Creating a Marketing Plan – Step 1 – Outlining Objectives

The first step in creating a marketing plan is to outline your marketing objective.  When outlining objectives, it is important to know your company’s current competitive position.  The use of a SWOT Analysis is an effective way to identity your company’s current competitive position.  SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Keep in mind; strengths and weakness are internal forces while opportunities and threats are external forces.

For example…

Western Automotive – a made up company for this post – is a small car dealership in the Midwest.  They have been in business ten years, have a good location, and a well known service department.  Western Automotive sells mostly trucks and larger SUVs.  However, they have just begun selling a smaller SUV.  The smaller SUV is very safe, stylish – but not flashy, affordable and received a fairly good mile per gallon (MPG) rating.

A larger dealership, New England Wagons (NEW) – also a made up company for this post – has just opened a new store right next door to Western Automotive.  NEW sells mostly cars and crossover SUVs.  Since they are a part of a larger dealership chain, they are able to sell their vehicles at a low price.  Vehicles at New England Wagons are typically priced just below the comparable models at Western Automotive.

The results of a SWOT analysis for Western Automotive could be the following.  Please keep in mind this is just an example, a SWOT analysis performed for a professional marketing plan would offer more detail.

Strengths:
• Only dealership in town that sells trucks
• History with the town – repeat customers
• Service department has a good reputation
• The Smaller SUV is a good addition to the vehicles they sell

Weaknesses:
• Limited options for people who don’t want a large vehicle

Opportunities:
• The regional hospital has opened just outside the town leading to a growth in jobs – Expendable incomes will increase and that could lead to an increase in vehicle sales.

Threats:
• The regional hospital that has just opened is located outside of town. More people are commuting further to work and using more gasoline. With the high gasoline prices, people may be focused on buying smaller vehicles that get a better MPG than trucks and large SUVs.

Now that we have performed the SWOT analysis to help us determine our company’s current competitive position, it’s time to use our findings to outline our marketing objective.

It is easy to say, “Clearly the marketing objective is to sell more vehicles.”  But, we want to avoid general statements like this.  We want to be more specific, so later on we can develop clear and precise marketing tactics.  Instead of the general statement, we should use something like, “Western Automotive’s marketing objective is to sell more of the new smaller SUVs to _________________.”

We can focus specifically on the smaller SUVs because our SWOT analysis results show us that these smaller SUVs would fit the opportunity and suppress the threat.   These small SUVs are affordable and would match an increase in expendable budgets.  They also provide a fairly high MPG for its class.  This would be important to those who are driving further to work, especially with high gasoline prices.  In this case, we don’t need to focus this campaign on truck sales because Western Automotive is the only dealership in town that sells trucks.  Therefore, we don’t need to try to push truck sales in this marketing objective.  That’s not to say we ignore this entirely.  It would be a good idea to run a separate marketing campaign, reminding your clients they can find the newest and best trucks in town at Western Automotive.

Since we decided to focus this marketing plan on selling more of the smaller SUVs, it is now time to determine to whom we are going to be selling these small SUVs.  To do this, we need to choose the appropriate target public and appropriate secondary publics.  This portion of Creating a Marketing Plan will be covered in the next post on Demographics.