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| The marketing plan may be the most important document a company possesses. It assembles all the pertinent and current facts about a company, the markets it serves, its products, and its competition. It sets specific goals and objectives and describes the precise strategies to use to achieve them. It musters the company's forces for the marketing battlefield and, in so doing, dictates the role of advertising in the marketing mix and provides focus for advertising creativity. There are three types of marketing planning models: top-down, bottom-up, and integrated marketing communications planning. The top-down marketing plan contains four principal sections: situation analysis, marketing objectives, marketing strategy, and tactics (action programs). A company's marketing objectives should be logical deductions from an analysis of its current situation, its prediction of future trends, and its understanding of corporate objectives. They should relate to the needs of specific target markets and specify sales objectives. Sales target objectives should be specific, quantitative, and realistic. The first step in developing a marketing strategy is to select the target market. The second step is to determine the product's positioning. The third step is to construct a cost-effective marketing mix for each target market the company pursues. The marketing mix is determined by how the company blends the elements it controls: product, price, distribution, and communications. Advertising is a communications tool. One way for small companies to construct the marketing and advertising plan is to work from the bottom up, taking an ingenious tactic and building a strategy around it. Integrated marketing communications can help build longterm relationships with customers. IMC planning is driven by technology. Thanks to computers and databases, marketers can learn more about their customers' wants and needs, likes and dislikes. IMC is both a concept and a process that offers the synergy of various communications media, strategically managed to enhance the relationship between the customer and the brand or company. Starting with the customer, the IMC planning model uses seven steps to segment the customer database by product and purchase related attributes; determine the best place, situation, and time to reach the prospect; develop behavior-related marketing and communications objectives and strategies; and develop specific communications tactics to implement the plan. In the IMC model, all marketing becomes communications and all communications become marketing. Advertising is a natural outgrowth of the marketing plan, and the advertising plan is prepared in much the same way as the top-down marketing plan. It includes a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, advertising objectives, and strategy. Advertising objectives may be expressed in terms of moving prospective customers up through the advertising pyramid (awareness, comprehension, conviction, desire, action). Or they may be expressed in terms of generating inquiries, coupon response, or attitude change. The advertising (or creative) strategy is determined by the advertiser's use of the creative mix. The creative mix is composed of the target audience, product concept, communications media, and advertising message. The target audience includes the specific groups of people the advertising will address. The product concept refers to the bundle of product-related values the advertiser presents to the customer. The communications media are the vehicles used to transmit the advertiser's message. The advertising message is what the company plans to say and how it plans to say it. Several methods are used to allocate advertising funds. The most popular are the percentage of sales approach and the objective/ task method. The share of market/share of voice method is often used in markets with similar products. |