to them.
Thus A marketing plan helps your employees achieve the best possible efficiency levels. Having understood what objectives does the marketing plan tries to achieve, it should be understood that it is more than just a document containing bits of information.
A Marketing Plan is designed to achieve short term goals with a view to winning over the long term achievements. A good marketing strategy is designed for building a marketing plan with SMART objectives.
The Concluding Thoughts
We have covered all the major objectives that a well-designed marketing plan strives to achieve. Before you check out the objectives that a marketing plan attempts to achieve, it is recommended that you also have a look at how to make a detailed marketing plan.
In any case, we assume the discussion here would have provided you with good insights into what a Marketing Plan helps you achieve.
