Sounds + Food 'n' Retail

OK, I know I said I was going to break for 12 days. But it's just to tempting to blog (I need to find some kind of bloggers-anonymous meeting). In any case, I'll try to restrict myself to reproduced content only—no original stuff! Here's a good comment I found on writing marketing plans. From mooders @ askmefi:

Okay. In a nutshell, you need to:
a) Define the current state of the market - your competitors, the industry, the problems your products or services are intended to solve, the Political, Economic, Social and Technological contexts within which you operate and so forth. This is the Marketing Audit

b) Next, you need to define to whom you are marketing. Define the industry, define the sector within that industry, e.g. Financial Institutions and retail banks with significant offshore presence.This is your Segmentation and Targeting

c) Define how you will position your product or service in the minds of the target customers. This is your Positioning

d) Write down what you need your marketing plan to achieve - increased revenue, increased customer base, increased feedback, increased market share and so on. Make these Marketing Objectives S.M.A.R.T.

e) Write descriptions of the following:

• e1) Product / Service
• e2) Pricing strategy
• e3) Distribution channels
• e4) Promotional activity - how / where / when / what you will advertise your product or service and its features and benefits

f) Calculate your budget to do all of e) and achieve all of d)

g) Assign roles, responsibilities and timelines to each of the Objectives and any other activities defined above

h) Define some means of measuring progress against those Objectives and controls to implement to minimise the chances of straying too far from them

Bare bones, this is enough to be a marketing plan. In terms of numbers, you need to use as many real, hard numbers as possible and make sure you detail where the numbers come from and the assumptions you have made in drawing those numbers up. You could add this into the appendix of the overall plan.

For more detailed info, I suggest you pick up a book or two on marketing plans. Something like this would be enough for your purposes. If nothing else, google for 'marketing plan template' which will provide a fair few resources for headings etc.