New Year, New Marketing Plan

I reprinted this from Entrepreneur magazine.   Just good common sense about marketing plans…

A marketing plan, on the other hand, is plump with meaning. It provides you with several major benefits. Let’s review them.

• Rallying point: Your marketing plan gives your troops something to rally behind. You want them to feel confident that the captain of the vessel has the charts in order, knows how to run the ship, and has a port of destination in mind. Companies often undervalue the impact of a “marketing plan” on their own people, who want to feel part of a team engaged in an exciting and complicated joint endeavor. If you want your employees to feel committed to your company, it’s important to share with them your vision of where the company is headed in the years to come. People don’t always understand financial projections, but they can get excited about a well-written and well-thought-out marketing plan. You should consider releasing your marketing plan–perhaps in an abridged version–companywide. Do it with some fanfare and generate some excitement for the adventures to come. Your workers will appreciate being involved.

• Chart to success: We all know that plans are imperfect things. How can you possibly know what’s going to happen 12 months or five years from now? Isn’t putting together a marketing plan an exercise in futility . . . a waste of time better spent meeting with customers or fine-tuning production? Yes, possibly but only in the narrowest sense. If you don’t plan, you’re doomed, and an inaccurate plan is far better than no plan at all. To stay with our sea captain analogy, it’s better to be 5 or even 10 degrees off your destination port than to have no destination in mind at all. The point of sailing, after all, is to get somewhere, and without a marketing plan, you’ll wander the seas aimlessly, sometimes finding dry land but more often than not floundering in a vast ocean. Sea captains without a chart are rarely remembered for discovering anything but the ocean floor.

• Company operational instructions: Your child’s first bike and your new VCR came with a set of instructions, and your company is far more complicated to put together and run than either of them. Your marketing plan is a step-by-step guide for your company’s success. It’s more important than a vision statement. To put together a genuine marketing plan, you have to assess your company from top to bottom and make sure all the pieces are working together in the best way. What do you want to do with this enterprise you call the company in the coming year? Consider it a to-do list on a grand scale. It assigns specific tasks for the year.

• Captured thinking: You don’t allow your financial people to keep their numbers in their heads. Financial reports are the lifeblood of the numbers side of any business, no matter what size. It should be no different with marketing. Your written document lays out your game plan. If people leave, if new people arrive, if memories falter, if events bring pressure to alter the givens, the information in the written marketing plan stays intact to remind you of what you’d agreed on.

• Top-level reflection: In the daily hurly-burly of competitive business, it’s hard to turn your attention to the big picture, especially those parts that aren’t directly related to the daily operations. You need to take time periodically to really think about your business–whether it’s providing you and your employees with what you want, whether there aren’t some innovative wrinkles you can add, whether you’re getting all you can out of your products, your sales staff and your markets. Writing your marketing plan is the best time to do this high-level thinking. Some companies send their top marketing people away to a retreat. Others go to the home of a principal. Some do marketing plan development at a local motel, away from phones and fax machines, so they can devote themselves solely to thinking hard and drawing the most accurate sketches they can of the immediate future of the business.

Ideally, after writing marketing plans for a few years, you can sit back and review a series of them, year after year, and check the progress of your company. Of course, sometimes this is hard to make time for (there is that annoying real world to deal with), but it can provide an unparalleled objective view of what you’ve been doing with your business life over a number of years.

Source: The Small Business Encyclopedia and Knock-Out Marketing.

The purpose of market research is to provide relevant data that will help solve marketing problems a business will encounter. This is absolutely necessary in the start-up phase. Conducting thorough market surveys is the foundation of any successful business. In fact, strategies such as market segmentation (identifying specific segments within a market) and product differentiation (creating an identity for your product or service that separates it from your competitors’) would be impossible to develop without market research.

Whether you’re conducting market research using the historical, experimental, observational or survey method, you’ll be gathering two types of data. The first will be “primary” information that you will compile yourself or hire someone to gather. Most information, however, will be “secondary,” or already compiled and organized for you. Reports and studies done by government agencies, trade associations, or other businesses within your industry are examples of the latter. Search for them, and take advantage of them.

