Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Are you a marketing student?

As an undergraduate or postgraduate marketing student, in various occasions you will be asked to elaborate marketing plans or will be involved in even more complex projects which, in order to be fully prepared need to include a marketing plan. Whenever you have several projects to be concluded within a short period of time or you are not sure of how best to start producing your plan, the “Marketing Plan Writer” services are here to support you. I will help with the research and production of a marketing plan SPECIFIC TO YOUR PROJECT where you can be based to carry out your own work before delivering it to your teachers. I do not incentive plagiarism therefore, I provide you with the full structure and key topics related to your work so that you can finalize the marketing plan yourself within little time. You can view the basic structure of how your marketing plan's structure will be here but all appropriate adjustments will be provided by myself as well as supplying you with all the biographical and non-biographical resources from where I took all the necessary information for the plan’s production. In that way you will have not only most of the work done for you, but also guide you through all the sources used. In this way, you can also learn from the same resources I used before presenting the work to your teacher so that you are able to answer all the questions that your teacher or colleagues might enquire.

WHAT YOU GET:

So, basically, when hiring my services I will provide you with the structure of the marketing plan including the research results of the specific market of study, bullet points of what you should be focused on for each part of the plan and a full bibliography of all the resources found during the research which will be sufficient for you to finish off the plan yourself in little time.

HOW I WILL DO IT:

Once we have agreed in the plan's production I will need to be briefed by you on the project you were asked to do. You will need to send me all the relevant material that was provided by your teacher along with any guidelines on the specific marketing plan structure that you teacher asked you to follow, if any. I will need you to provide me with the deadlines and any other relevant information that will help me in the production of the marketing plan. Once I take on the project I will be available for contact via e-mail (marketing.plan.writer@gmail.com) and via skype or MSN. I will provide you with these contact details after your initial contact. E-mail me on marketing.plan.writer@gmail.com to find out more about how I can help.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Are you starting-up your own business?

When starting a new business, the organisation and planning are decisive factors upon the success of your company and this is the time when you need to make sure that absolutely everything is ready to start trading. Your business plan, finance, legal documentation, recruiting, the business location and an effective marketing plan to draw in sales, must all be in place. It is common that start-up businesses tend to omit this last step either because they don’t have the marketing skills to write a plan, don’t have the budget to pay a freelancer to do it or don’t have the time to dedicate to all the research and plan production. What they forget is that, by omitting this important step before starting trading, they are not prepared to bring in sales, don’t have a structured document in place that details the steps to take in the first year, don’t have a clear understanding of what their target market is looking for, don’t have the marketing costs and respective ROI planned, neither have a contingency plan on the books just in case everything else goes wrong. This lack of planning usually leads to premature chaos in the business and might even be a reason for the company’s early decline.

I hope this brief explanation helped you understand the importance of defining a marketing plan for your business. However, if you don’t have the time or knowledge to write the marketing plan, this is where “The Marketing Plan Writer” can help you. From the various writing tips and ideas you will find throughout this blog, you can either focus on doing the plan yourself or you can take advantage of my writing services.

WHAT YOU GET:

When hiring my services I will provide you with a professional, specific to your business marketing plan which will include detailed marketing strategies to take your business forward, costs involved, market analysis, financial forecasts, ROI definition, implementation timeline and detailed contigency plans along with all the other marketing plan specifications as detailed on the post where I refer to the marketing plan structure.

HOW I WILL DO IT:

Once we have agreed in the plan's production I will need to be briefed by you on your business and industry. I will need you to tell me what are your main business goals, marketing budget, industry details and any other information that will help me identify how best to create your business marketing plan and associated strategy. Usually it will take me 2-3 weeks to complete the marketing plan but the time of delivery might be adjusted depending on how soon you will need it concluded. However, there will be an associated fee if you ask me to take less than 2 weeks to complete the marketing plan. Once I take on the project I will be available for contact via e-mail (marketing.plan.writer@gmail.com) and via skype or MSN. I will also require you to provide me with a relevant means of contact through where I can reach you if any questions come up while working on the plan. Contact me via e-mail at marketing.plan.writer@blogspot.com to find out more about how I can help.


You will not find any other marketing professional willing to take upon all the work involved in researching and writing a business marketing plan for the innovative payment plan offered here! Nevertheless, you are guaranteed to be delivered a professionally written marketing plan SPECIFIC FOR YOUR BUSINESS and market inclusive of detailed marketing campaigns, associated costs, ROI calculation, implementation timeline and detailed contingency plans. To find out in more detail what will be included in your marketing plan please read this post.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

The Marketing Plan Structure

The marketing plan structure will depend on your type of business. Here I will highlight a standard outline for a marketing plan, however, depending on your market situation, whether you are selling products or services, whether you are targeting businesses or consumers, or if you are a not-for-profit organisation, sections may be added or removed accordingly to what is most suitable. Below follows the general structure:

1.0 Executive Summary
This section is a high-level summary of the marketing plan including the most important facts regarding the target, the strategy and the goals.

2.0 Situation Analysis
Brief the situation analysis by providing an introduction about your organisation, define where it stands in the market and what are its main advantages in relation to competitors or market opportunities.

2.1 Market Summary
General summary of the specific market characteristics in which the organisation is involved and highlighting the most important factors that may have a strong effect (either positive or negative) in the organisation.

2.1.1 PEST Analysis
Identify here the Political, Economical, Social and Technological macro-environmental factors that can affect your business.

2.1.2 Target Market
Identify who are your customers/audience you want to reach and characterise them.

2.1.3 Market Analysis
Identify the market growth during the last few years, prevision for the future along with any other market insights.

