Marketing Plan Template Step 7 & 8

Step 7 7.1    Action Plans

Any strategies or marketing goals are simply just theoretical objectives.  It's the Action Plans that really bring your strategy and objectives to life.

Your action plans are your implementation plans.  These are your ‘hands on' rules of play.  Therefore, your Action Plans should be specific and detail:

Who, how, which, when, where and how....

•          Who is responsible?
•          When will it be done?
•          How much will it cost?
•          Which segment?

Very often these Action Plans are created in a calendar format.  This enables you to see the activities overall - and of course, look at how campaigns can be integrated.  It may be that you have an Email campaign to promote one product / service to a particular segment.  And you notice that you could double up with the same campaign to a different segment.  However, it's only through having these clearly mapped out that you can spot these economies of effort.

Practical Exercise 

Creating an Action Plan

All Action Plans should cover:

Target market

Be specific in terms of segments. 

Who are you aiming for?

Clarifying the need                 

What do your target market need from you. 

Which problem can you provide a solution to?

Competitor watch                 

Identify your competition and assess your strengths. 

Some target markets may be worth leaving alone, purely because you cannot compete with the service they are already receiving.

Targets / Goals                      

State your goals and decide the activities that you

need to do to achieve them.  For example: If one of your goals is to host a business breakfast every month for customers, then what activities need to be put in place to promote these, who will you be inviting, how much will you charge. 

Resource                                

Does the activity provide you with the results you

need.  Are you meeting your overall business objectives?   Monitor return on activity, are you using your resources to maximum benefit?

Budget                                    

Financial resource has to be monitored too.   

Action Plans will have cost implications and therefore, if you create a budget for each Action Plan, you can then simply feed the budgets into your overall Marketing Budget.

Step 8

8.1    Budgets

Whilst there's only ever so much money in the pot to undertake certain activities - your overall Marketing Plan cannot be driven purely by budgets. 

Your budget will project the revenues, expenditures, profits and cash flows over the planned period. 

And then, having pulled your budget together you can then assess whether or not your Marketing Plan is realistic - yet ambitious, whether the costs are reasonable and assess the risks involved.

Dependent upon budget available - you may have to prioritise some of the Action Plans - based on what you can afford to do initially.  However, your overall plan should not be held back because of ‘budgets'.

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