Before you can write a successful marketing plan for your business, you need to know the ins and outs of what a marketing plan includes.

Marketing plans vary significantly in format and outline, but all of them have sections about the following:

• Your current position: This is in terms of your product, customers, competition, and broader trends in your market.
• What results you got in the previous period (if you’re an established business, that is): You need to look at sales, market share, and possibly also profits, customer satisfaction, or other measures of customer attitude and perception. You may also want to include measures of customer retention, size and frequency of purchase, or other indicators of customer behavior, because they’re often helpful in thinking about where to focus your marketing efforts in the future. Identifying the key things that customers desire and how your product matches up with those attributes are also important considerations.
• Lessons learned: A postmortem on the previous period helps identify any mistakes to avoid, insights to take advantage of, or major changes that may present threats or opportunities.
• Your strategy: This is the big focus of your plan and the way you’ll grow your revenues and profits. Keep the strategy statement to a few sentences so that everyone who reads it gets it at once and can remember what the strategy is.
• The details of your program: You want to cover all your company’s specific activities in this section. Group them by area or type, with explanations of how these activities fit the company’s strategy and reflect the current situation.
• The numbers: These definitely include sales projections and costs but may also include market share projections, sales to your biggest customers or distributors, costs and returns from any special offers you plan to use, sales projections and commissions by territory, and any other details that help you quantify your specific marketing opportunities and activities.
• Your experimentation plans: If you have a new business or product, or if you’re experimenting with a new or risky marketing activity, set up a plan (or pilot) for how to test the waters on a small scale first. You need to determine what positive results you want to see before committing to a higher level. After all, wisdom is knowing what you don’t know — and planning how to figure it out.

By the time you think through and write down all these elements of a good plan, you may feel quite invested in your plan. Be careful! You mustn’t think of your plan as written in stone. In fact, your plan is just a starting point. As you implement it throughout the coming year, you’ll discover that some things work out the way you planned, and others don’t. Good marketers revisit their plans and adjust them as they go. The idea is to use a plan to help you be an intelligent, flexible marketer, not a stubborn one who refuses to learn from experience.