What should the most basic marketing plan include?

Do a keyword search on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com or walk down the aisles of any bookstore with a business section and youll find plenty of books designed to help you write your business plan or marketing plan. My issue with a lot of these books is that they are often a little more detailed than they need to be. Just as I believe strategic plans should be tools that produce action, I believe the marketing plan should be an easy to comprehend, rapidly actionable document. As such, Ive worked over the years to keep the plan as short (and as actionable!) as possible.

Ive borrowed from several sources to develop my suggested framework, but its original inspiration was provided by marketing author Jerome McCarthy. You'll also see echoes of Kotler's Four Pillars model here, too.

This framework helps you develop a go get em plan by answering 4 basic questions:

1. What is the value proposition?

2. Who is the target audience?

3. How will we connect with them?

4. What will all this cost?

What is the value proposition?

This section of the plan discusses how our product leaves the lives of our customers better. It is all about the value or benefits our product has to offer. As the late, great guru Theodore Levitt once famously said, The customer doesnt want a quarter inch drill, what they want is a quarter inch hole. In this section we discuss what the customer is buying or what they receive in the exchange, and we discuss it in terms of how the customers future is better because of it. Its helpful if this can be capsulated into a sentence or two, but a paragraph or so should be all that is really needed to explain what our value proposition is. That can actually be very challenging in itself, but remember that what we're after here is somthing that is actionable, so to be actionable it needs to be memorable, so the shorter the better when it comes to stating exactly what our true value offering is.

Who is the target audience?

Once we have answered the question of what value our product provides, we have to address who the best target audience or target market is for our offering. This is the most critical decision a marketer makes. Because we have finite resources, we are charged with allocating those resources in the manner that returns the highest possible returns. Remember, "The" customer isn't always right, only the "right" customer is always right! We have to choose our target market(s) carefully and deliberately.

Sometimes we may actually start with defining who our target audience is and then developing the value proposition around that, so you might give that a try and see if its a better fit to do it that way. Being a constant student of the marketplace and looking for ways peoples lives could be improved has been the starting point for many life-altering products, so it is very possible to start with the target audience we want to serve, then build the value proposition around that. Essentially, the target audience question is the who part of our marketing plan equation, and the value proposition is the how and why.

How will we connect with them?

Addressing this question means describing what media or methods we will use to open, communicate, and build the relationship with our customers. If we have the budget, we should use as much media as we can afford to communicate our value proposition with our target market. Because the budget will always likely be an issue, we have to decide which media will provide the greatest return for our investment and develop a strategy that will capitalize on that.

While much of this part of the plan will deal with the media we use to communicate with our target market, let's be careful to remember that anything and everything that connects with the customer is how they will evaluate the brand. There may be a lot of very cost-effective things we can do to "connect" with the customer that don't involve fancy or expensive media, or may not involve "media" at all. As Tony Hseigh, the founder of Zappos said, We view any expense that enhances the customer experience as a marketing cost because it creates more repeat customers through word of mouth. Anything and everything that can help us build a relationship with a customer is something you should consider (Integrated Marketing!).

As you can imagine, this section tends to be the largest. It may evolve into subsections, and may also tend to grow on its own as you consider more ways to "connect" with the customer.

What will it cost?

Finally, we have to have an accurate, comprehensive budget to accompany our plan or were not doing our jobs as marketing managers. While the idea of a comprehensive budget may sound rather daunting, its actually fairly easy to build a comprehensive budget by keeping track of anticipated expenses as we develop our strategies by assigning a dollar value to ever expense for each strategy we consider. For example, if were going to use direct mail, as were considering using that strategy we should estimate the cost of the materials and/or the costs of hiring a firm to do that for us.

Dont forget also to include the indirect costs associated with marketing tactics, too. If a tactic will require additional resources, overtime, additional personnel, etc. Using the example of direct mail again, if were planning to do the mailing ourselves, obviously well have the costs of the materials and the postage. However, we sometimes forget that someone will have to do the actual work and we need to budget for that. Even if were doing it ourselves or doing it in slack time, there are at least opportunity costs associated with the project, and these need to be considered and addressed in the budget. So when we talk about "virtually free" tactics like social media, remember that there are still resources that have to be allocated to accomplish the tactics.

The payoff for doing a comprehensive budget is not only that we can make the case for exactly what kinds of resources we need, but when our plans pay off, we can accurately demonstrate return on investment to make it easier to get funding for the next campaign.

Planning is a process...

Lest we forget, planning is a PROCESS, not an event! A marketing plan, a business plan, a strategic plan, any true plan that will be used in the real world has to be viewed as a living document. As market forces change, so must our strategies. Just recognize going in that it's a process and with that as a guiding principle you'll avoid a lot of frustration.