2.1.4 Market Needs
Explain the market needs you wish to fill and what specific values your organisation will provide to fill these needs.

2.1.5 Market Trends
What factors seem to be affecting changes to your market and how these might affect your business or your target’s response to your products/services?

2.2 SWOT Analysis

  • Strengths: List all the advantages or strong points within your organisation or regarding the product/service itself.
  • Weaknesses: List all the disadvantages or weak points within your organisation or regarding the product/service itself.
  • Opportunities: List all the market advantages and strong points regarding your organisation’s macro environment beyond your control that may benefit your business, product or service.
  • Threats: List all the market disadvantages or weak points regarding your organisation’s macro environment beyond your control that may affect negatively your business, product or service.

2.3 Competition
Define a list of your direct and indirect competitors describing each main strengths and weaknesses along with their market share, the marketing strategy they use and any other relevant information about them.

2.4 Critical Success Factors/ Keys to Success
List the three or four key priorities for your business. These must be the priorities you need to focus on as the main key advantages that will differentiate your business/product or service from the competitors.

2.5 Critical issues
Taking in consideration the SWOT analysis, list the issues that you find crucial to take in consideration in order to minimize the weaknesses and surpass the threats while prioritising your business strengths. By doing this, categorise your organisation into its current life cycle.

3.0 Marketing Strategy
Write a brief summary of the strategies to take in order to achieve specific goals.

3.1 Mission
Write a good mission statement to reach all stakeholders that describes the company’s business and its value proposition.

3.2 Objectives
List here your marketing objectives, not only with the aim to generate sales but also any other relevant objectives such as relating to the brand awareness, employee motivation, among others. They should, however, all be interlinked with each other and try to focus on no more than 5 objectives so that each and every one of them are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible).

3.3 Target
List here specifically the type of customers your company will be focused in reaching. Specify the targets demographics, habits, income or any other relevant characteristics. Before identifying these groups you must ensure that you know very well this audience and that you will be able to communicate to them effectively.

3.4 Positioning
This should be a strong statement that will clearly identify your company’s approach to the market focusing on the most important market need the company will cover and how it plans to satisfy that need differentiating itself from the competitors.

3.5 The Marketing Mix
Identify here what you plan to achieve in terms of branding and value proposition to compete effectively in the marketplace through the use of the various marketing mix tools.

3.5.1 Product
Describe here your long term product/service strategy taking in consideration all its characteristics, such as branding, labelling, packaging as well as any features and attributes.

3.5.2 Promotion
Describe how the product will be promoted in terms of advertising, sales promotion, public relations and personal selling, summarising the methods used and the spending involved for each method.

3.5.3 Distribution
Here you will specify where and when your customers will be able to find your products/services, in which quantities and delivery times.

3.5.4 Pricing
Define the price of your products/services which should be based on the analysis of the cost of production/delivery, demand, image and competitors prices. Here can also be identified if any discounts can be applied to the price at any given situation.

4.0 Marketing Budget and forecasts
Determine the marketing budget, break-even analysis and financial sales forecasts required to implement the plan as defined in the previous topics for at least the period of 1 year. The use of visual graphics and tables is advised throughout this section.

4.1 Marketing Budget
Define the spending involved in the implementation of the marketing plan breaking down each tactical marketing decision and its total cost over the period of at least one year.

4.2 Break-even Analysis
The Breakeven analysis will indicate the level of sales required before the company realises a positive marketing contribution.

4.3 Sales Forecasts
Define the sales forecasts in time taking in consideration the marketing plan implementation. Present your forecasts in a table followed by an illustrative graphic and provide consistent reasons for the forecast, highlighting what the expected progress in sales will be throughout the year.

5.0 Controls and Evaluation
In this section define how you will make sure that the marketing plan is implemented throughout time. Also identify the methods used to measure the effectiveness of each marketing tactic and how the results will be evaluated.

5.1 Contingency planning
Taking in consideration unexpected issues that may come up such as economic or market factors, or following the failure of certain tactics, define how the company will respond to these industry changes or provide alternative marketing actions to take.

6.0 Timeline
Define in a chart all the actions to take place throughout time in order to implement the marketing plan, allocating the frequency of each activity and the person responsible for each one, as well as highlighting any deadlines or important dates to consider.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

What is Marketing?

There are numerous definitions, all with its own truth, however, I choose to define marketing in a simple approach to make it clear to anyone what marketing is really all about:

Marketing is the process by which an organisation succeeds to attract its target audience in such a way that, the audience will consider the organisation to satisfy the purposed necessity ahead of all its competitors.

So, with this simple definition I hope to make it clear that the ultimate goal of marketing is to achieve profit by making your organisation stand out from the crowd and become THE organisation/brand people will think about once they require the services/products you supply. In order to achieve this goal you need to define carefully and intelligently your organisation’s marketing plan which will provide you with the key elements to step-by-step achieve the ultimate aim.

Friday, July 10, 2009

The Marketing Plan Writer Services

With the creation of this blog my aims are simple:

  • To provide start-up businesses and students with marketing plan writing services in a cost-effective way
  • Provide various tips on marketing plan writing and other marketing techniques
  • To clarify businesses and marketing students on their doubts regarding marketing subjects
  • To blog about effective marketing campaigns and the latest marketing trends

This will be mine and yours little marketing corner on the web where we can discuss marketing news; learn about new marketing trends; share marketing tips and clarify your marketing doubts.
Your participation is KEY in the success of this blog so any feedback is very welcome so that I can continuously improve “The Marketing Plan Writer”.