Primary Research
When conducting primary research using your own resources, there are basically two types of information that can be gathered: exploratory and specific. Exploratory research is open-ended in nature; helps you define a specific problem; and usually involves detailed, unstructured interviews in which lengthy answers are solicited from a small group of respondents. Specific research is broader in scope and is used to solve a problem that exploratory research has identified. Interviews are structured and formal in approach. Of the two, specific research is more expensive.

When conducting primary research using your own resources, you must first decide how you will question your target group of individuals. There are basically three avenues you can take: direct mail, telemarketing or personal interviews.

Direct Mail
If you choose a direct-mail questionnaire, be sure to do the following in order to increase your response rate:

• Make sure your questions are short and to the point.
• Make sure questionnaires are addressed to specific individuals and they’re of interest to the respondent.
• Limit the questionnaire’s length to two pages.
• Enclose a professionally prepared cover letter that adequately explains what you need.
• Send a reminder about two weeks after the initial mailing. Include a postage-paid self-addressed envelope.

Unfortunately, even if you employ the above tactics, response to direct mail is always low, and is sometimes less than five percent.

Phone Surveys
Phone surveys are generally the most cost-effective, considering overall response rates; they cost about one-third as much as personal interviews, which have, on average, a response rate which is only 10 percent. Following are some phone survey guidelines:

• At the beginning of the conversation, your interviewer should confirm the name of the respondent if calling a home, or give the appropriate name to the switchboard operator if calling a business.
• Pauses should be avoided, as respondent interest can quickly drop.
• Make sure that a follow-up call is possible if additional information is required.
• Make sure that interviewers don’t divulge details about the poll until the respondent is reached.

As mentioned phone interviews are cost-effective but speed is another big advantage. Some of the more experienced interviewers can get through up to 10 interviewers an hour (however, speed for speed’s sake is not the goal of any of these surveys), but five to six per hour is more typical. Phone interviews also allow you to cover a wide geographical range relatively inexpensively. Phone costs can be reduced by taking advantage of cheaper rates during certain hours.

Personal Interviews
There are two main types of personal interviews:

1. The group survey. Used mostly by big business, group interviews can be useful as brainstorming tools resulting in product modifications and new product ideas. They also give you insight into buying preferences and purchasing decisions among certain populations.
2. The depth interview. One-on-one interviews where the interviewer is guided by a small checklist and basic common sense. Depth interviews are either focused or non-directive. Non-directive interviews encourage respondents to address certain topics with minimal questioning. The respondent, in essence, leads the interview. The focused interview, on the other hand, is based on a pre-set checklist. The choice and timing of questions, however, is left to the interviewer, depending on how the interview goes.

When considering which type of survey to use, keep the following cost factors in mind:

• Mail. Most of the costs here concern the printing of questionnaires, envelopes, postage, the cover letter, time taken in the analysis and presentation, the cost of researcher time, and any incentives used.
• Telephone. The main costs here are the interviewer’s fee, phone charges, preparation of the questionnaire, cost of researcher time, and the analysis and presentation of the results of the questioning.
• Personal interviews. Costs include the printing of questionnaires and prompt cards if needed, the incentives used, the interviewer’s fee and expenses, cost of researcher time, and analysis and presentation.
• Group discussions. Your main costs here are the interviewer’s fees and expenses in recruiting and assembling the groups, renting the conference room or other facility, researcher time, any incentives used, analysis and presentation, and the cost of recording media such as tapes, if any are used.

Secondary data is outside information assembled by government agencies, industry and trade associations, labor unions, media sources, chambers of commerce, etc., and found in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, trade and other magazines, newspapers, and so on. It’s termed secondary data because the information has been gathered by another, or secondary, source. The benefits of this are obvious–time and money are saved because you don’t have to develop survey methods or do the interviewing.

