Why you need a business plan before a marketing plan

A marketing plan is a significant portion of your business plan. It’s purpose is to identify your ideal target market and how you'll reach it. To create an effective marketing plan, you need to answer important questions about your goals, your business vision, and your strengths and weaknesses, so you can develop a marketing plan to support your overall business plan and mission.

Let’s break it down double time. 

An Analogy as an explanation 

Imagine you want to go drive from New Jersey to a beach in California. You load all your needed road trip items, beach gear, food etc. into your car. You hop in and start driving but you never been to California so you are just driving in a general direction hoping to meet your destination. Because you are driving you constantly have to spend money on fuel & food, but you have no idea if you are actually getting closer to your destination. Sounds crazy right? 

The solution, TURN on the GPS. 

First, the GPS makes you get specific about your destination, “beach in California” is not going to cut it. For this to work you have to be very specific (i.e a specified business goal/s) Only with this info can a guaranteed plan get you where you want to be, be developed. 

Second, the GPS helps to predict cost (i.e your marketing budget). Because we have a specified goal we know the mileage and time it will take to get to where we want to be, with this info we can estimate the cost of food, fuel, if there will be overnight hotel fees etc, for the trip. 

Third, the GPS gives you the turn by turn route with time to your destination. (i.e your marketing strategy). The turn by turn route tells us how to literally approach accomplishing our goal in a realistic time perspective. Do we need to invest in email marketing, social media, paid media? For how long? What are our priority digital channel/s? These are all the specific things that we can now confidently answer. 

We hope this analogy helps, let us know below?

A business school explanation

Your Marketing Plan Supports Your Business Goals? Before you start developing your marketing plan, you need a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. Your marketing strategy should be directly related to your business goals and objectives. Based on what you want to achieve, you need to develop a plan that outlines what you want to do and the details on how to do it.

For example, if one of your business goals is to expand your brick-and-mortar retail store into an e-commerce website, your marketing strategy could be to introduce your products to a new national market segment. You would then break down your strategy even further into short- and long-term objectives while defining your specific marketing message.

If you don't have them already, create specific business goals  to get started. Also, make sure you are attaching a specific timeline to your goals, such as a 90-day plan. Having a time frame helps you create a more targeted and realistic marketing plan.