Article2: How to develop a marketing and business plan?
When you decide to develop a business or one of the cases I have mentioned in the last Article, you need a general plan to bring all of your facilities and capacities in a united way and direction to achieve all your goals and objectives. This way you can be assured that each part of your business is in the right way.
For this purpose you need to have marketing plan at first.
How to develop a marketing plan? There is 3 main steps, you should do in developing a marketing plan:
step 1: Understanding
In this step you need to come to a real understanding about your company, the competition situation in the market, different target markets you will face and the channels through which you can reach your target.so for coming to this understanding we should go through the four following actions:
- Business review:
In this level you should come to a real understanding about the abilities of your company in the following fields:
A: Financial abilities B:Technical abilities C: Organizational chart and culture (for those companies which are active and plan for Developing the business) D: Vision and Mission of the Board of the company.
2. Competition Analysis
In this level all the competitors in the market ( both direct and indirect ) should be analyzed about their Target market , Their marketing activities, Their market share and their financial and technical potentials.
3. Distribution Channel Analysis
In this level the distribution channels and all possible ways to distribute the product or service to the market should be analyzed. (the costs, facilities, market coverage and estimate the conflicts in case of choosing different channels in parallel)
4. Market Analysis
In this level we should know about the habits and usage behavior of the market to our product/service category, the market media habits and demographic analyzing of the Target market.
We go to step 2 in the Third Article