Secondary sources are divided into three main categories:

1. Public. Public sources are the most economical, as they’re usually free, and can offer a lot of good information. These sources are most typically governmental departments, business departments of public libraries, etc.
2. Commercial. Commercial sources are equally valuable, but usually involve costs such as subscription and association fees. However, you spend far less than you would if you hired a research team to collect the data firsthand. Commercial sources typically consist of research and trade assocations, organizations like SCORE (Society Corps of Retired Executives) and Dun & Bradstreet, banks and other financial institutions, publicly traded corporations, etc.
3. Educational. Educational institutions are frequently overlooked as viable information sources, yet there is more research conducted in colleges, universities, and polytechnic institutes than virtually any sector of the business community.

Government statistics are among the most plentiful and wide-ranging public sources of information. Start with the Census Bureau’s helpful Hidden Treasures–Census Bureau Data and Where to Find It! In seconds, you’ll find out where to find federal and state information. Other government publications that are helpful include:

• Statistical and Metropolitan Area Data Book. Offers statistics for metropolitan areas, central cities and counties.
• Statistical Abstract of the United States. Data books with statistics from numerous sources, government to private.
• U.S. Global Outlook. Traces the growth of 200 industries and gives five-year forecasts for each.

Don’t neglect to contact specific government agencies such as the Small Business Administration (SBA). They sponsor several helpful programs such as SCORE and Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) which can provide you with free counseling and a wealth of business information. The Department of Commerce not only publishes helpful books like the U.S. Global Outlook, it also produces an array of products with information regarding both domestic industries and foreign markets through its International Trade Administration (ITA) branch. The above items are available from the U.S. Government Printing Office .

One of the best public sources is the business section of public libraries. The services provided vary from city to city, but usually include a wide range of government and market statistics, a large collection of directories including information on domestic and foreign businesses, as well as a wide selection of magazines, newspapers and newsletters.

Almost every county government publishes population density and distribution figures in accessible census tracts. These tracts will show you the number of people living in specific areas, such as precincts, water districts or even 10-block neighborhoods. Other public sources include city chambers of commerce or business development departments, which encourage new businesses in their communities. They will supply you (usually for free) with information on population trends, community income characteristics, payrolls, industrial development, and so on.

Among the best commercial sources of information are research and trade associations. Information gathered by trade associations is usually confined to a certain industry and available only to association members, with a membership fee frequently required. However, the research gathered by the larger associations is usually thorough, accurate and worth the cost of membership. Two excellent resources to help you locate a trade association that reports on the business you’re researching are Encyclopedia of Associations (Gale Research) and Business Information Sources (University of California Press) and can usually be found at your local library.

Research associations are often independent but are sometimes affiliated with trade associations. They often limit their activities to conducting and applying research in industrial development, but some have become full-service information sources with a wide range of supplementary publications such as directories.

Educational institutions are very good sources of research. Research there ranges from faculty-based projects often published under professors’ bylines to student projects, theses and assignments. Copies of student research projects may be available for free with faculty permission. Consulting services are available either for free or at a cost negotiated with the appropriate faculty members. This can be an excellent way to generate research at little or no cost, using students who welcome the professional experience either as interns or for special credit. Contact the university administration departments and marketing/management studies departments for further information.

Every how-to book on the market has a different take on the essential elements of a marketing plan. Those geared toward the big corporate crowd communicate in a language few human beings understand. However, the words you use are much less important than how seriously you approach the task.

This section outlines the key elements you need to include in your marketing plan. No matter how it’s ultimately organized, your marketing plan should be a straightforward, easily understood company document. It should provide you with a clear direction for your marketing efforts for the coming year, and it should give an incisive look into your company for all readers.

Preparing to Write
Before you begin to write, pull together some information you’ll need. Getting the information first avoids interruptions in the thinking and writing process. Have on hand:

• Your company’s latest financial reports (profit and loss, operating budgets and so on) and latest sales figures by product and region for the current and the past three years or, if less, for however long you’ve been in business.
• A listing of each product or service in the current line, along with target markets
• An organization table (If you can count your employees on one hand, you can probably omit this.)
• Your understanding of your marketplace: your competitors, geographical boundaries, types of customers you sell to, existing distribution channels, latest and most useful demographic data, any information on trends in your markets (both demographic and product-related)
• Ask each of your salespeople and/or customer-relations people to list the most crucial points, in their opinion, that need to be included in the coming year’s marketing plan. You don’t have to include all of them, but you do have to take them into account.

