Kotler & Keller (2011) described marketing as a way of identifying and meeting human as well as social needs; and they further defined it as "meeting needs profitably", (p. 5). For any business to be success a marketing plan is the most vital and crucial requirement. A marketing plan helps in decision making and creating marketing strategies. With a marketing plan a company can sell its products or provide services to its targeted customers and can increase its revenues and profits. The marketing should be planned as per the financial conditions of the market so as to make the company or business battle ready with the competitors while offering its products and services.
Proposal
The marketing plan should also involve the sales tactics so as to increase the company's sales revenue. Thus for a successful marketing plan the various key parts are:
The marketing plan will highlight the strengths and weakness of the business, say for e.g. in our case the product is the Software which anticipate the future purchases of our customers.Graeff& Harmon (2002) pointed to the fact that customers are becoming very worried about the extent to which manufacturers, retailers, marketers and the web site are monitoring their actions, (p. 302). Therefore, it is critical that this factor is considered in our marketing plan. In short we should first do the SWOT analysis of our product by closely monitoring the external and internal factors. One should think outside the company which means that our business should come up with a product or a service which can meet the demands of our customers and our business should be able to acquire the customer knowledge. The plan should be drafted in accordance with the current competitors to our business or product and should be ready with alternative plan or step. The very first part of our marketing plan is the business mission and vision statement which should describe the goals and strategies required in selling the product, then identifying the value additions that the product will provide to our business and then framing the cost of our product which is key highlight point of the plan. Then comes the promotional strategy. (Cooper, 2000)
Our firm is a software company, so the marketing plan for our product should highlight the market segments, pricing, supply chain or distribution channel, appropriate advertising or communication channel for the successful achievement of the goal.
The market segmentation can be done by the top to bottom approach where the entire pool of customers are segregated in terms of their purchasing capacity or turnover size, this can be achieved by analysing the historical demand value data. After that, two to three segments of customers should be created based on the parameter for planning the targeted customers accordingly. For instance the customers with large accounts or premium customers who constitutes 5-10% of the total population size should be appointed to Key Account Managers who can provide real time service to them.
Pricing should be decided as per the volume and value generated by the targeted customers or market segments. If the maximum buyers or our product fall in the huge turnover rate segment then the price should be on a higher decide, similarly for middle income segment price should be decided which is bearable to them. Large clients who look for software products along with the service package should be priced as per long term pricing techniques like by providing them AMC's along with the software. For medium or small enterprises the price should be charged only for the product with the offer of free training session for understanding and using the product so that they can purchase our software. (Cooper, 2000)