Marketing plan and objectives - Essay Example

A marketing plan is a written document that that guides the marketing activities of the marketing manager of any business entity. The document has specified objectives with the necessary actions that are required to attain the objectives. Through the marketing strategy, the actual and expected performance of the firm is compared after a stipulated time. It allows the marketing manager and his team to examine and evaluate the marketing environment together with the inner operations of the company.

In the marketing plan, the organization will need to define its mission statement and objectives for a strategic business unit with is a section of the entire business or collection of business activities within the entire company. The strategic business unit should have direct control over its resources, its own competitors, and plans which are independent of the other strategic business units in the company. A large firm can, therefore, have marketing plans for each of the strategic marketing units (Homburg and Krohmer, 1-40).

Setting marketing plan objectives The objectives of the marketing plan come before any other details are developed. Without objectives, it would be difficult to measure the success of a marketing strategy. A marketing objective is a statement containing the details of what is to be accomplished in the marketing process. Marketing objectives should meet the following criteria for them to be useful in any measure: Realistic Managers should set objectives that have the natural chance of being achieved.

It would be needless to set objectives that are beyond the capacity of the company to achieve them. For example, it would be unrealistic for the marketing manager to set objectives for start-up firms or new products to command the dominant market share, when there are other competitors in the market. The objectives should not stretch beyond the resource limit of the firm (Homburg and Krohmer, 50). Measurable Managers should be able to quantify the success of the objectives. The success or failure of the objectives should be reflected in monetary terms of the benefits and costs of the entire marketing process.

This requirement also means that the objectives should not be vague. For example, it would be difficult to measure the success of marketing objective that states, ‘to increase the number of sales’. This is very general. If the number sold increased by one percent, it does not meet the threshold of a successful objective. Instead, a specific number should be stated such as ‘to increase the amount of sales from $300 million to $ 345 million per annum.’ Time specific This sets a limit of time within which the objective should be achieved.

If the objective fails to meet the time threshold, it would attract questions on evaluating the efficiency of the marketing team. a time bound marketing objective should state, ‘ to increase the amount of sales from 300 dollars to 345 dollars from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2010. The time constraint is paramount in ensuring that the manager and their marketing team carry out their duties efficiently (Homburg and Krohmer, 60-65). Compared to a time benchmark The benchmark is a past figure that the firm has to grow beyond in terms of sales.

If the objective lacks the time benchmark, evaluation will be difficult because it will be difficult to quantify the progress the firm has made within the time threshold. The marketing team has to make projections that based on the much it has been able to achieve in the past year or simulation of years. The objectives included in the marketing plan can be as follows: The example in this case is ana Equipment manufacturing Company. 1. To increase sales by ten percent per I real terms for the next three years 2.

Double the sales of ball valves to the water resources industry within three years 3. Increase sales of packages to 50 units within three years 4. To double the market share of filters in the water industry by 2018 5. To double the distributor sales in Scotland and North Ireland by 2018 6. To increase overall gross margins of the entire company form 39 percent to 43 percent by 2018 The marketing objectives represent a mix of the objectives of one strategic business unit and the entire company.

The business unit will occasionally meet with other business units in the firm to make the marketing objective of the whole firm in a harmonized version. The harmonized marketing objective as part of the business plan appears as in the table below. To be more specific, the objectives can be presented in a table that represents each segment of the marketing strategy. For this case, the table below is the marketing objective Works Cited Homburg, Christian; Sabine Kuester, Harley Krohmer: Marketing Management - A Contemporary Perspective (1st ed.), London. (2009).print