Market Situation
The “market situation” section should contain your best and most clear-headed description of the current state of the marketplace (this is no place for hunches).

• What are your products/services or product/service lines?
• What is the dollar size of your markets?
• What is your sales and distribution setup?
• What geographic area do you sell to?
• Describe your audience in terms of population, demographics, income levels and so on.
• What competitors exist in this marketplace?
• Historically, how well have your products sold?

Your market situation section might read like this:

Sumners and Associates is a bookkeeping and accounting firm started in 1981. We provide tax services to individuals and to businesses under $500,000 in annual sales. We provide bookkeeping and payroll support to those same businesses. Our market area is Boulder, Colorado, and its northern suburbs.

For the personal market, our clients typically are in the $75,000 and higher income range, or they are retired with assets of $200,000 or more. For the business market, most of our work is for restaurants, service stations, independent convenience stores and a large courier service.

With the exception of a slump from 1988 through 1991, Sumners and Associates has grown steadily from its inception. Gross sales in 1997 were $145,000.

Competition for our immediate market is a group of eight firms roughly comparable to our company. Only one of these firms, Acme Bookkeeping, has an interest in marketing itself. We believe we rank second in the group of competitors, behind Acme.

We have a strong position in the restaurant portion of our business.

Much of this information exists in the heads of the management team, the way it is at many companies. But now is when you write it down. For example, how much information do you have in your office–right now–on your competition? A marketing plan gives you a chance to pull all this relevant information together in one place, to spur ideas and justify actions.

Consider each of your products or services up against the matching products or services of your competitors. How well do you stack up? Is there any significant market opportunity for you that neither you nor your competitors are currently exploiting?

You’ll also find that the best thinkers in your company may well have different ideas about elements of the current situation. Your marketing plan will provide a good arena to test different snapshots of the market against each other.

Threats and Opportunities
This section is an extension of the “market situation” section, and it should focus on the bad and good implications of the current market:

• What trends in the marketplace are against you?
• Are there competitive trends that are ominous?
• Are your current products poised to succeed in the market as it now exists?
• What trends in the marketplace favor you?
• Are there competitive trends working to your benefit?
• Are the demographics of your market in your favor? Against you?

There are lots of places to go to get information on the trends in your market. City and state business publications frequently publish overview issues; you can talk to local business reporters; and local chambers of commerce publish projections, as do associations of manufacturers (the names are different in various parts of the country). Talk to your professional association and read your trade journals.

Here’s an example of what a threats and opportunities section would look like for the Sumners and Associates firm:

Threats:
The company faces four identifiable threats in the coming year:
1. Our computer system needs upgrading to the latest version of our accounting and tax software. To do this with all of our machines will be too costly. We’ll need to work with the existing version of our software for another 10 months. This may put us at a service disadvantage with some clients.
2. Two of our clients, Porkie’s Carryout and the Magnus Group, are facing difficult business prospects in the short term. We will likely need to replace this business before the end of the year.
3. Acme Bookkeeping, our major competitor, has hired one of our staff members. We have to assume they now have our current client list and will make solicitations based on their greater size and service capabilities.
4. Growth on the south side of town is outstripping growth on the north side. We’ll need to consider opening a south-side office or look into ways to use couriers or electronic communications to make ourselves fully competitive in providing our services.

