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Marketing Plan Article-How to Create a Marketing Plan

    This marketing plan and strategy article helps outline the importance of a true marketing plan. Learn how important it is to create a marketing plan to help ensure your businesses success. Your marketing plan strategy can impact your business up to 51%. This article is just one of many marketing plan article selections from Charles Marshall.
     I love watching a good magic show. The challenge, of course, is to guess how the trick is done and expose the magician. Unfortunately, I have never been able to do so.  I’m always looking in the wrong direction. When I should be looking one place, the magician is waving something shiny in the other hand, distracting me from the mechanics of the illusion. That’s because what we commonly refer to as “magic” might be more accurately named “misdirection.”
     Business is just loaded with such misdirection. So often I am approached by people who excitedly tell me about their new business idea. They gush about their tremendous and revolutionary product. Their eyes shine and their faces beam as they imagine themselves sitting in the lap of luxury, reaping the profits as people rush to buy their product.
     Almost without exception, when I ask these individuals about their marketing plan, they brush off the question and continue to rave about their idea. Like infatuated schoolgirls being told that love is more than class rings and school proms, they resent the intrusion into their fantasy world and insist that their product idea is different — that they won’t need to worry about such things. They’re uncomfortable thinking that their idea might need more than bells and whistles.
    I can’t say that I blame them for wanting to think that way, but the truth is, they are victims of misdirection. Their shiny product idea is flashing in front of them and they mistake it for the business itself. What every product will eventually need is a delivery system, a method of letting prospective customers know about the product. 
     What good is a product if no one has ever heard of it? Countless people spend untold hours tinkering with their product idea, only to have it collecting dust in either a real or metaphorical attic. Am I saying the product is not important? Absolutely not! It is 49 percent of your business. The other 51 percent is your marketing plan.
     A marketing plan is more important than the product itself? Without a doubt. Developing a good marketing plan is more important because it is possible to have a successful business with a only a decent product and a tremendous marketing plan, whereas the opposite does not hold true.
     How much time have you spent thinking about how people are going to know about you and/or your product? How much money have you invested in exploring plausible marketing solutions? Time and money invested in the exploration of ways to connect with customers is never wasted.
     Resist the temptation to have your focus and priorities misdirected. Discipline yourself to watch not that which is most entertaining but rather what is most beneficial. Having a successful business is not magic. It’s just good marketing.
     © 2004 Charles Marshall. Charles Marshall is a motivational speaker, motivational author and president of M Power Resources, LLC. Visit his Web site at www.MPowerResources.com or contact him via e-mail at charles@MPowerResources.com.