Marketing Plan Basics
Marketing plans can be written in any format that is acceptable to the guidelines of the strategic planning process of the organization. A multinational company must assess its marketing strategy among several countries and regional markets. Small and medium-sized businesses will write their marketing plans according to their intended target markets and respective environments. This text provides guidance on how to format a marketing plan.
The Offering
Provide detail on the features and benefits of the offering, including pricing options, in this section. For example, in some instances, your organization might plan for several variations of the offering, each with different pricing options. The different options should be discussed in detail, along with the market segments expected to respond to each option. Some marketing professionals like to specify the sales goals for each option in this section, along with the associated costs and gross profit margins for each. Other planners prefer to wait until the budget section of the plan to provide that information.
The plan for the offering should also include the plan for introducing offerings that will follow the initial launch. For example, when should Progresso introduce new soup flavors? Should there be seasonal flavors? Should there be smaller sizes and larger sizes, and should they be introduced all at the same time or in stages?
Part of an offering is the service support consumers need to extract the offering's full value. The support might include presales support as well as post-sales support. For example, Teradata has a team of finance specialists who can help customers document the return on investment they would get from purchasing and implementing a Teradata data warehouse. This presales support helps potential buyers make a stronger business case for buying Teradata's products with executives who control their companies' budgets.
Post-sales support can include technical support. In B2B (business-to-business) environments, sellers frequently offer to train their customers' employees to use products as part of their post-sales support. Before you launch an offering, you need to be sure your firm's support services are in place. That means training service personnel, creating the appropriate communication channels for customers to air their technical concerns, and other processes.
Figure 13.6: Service support
Prior to launching a new offering, the pre-sales and post-sales support personnel for it have to be trained and the appropriate work processes created so that the right level of support is provided. These call-center technicians had to first learn the offering's technical processes before it could be launched.