Difference Between Marketing Plan and Business Plan
Before we start the practical guide to writing a marketing plan, we must clarify the distinction between the marketing plan and the business plan, as the differences are vast.
The Business Plan is More Comprehensive
The first and most important difference between the marketing plan and the business plan is that the business plan is a comprehensive plan covering all activities of the company. The main activities of the company revolve around four parts: production/operations, human resources, finance, and marketing. As is clear, marketing is one of the elements of the business plan.
Of course, the most important part of any business is how you will produce and manage operations correctly. There might be a product or service you want to offer to the market, but without a clear plan for managing the production process efficiently, suited to the market and buyers' requirements, there will be no business at all.
The business plan will also address how to manage the project or product financially, how you will support it, who will fund the product, what your financial goals are, and how you will attempt to achieve them.
The business plan will also respond to questions regarding how to attract and train the best employees to deliver the product or service in the best possible manner, and how to compensate them in all possible ways to gain their loyalty and elicit their best performance.
Finally, the business plan focuses on marketing management, determining the appropriate method for market research, identifying its needs, revealing its environment, developing the appropriate marketing strategy, and professionally developing a marketing mix to succeed in marketing your product or service.
What concerns us here is the marketing plan, so it is clear that the marketing plan is a part of a larger and more comprehensive plan, which is the business plan.
The Business Plan is a Long-Term Strategy
The marketing plan can also be strategic and long-term, but not to the extent of the business plan, which forms the foundational structure for managing your project, company, product, or service. The business plan answers very fundamental questions, including how to develop a strategy for attracting and training employees or how to provide the financial support necessary for project success. Consequently, these strategies should remain stable for a long time; they are pillars of building your project, and of course, you cannot change these pillars every day!
Therefore, the business plan contains terms that I prefer not to see in the marketing plan, which I consider to be shorter in duration than the business plan. Among these important terms are mission and vision, although the mission may appear quickly in "Sonic's" plan; it is important to mention it in the plan if it represents a brand or product mission. This means it serves as a prelude to building a marketing strategy based on a distinctive mental position, as will be explained in the dedicated section.
I believe it is more appropriate to clarify the company's mission and vision strategically in the business plan rather than in marketing (or as a quick section within the branding part of the marketing plan). The marketing plan does not need to include such a strategic vision to this degree; you should focus your efforts more on the short-term and long-term aspects of your product and how to market it correctly.
Summary of the Contents of the Marketing Plan (Executive Summary)
Regardless of the length of the marketing plan or its brevity, and regardless of the field or industry you operate in, the marketing plan must go through four basic steps, and if your marketing plan lacks any of these four elements, it is not a plan at all.
The first step is research, the second is planning, the third is implementation, and the fourth is control.
Now... think about how these steps will unfold. What do you need first? When you search for the answer, you will find that the first step that comes to mind is gathering data and information.
Data consists of significant and insignificant numbers and statistics, which will not become useful unless linked together, organized, and transformed into useful information from which correct decisions can be made.
There are two pathways to gather information: the easier one is to collect it from available secondary sources, such as newspapers, the internet, acquaintances, and statistics. Once you exhaust these sources and your hopes fade, move on to primary sources.
You will find that you need types of information that are not previously available, and thus you must employ known marketing methods to gather primary data, including market research, observation, and experimentation, until you reach the required information.
In market research, you will gather data about the market, competitors, suppliers, customers, and anyone directly and significantly related to your organization's activity. This is the environment linked to the industry that affects it quickly and directly.
You will also collect information about the external environment that will eventually affect you, but not directly. These environments are economic, political, cultural, and technological, often summarized in the famous PESTLE analysis. I will show you a way to integrate this external analysis with the industry-related analysis, enabling you to conduct a strong, intensive, and practical analysis that helps you build a sound marketing strategy and plan.
The strength of managers and their experience, as well as the strength of military experts in wars, lies in their methods of collecting data, organizing it, and transforming it into valuable information. Then comes the stage of making decisive and correct decisions.
Once you ensure that you have gathered the required amount of information, the rest of the plan will rely on flexibility and the distinguished marketing mentality you possess. The subsequent steps become simpler and much closer to accuracy and precision.
Based on the information you gathered, you can now develop the appropriate strategy, the mission that suits your company, the goals you want to achieve, segment the market, and choose the most suitable segment to direct your marketing message toward, and begin forming the mental position and image/perception for this segment about your product or service (Positioning).
There are numerous business strategies employed regarding market entry initiatives or waiting to learn from the mistakes of early entrants. There are also growth strategies, such as vertical growth by purchasing distribution or supply outlets, and horizontal growth strategies by expanding into new markets with current products or innovating new products for these markets. However, all these strategies are related to business and its development. The strategy you will learn through this guide will mostly relate to the famous marketing model – STP, which helps you build a marketing strategy scientifically and correctly.
Based on the information you gathered and the strategy you developed, you can now create distinct marketing programs that will ensure precise and practical implementation of your marketing strategy, known by another name as the marketing mix.
Based on the information you gathered, the strategy, and the programs you developed (the mix), you can determine the appropriate marketing budget you will use, while establishing a method and procedures for monitoring the plan and controlling the efficiency of its execution, known as the control stage.
All of this – if discussed briefly – occurs after you have constructed the entire plan, and this brief summary of all the stages you have undertaken is called the executive summary of the plan. It is a quick summary of the entire plan and its key points and strategies, which can be read by a company owner who lacks the time or technical knowledge to scrutinize every detail of the plan. This summary should be the first thing in the plan, before the market research, but it is written last in the plan since it serves as an executive summary of the plan after its completion.
You can refer to the article "Steps to Create a Successful Marketing Plan | Stages of the Marketing Plan" to understand the marketing stages before starting your plan.
[Marketing Process] Excluding the last stage, which is communicating with customers, and replacing it with the control stage, this diagram serves as a quick summary of the stages of the marketing plan.
Now... are you ready to dive step by step into the marketing plan?