Opportunities:
1. Morrissey’s Inc., a long-time client, has purchased three significant restaurants in the adjoining county and has expressed an interest in having us take over the accounting work for these operations. This should provide us a great chance to hire one and perhaps two additional people.
2. Changes in the tax laws have made many small businesses uneasy with handling the bookkeeping by themselves or through a one-person bookkeeping service. As the details of these revisions become more public, we anticipate increasing calls for help.
3. We have been asked to participate in several educational venues in the coming year, which include three presentations at a small-business forum, an evening class at the university on starting a small business, and a role in the Boulder Entrepreneur Club. These will provide us good exposure and strong business prospects.
4. The local economy continues to be strong, and we believe our typical clients will continue to flourish in this growth cycle.

n the “marketing objectives” section, you paint your picture of the future: What marketing objectives do you want to achieve over the course of the plan? Each of your marketing objectives should include both a narrative description of what you intend to accomplish along with numbers to give you something concrete to aim for. Just to say you want to make a first entry into the Swiss screw machine marketplace isn’t providing much guidance. Saying you want to go from 0 percent to 8 percent of the local market in two years is easier to understand–and verifiable. If you’re not sure of the size of the local market, then aim at a dollar figure in sales. Your accountant will let you know whether you’ve succeeded or not.Goal for It
If you’re new to the marketing plan racket, how do you set a quantifiable goal? Start with your past. Review your past sales numbers, your growth over the years in different markets, the size of typical new customers, and how new product introductions have fared. If over the last five years you’ve grown a cumulative 80 percent in gross revenues, projecting a 20 percent to 25 percent increase in the next year is reasonable; 45 percent is not. Make a low but reasonable projection for what you’ll be able to accomplish with marketing support toward your new marketing objectives. Set modest goals to start, until you get a feel for the terrain.

You should make it a point to limit the number of marketing objectives you take on in a given year. Let’s face it, change can bring stress, disorient staff and sometimes even confuse your target market. Keep your objectives challenging but achievable. Better to motivate yourself with ambitious but worthy targets than to depress yourself by failing at too many enthusiastic goals.

Here are some typical marketing objective categories:

• Introduce new products
• Extend or regain market for existing product
• Enter new territories for the company
• Boost sales in a particular product, market or price range. Where will this business come from? Be specific.
• Cross-sell (or bundle) one product with another
• Enter into long-term contracts with desirable clients
• Raise prices without cutting into sales figures
• Refine a product
• Enhance manufacturing/product delivery

This third section of your plan should include perhaps a half dozen such objectives, spelled out with specific goals. Some examples:

• Objective: Introduce our accounting and audit services to Blankville. By the end of the first year, we want to have six clients of significance and billed time of $75,000.
• Objective: Reverse the decline in our package Caribbean winter tour sales in Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis. Sales over the past three years have declined 11 percent. We intend to increase sales 4 percent this year and 8 percent next year.
• Objective: Introduce lunch fax business at the west side restaurant and deliver 420 lunches per week by June 1.
• Objective: Demo updated X-ray crystallography at selected trade exhibitions in the summer of 1999. Capture 250 leads per show and secure 75 on-site demos.

To repeat, make your objectives simple, concrete, countable, ambitious and achievable.

Marketing Goals: Where the Details Start
Here’s where you come down out of the clouds and spell out how you’re going to make things happen. While your spreadsheet has shown increasingly stunning profits each time you bump up the market gains, now you’re in the real world. Gains must be made by brains and brawn.

Each marketing objective should have several goals (subsets of objectives) and tactics for achieving those goals. In the objectives section of your marketing plan, you focus on the “what” and the “why” of the marketing tasks for the year ahead. In the implementation section, you focus on the practical, sweat-and-calluses areas of who, where, when and how. This is life in the marketing trenches.

When Eisenhower and the Allies decided to invade Normandy in 1944 to open up a mainland Europe offensive against the Axis powers, they developed detailed plans for victory. While successfully landing in Normandy and holding it were the overall objectives, many intermediate goals were set to make this possible: lining up the needed boats, air cover, behind-the-lines paratrooper drops to cut off communications, feints at a Calais landing to fool the enemy and so on. And, of course, each of those steps had its own list of details.

The key task is to take each objective and lay out the steps you intend to take to reach it. As an example, let’s take the first marketing objective mentioned

Objective: Introduce our accounting and audit services to Blankville. By the end of the first year, we want to have six clients of significance and billed time of $75,000.

