Prompt
Submit a first draft of your completed Marketing Plan, including the Executive Summary and the Conclusion. The Executive Summary should include a sentence or two about each section of the plan to be a conclusive summary of the entire plan. The conclusion should reiterate the goals of launching the offering and explain how the reader can help you reach those goals (through monetary investment). The overall Marketing Plan Assignment Instructions have been included below for you to review again prior to submission.
A marketing plan is used by marketing departments to create buy-in from company leadership for their new offering. It also enables other departments to figure out what their responsibility will be in the new launch. Marketing plans can cover a variety of spans of time, but this plan should be a one-year plan. Although each marketing plan differs slightly in structure and content, they are all quite similar. The template you will use for this project is made up of six sections: executive summary, the business challenge, the market, the strategy, budget, and conclusion. Each section has subsections that help to explain it in good detail. The template is below.
During the first six modules of this course, you will work on various pieces of the project so that by the seventh module, you can submit a first draft of the project. The instructor will review the first draft and provide feedback for you to incorporate prior to handing in the final, graded draft in the final week of the course. The flow of subsections assigned is not in the order of the template to better align with the readings. You will understand how to perform these weekly assignments if you work on them following the readings. By following the assignment outline below, by the end of the sixth module, you will have completed all sections of the plan, except the Executive Summary and the Conclusion. The total length of the plan you submit should be four to five pages, single-spaced, with 12-point Times New Roman font and one-inch margins. Refer to the sample marketing plans on MyFire for additional guidance.
The Marketing Plan: An Outline
- Executive Summary
- The Business Challenge
- A brief description of the offering and the goals of the plan. This section serves as an introduction.
- The Market
- Customers: Who are they, and what do they need?
- Company analysis: Your firm’s strengths and weaknesses relative to this market and the offering
- Collaborators: Your collaborators could include suppliers and/or distributors or retailers.
- Competitors: Who are they, and what are they doing?
- Business climate: The business climate includes the opportunities and threats created by environmental forces, such as government regulations and legislation, the economy, and social, cultural, and technological forces.
- The Strategy
- The strategy: Why did you choose the strategy you did? Consider including a brief discussion of alternatives that were considered and discarded.
- The offering: Provide details on the features and benefits of the offering as well as its pricing options.
- The communication plan: How will the offering be launched? What will the ongoing communication strategies be? This section is likely to be fairly broad and will require collaboration with communication partners such as your firm’s advertising agency.
- Distribution: How will the offering be sold? Who will sell it? Who will ship it? Who will service it?
- Budget
- Investment: Provide details about the budget needed to launch and maintain the offering.
- Return: List both the short-term and long-term financial goals of the offering, including its projected sales, costs, and net income.
- Other resources required
- Conclusion
