Marketing plan serves several purposes:

• Reaching potential customers costs money, so your marketing plan must be carefully thought out and written down. A well conceived marketing plan serves several important purposes:
• It guides you into writing a brief, non-technical description of your company. From this description you can extract your company’s mission statement, which is a short, to the point statement about your company. Once written, it becomes the focal point of all your company’s marketing.
• It unifies your entire organization and gives everyone a common goal by establishing marketing objectives.
• It narrows your marketing effort by defining a target customer.
• It makes you look at your competition and allows you to discover how you are better and how you need to improve.
• It allows you to discover both your strengths and weaknesses and turn them into marketing advantages.
• It stimulates your ability to make wise decisions when it comes to deciding on your communication strategies.
• It forces you to look at a specific marketing timetable. Having a plan is the number one factor in minimizing the cost of marketing your company.
• A goal is a dream with a time limit.

There are two types of plans essential in business - the business plan and the marketing plan. A business plan maps out financial company growth. A marketing plan is a map of strategy for contacting and motivating potential customers.

Even though they are both important, of the two plans, the one that you must have is the marketing plan. It’s a fact, a business without customers is no business at all.

Don’t confuse marketing and selling. Selling is the present - marketing is your future. Selling is a direct action taken to get a customer. Marketing creates the opportunities in the future by generating demand for your product or service.

If marketing is done right a customer is already “sold” when he contacts you.

When a rocket ship takes off from Earth it expends 85% of its fuel getting out of the atmosphere, which is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to going to the moon.

Going to the moon and coming back requires only 15% of all of the fuel. There’s virtually no fuel coming from the moon to here because it’s all gravity. It’s getting off the ground that counts. It’s the same thing with you starting a marketing plan, it’s the start that will take the majority of your time and effort.

Marketing is not an expense, it’s an investment in your future. Any money invested into a good marketing plan, will bring returns 10 fold.

What is good marketing for your business? That is what I want to help you figure out. There is no one way to market. There is not a one-size fit all plan in marketing. As you go through my tips, you need to take an in-depth look into your business with the information that I give you. I want to empower you to make smart marketing decisions by providing you with the tactics that are available out there. You can decide what will work best for your company.

A marketing plan will provide the road map for business staying power and growth even in the midst of constant market changes. Marketing is your key to success.

Marketing creates future revenue. Marketing is your future.

Marketing is based on the importance of customers to a business. Marketing gets you customers. No customers, no business - it’s the most basic business fact. Your plan will identify potential customers, determine what they want, and help you decide the most effective way to reach them.

Today, in small to medium sized businesses, marketing is not executed badly - it’s not executed at all, but anyone who can explain the distinctiveness of his or her business can write an effective marketing plan.

Many new business owners think that by simply placing an ad in a local newspaper, an eZine or a commerical on a radio or a television station, that customers will flock to purchase their product or service.

This could be true to a certain extent. Some people will learn about your product or service and try it, just out of curiousity. But hundreds, even thousands, of other potential customers may never learn of your business. Just think of the money you’ll lose, simply because you didn’t take the time to create a marketing plan.

Marketing is an essential part of your business operation and will determine how successful your company will be. You must have a through understanding of your marketing program, and use it to crave out advantages in your marketplace.

Keep going over the strategies and techniques until you understand how to apply them to get the results you desire. Your aim is to attract and keep a steady flow of loyal customers, expand your customer base by identifying and attracting new customers and reduce risks by predicting market shifts that can affect your bottom line.

Since marketing plays such a vital role to the success of any business, how well you develop and process the plan will ultimately determine your degree of success or failure.