Dr Jeff Cornwall

A marketing plan is so much more than simply a list of promotional tactics to be used to sell your product. While how you plan to promote your business is important, the marketing plan should explain all of the strategies you will use to build relationships with your customers.
Marketing plans consist of what is commonly called the “4 P’s”: Product, Pricing, Promotion and Place (distribution). When building your marketing plan you should address how each of these will improve your chances of attracting customers to your business.
We look at product because we need the customer to tell us what they really want from us. We may have developed our own thinking about this, but what we think does not really matter. I work with many artists through my position here at Belmont — musicians and visual artists are common in our program. I tell these artists that if they want people to pay for their art or their music that they will need to adjust their skills and gifts to meet the needs and wants of the market. But, that lesson is not just for artists. It is for all entrepreneurs. We have a notion of what we think the market wants when we open our doors, but in almost all cases the market begins to immediately give us feedback that tells us what they truly want. What they want may force us to make a minor adjustment in what we offer, or it may take a major rethinking of our business concept. If we are not ready to adjust to the feedback from the market, our chances of success fall dramatically.
Pricing is the next key part of the marketing plan. What we understand what the market wants in our product, we now have to price it at a level that the market is willing to pay. Most often an entrepreneur will set the price relative to the market. The most common mistake I see is pricing the product or service too low. Price is part of what communicates quality to the market. If you price lower than everyone else, that may send a message of inferior quality to all of those potential customers. I refer to this as “apologizing to the market.”
Place tells how we get the product or service from us to the customer. Will we use distributors, retail outlets, our own retail stores, the Internet, door to door sales, kiosks, or some other means to get the product into their hands?
And finally there is promotion, which tells how best to communicate our product, its price and how they can get it, to the market.
Now here is a final step in market planning that many overlook. There is another part of the business plan that should tell the same story as our marketing plan — our revenue forecasts. Revenue forecasts should never be made by guessing or simply plugging in some numbers that look reasonable. Rather, the revenue forecast should, in numbers, tell the same story as the marketing plan. Why? Consider the simple formula for Revenues:
Revenues = Price X Quantity
If we do a good job in our marketing plan, and use real information we derive from real customers (or potential customers), it should help explain our assumptions for those two seemingly simple variables — price and quantity. A well developed marketing plan will tell us why we think we can charge a certain price. It will also help us explain why and how we intend to sell a certain number of units by giving the customer what they want (product), how we will get it to them in a manner that will make it easiest for them to buy it (place), and how we know they will be aware of all of this information (promotion).