The marketing strategy

This is a consciously well formulated plan that describes how the new venture will compete with the existing products in the market.

It focuses the business enterprise on a target market to fill the gap or create a niche.

A well formulated marketing strategy provides guidelines for the entrepreneur concerning-:

·       The expected results: It gives you an assurance of how much you are to get from you business in terms of returns;

·       Allocation of resources: How much resources do you need and how to allocate them in order to efficiently start and manage you business successfully while meeting customer’s needs perfectly.

·       Responsibilities for marketing: It clearly lays down what should be done during marketing of the company or business products to ensure attraction of many customers as possible to the consumption of the goods and services offered.

·       Ways of controlling the enterprise. Control is aimed at keeping the performance gearing forces at their peak. For example how will you ensure quality of the products, respond to change and ensure customer satisfaction in terms of always meeting their needs perfectly?

3.2 The marketing Plan

Solidifies/strengthens the marketing strategy by defining customers, sales forecasts and marketing objectives;

It synthesizes/converts market research and the entrepreneur’s strategy into a blueprint/plan for action.

The plan is implemented through a marketing programme, which addresses the marketing activities, decisions regarding product, the price, the promotional activities and the placement activities.

The steps in preparing the marketing plan

·       Define the business situation. What business are you are in, its mission, vision, goals and objectives and how to manage it successfully in relation to the contribution of marketing;

·       Define target market, opportunities and threats. Who are the customers you want serve or you are serving. What are the opportunities in terms of their growth in demand and challenges or threats in terms of competition from other businesses?

·       Consider strengths and weaknesses. In which areas are you strong for example are you quality conscious, are you based on innovations to always come up with new goods and services. What are your weaknesses in comparison to your competitors? In other words this is to help you better position yourself against competitors; which gives you an advantage to dominate the market.

·       Establish goals and objectives. Set targets to achieve and follow them. These objectives must be SMART. These must also be accompanied by the strategies to achieve them.

·       Define marketing strategy. A strategy is a means to achieve the objectives or targets set. So in this case you have come up with clear means to successfully achieve the company’s marketing targets.

·       Coordinate, budget, implement and monitor.

ü  To coordinate means to organize or make sure that all the activities in the marketing plan are done effectively and efficiently.

ü  A budget is an estimated income and expenditure of a given activity. Therefore at this point you have to make sure that you estimate how much you need to invest and how much you will get as returns based on the marketing plan of all the company products and services.

ü  To implement is to put into action the designed plan hoping to achieve the desired goals and objectives.

ü  To monitor is to give a follow up to make sure that the implementation is in line with the plan. It is to ensure consistency between all the activities and the plan.

Why some plans fail

·       Poor implementation

·       Limited resources

·       Lack of a real plan

·       Lack of adequate situation analysis

·       Unrealistic goals

·       Unanticipated competitive moves, product deficiencies, and acts of God;