How can you make this happen?

Let’s suppose you’ve assigned this objective to a group of people, and they’ve worked up some plans on moving into Blankville. Here are what some of their goals might look like:

1. Since accounting and auditing services don’t work well at a remote site (except for the very largest companies), we’ll probably need a local office in Blankville. We should open this new office by July. (Always include target dates when possible.)
2. If we’re going to talk about our expertise, we need some of our professional staff there. We’ll probably want to detail two or three of our experienced people in that new office, as well as hire local support staff.
3. We may want to do some direct-mail advertising to companies in Blankville. Our message might talk about special expertise in certain areas of business. We’ll target those types of businesses in Blankville.
4. We’ll talk to the business editor of the local paper and let him or her know we’re coming to town. We might contribute a “tax tips” article or two for the exposure.
5. We’ll approach several business associations in town and offer to give a talk on some specialized topic in which we can offer some expertise.
6. We’ll ask our clients in other cities if they’d be willing to give us some referrals in Blankville.
7. We may run some modest advertising in the Blankville Bugle (a fine and respected newspaper) announcing our arrival and explaining our special expertise.
8. We’ll have an open house and invite a number of local business celebrities, political people, potential clients and media.
9. We might look to get our Blankville office involved in some high-profile charity or public service work.

You get the idea. If your objective is to build a business in Blankville, you have to put together concrete goals to make it happen. Each of these actions makes sense. You might come up with others (there’s no limit to human creativity, after all–especially in marketing). The point is that each goal should consist of concrete actions.

Each of these goals needs to have its own series of steps formalized. Who’s going to check on the advertising rates for the Blankville Bugle? And when should those ads run? Which professionals are moving to Blankville and how do they feel about it? How do we get a list of companies in Blankville? Lots of work to do.

One of the best ways to handle such details is through an activity matrix. A matrix is a grid table that lets you plot actions across time. When you’re developing a marketing plan, you’ll soon reach the point where you have to turn to your calendar and see when things should happen. A matrix provides you with a clear and very usable framework for such timeline plotting.

You can make the matrix as detailed or as big picture as you want. It should, however, include everything that’s scheduled, when it’s scheduled and who the responsible party is. Don’t forget to delegate responsibility as you go.

Whether done well or poorly, business activity always costs money. Your marketing plan needs to have a section in which you allocate budgets for each activity planned. This information shouldn’t appear on the activity matrix since there’s enough detail there already. But it should be in writing with the individual carrying overall program responsibility. People responsible for portions of the marketing activity should know exactly what funds are available to them. In fact, you would be wise to involve them in planning those budgets.

Be as objective as you can about those costs you can anticipate. For things with which you have no budget experience, add 25 percent to your best estimate. Your budget should allocate separate accounting for internal hours (staff time) and external costs (out-of-pocket expenses). Make sure to enter the budget on a Lotus or Excel spreadsheet so you can manipulate it during construction to see which variant works best.

Your budget section might look like this:

Gross sales	$142,000
Budget for annual marketing efforts	$7,045
Yellow Pages	$2,600
Sales letter mailing to prospects	$625
Clerical help on mailing list	$125
Advertising in local business magazine	$500
Advertising in newspaper business section	$1,200
Brochure design and copywriting	$380
Brochure printing	$315
Registration for business exhibitions	$145
Attend training session in Chicago	$930
Purchase new mailing label software	$225

Controls: Tracking Effectiveness
To track progress on your marketing plan throughout the year, establish a regular schedule of meetings, and spell this out in writing. How will you make adjustments to your plan midstream? How will you monitor progress in sales/costs to make changes during the year? You can’t leave yourself without this capability.

The reason you pick measurable marketing objectives is to have the ability to track your progress toward reaching them. Too many marketing efforts aren’t quantifiable, with the result that the achievements of your marketing campaigns aren’t satisfactory, or they’re just plain illusory.

All your marketing efforts will benefit from the classic feedback loop: Act, observe, adjust, act again. Scheduling quarterly meetings is best. At these meetings, responsible individuals should report on what they’ve accomplished in the last quarter, including how much of the budget has been spent. Reports should be verbal, with a printed summary for the record.

