Why is it both important and beneficial to have a Marketing Plan?

If you are a reseller in the telecommunication industry, it is vitally important and beneficial to have a marketing plan as this document will increase the availability of a vendors marketing budget to your business. A vendor is more likely to approve budgets for marketing activities with a partner that has a marketing plan as opposed to a partner that just sends an email or a verbal request.

Vendors, in our industry, are now far more constrained with the volume and types of budget available for their partners, when it come to jointly funded marketing campaigns. If you then add the confusing state of discretionary funding as opposed to accrued funding and then if you also take into consideration certification levels, it all becomes a bit of a minefield. And most partners give up…

Just spend the time or employ a professional to develop a credible and useful marketing plan, their cost will be offset by the budgets you receive from the vendor, and if you use the same plan across multiple vendors, it could be a mini bonanza on the marketing funding front. You might need to employ a marketing body to manage the funds and the campaigns, which would be a nice problem to develop.

Anyway getting back to the point, it does all make perfect sense though, because if a business has a business plan, to plan for an increase in sales and growth, a receive a certain sales target for the year with a specific vendor why would they not have a marketing plan to plan for how to achieve that increase in sales and growth via joint marketing initiatives. Marketing is a cost to any business, therefore if costs can be offset by a vendor but the benefit be felt by the partner, then why not try and secure some marketing budget, and write a simple marketing plan.

In the old days some vendors had hundreds of thousands of pounds put aside for business development and lead generation. But now it is more like tens of thousands of pounds which mean this is a smaller and more prized budget to be allocated. We always have to bear in mind that there are strict financial guidelines for global companies to adhere commonly referred to as Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB)rules or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). These will govern the types of activities that will be funded, therefore understand which activities your vendor will fund and then develop a plan around those activities, it is quite simple.

A simple Marketing Plan should cover the following topic areas:

Management Summary 

Budgetary Considerations 

Situation Analysis 

Product Analysis 

SWOT Analysis 

Market Segmentation 

Business Objectives 

Marketing Strategy Options 

Recommendations & Next Steps 

List of Marketing Activities – This should be a GAANT chart with budget requests.

And finally, some leading brands are now starting to address new marketing communication vehicles by either using parts of these funds to help their partners understand the opportunity presented by digital channels through training and provision of tools. They are also looking at interesting incentives to insure these partners start to use these funds properly.

So if you are a reseller in the telecommunication industry, it is vitally important and beneficial to develop or create a current and achievable marketing plan as this document will increase the availability of a vendors marketing budget to your business.

If you would like to know more about this subject please email: andygrant@bowanarrow.com or click on www.bowanarrow.com/services