As your activities move forward over time, you’ll doubtless find the need to adjust the timing, the budget or the tasks themselves. At these points you must decide whether to intensify your efforts, add more tactical steps to pick up the pace, or scale back your objectives. Make your changes in an organized manner, adjusting all the dependent tasks so that the plan shifts as a whole. Whatever your decision, make sure to update your marketing plan document. Put in writing your understanding of why you didn’t reach your goals. Keep the original, and date and number all changes. Your plan must be dynamic, but it shouldn’t lose its sense of history. All this information will be extremely useful when you create next year’s marketing plan.

Marketing isn’t a science, but it is a skill in which you can make steady incremental improvement.

Your effectiveness section might look like this:

A) Annual gross sales from the previous year	$865,000
B) Marketing expenditures planned during the current year	$40,000
C) Anticipated impact of marketing expenditures on gross sales	$110,000
D) Actual marketing expenses during the current year	$32,500
E) Annual gross sales at the end of the current year	$971,000
F) Percentage of the actual difference between this year’s sales and last year’s sales that can be fairly attributed to the marketing effort	60%

Executive Summary
Put a brief summary at the front of your marketing plan binder. On a single page, sum up (with key financial numbers) in no more than a single page the contents of your marketing plan. Use bullet points, short sentences and bold type for major points, and stay focused on the big issues. What does someone have to know about your plan to have any sense of it?

This summary gives plan readers a concise description of what your company plans to do in the coming year. It also forces you to boil your thoughts down to their rich and flavorful essence, which is always a good thing.

Here’s a sample marketing plan summary:

The year 2006 marketing plan for Sumners and Associates has four main elements:
1. We review our existing competitive marketing situation. Overall, prospects look good for our company. Boulder is growing at a steady 4.2 percent rate, with new businesses starting at roughly 750 a year. No competitive bookkeeping and accounting firm has made significant marketing efforts, although Acme Bookkeeping did run a series of advertisements in the business section of the Boulder Bugle. Our gross sales were $145,000. We’ll have to upgrade our software sometime this year, and this will cost us about $20,000, with associated hardware costs. Our supplier will let us spread these costs over three years.
2. We plan on marketing ourselves aggressively in the coming year. In addition to speaking and training engagements, we will prepare a series of three half-page ads to run on a six-time schedule in late summer and early fall in the Boulder Business Bulletin. We’ll also produce our first company brochure, which we’ll use as a handout at the training venues. Costs for production of the ads, the brochure and placement of the ads will be $8,500.
3. We foresee the following results for the coming year:
Gross sales $ 154,000
Net profit $ 12,400
4. In the long term, we’ll explore the possibilities of opening a second office in the city. Over the next two to four years, we anticipate maintaining our historical growth of 5 percent to 7 percent per year. Toward the end of that period, we’ll hire at least one other employee and consider expanding our leased space.

Your plan must address two different time frames: the short-term (one to 12 months) and the long-term (over 12 months). Most of your document should focus on the coming year, which is the most important for the majority of small and medium-size businesses. Marketing typically demands the performance of a number of short-term actions planned in unison, which together bring about change. Once you’ve outlined the major year-end goals, the analysis will largely focus on the mechanics of media, mailing and promotion. But you shouldn’t stop your serious thinking at year-end. Stretch beyond your business’s immediate needs and envision the next two or three years. What are you ultimately reaching for?

Write this down, briefly and in general terms. Questions you might answer could include: How many employees do you envision adding over the next few years? Will your need for office space stay the same? Will there be major equipment purchases? Will you be able to hire a manager? Do there exist specific training courses or certifications you’d like to put your staff through? Will your profit margin stay constant, or do you think you’ll be able to better it? Will you become active in local, regional or national trade groups? How will market demographics affect your business in the coming years? Keep track of how your larger vision changes over time as well.

Source: The Small Business Encyclopedia and Knock-Out Marketing.

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