This section of the marketing plan outlines each marketing event or action planned to increase sales. The plan will generally cover a calendar year, broken down by month or by quarter. For example, it may contain a summary of quarterly promotion and advertising plans, with spending, timing, and share/shipment goals for each program.

This section of the marketing plan outlines major company goals, marketing, and financial objectives. All objectives should be carefully quantified, where possible, especially in terms of an achievable time or date. Objectives should be reasonable and attainable.

This subsection of the situation analysis section provides company information on:

This section of the marketing plan analyzes the major external opportunities and threats to the company and the internal strengths and weaknesses of the company, along with a discussion of key issues facing the company.

This subsection of the situation analysis section describes each distribution channel and its relative importance to the company in terms of:

This subsection of the situation analysis section provides information on the size, growth, and trends of the overall market and any relevant segments of the total market or category.

This subsection of the situation analysis section provides information about key competitors:

This subsection of the situation analysis section provides actionable information on selling to target buyers and stimulating purchases or usage by the ultimate end users. Key questions answered in this subsection include:

Every business, small or large, will be more successful with a business plan. And the key component of a business plan is the marketing plan. A good marketing plan summarizes the who, what, where, when, and how much questions of company marketing and sales activities for the planning year:

The primary purpose for the situation analysis section of a marketing plan is to describe what is happening in the markets in which the company competes, and the company's product and distribution trends. A simple, common-sense approach to organizing and providing only relevant information is recommended for this section.

This subsection of the situation analysis section of your marketing plan describes only relevant information on macroenvironmental trends that might affect your business:

Company materials may also be utilized to carry PR messages (e.g., stationery, trucks, uniforms, etc.). It may be possible to combine both advertising and PR messages on company materials. For example, beer and soft drink delivery trucks are often painted with advertising (e.g., "Pepsi, the choice of a new generation") and PR messages (e.g., "Support the fight against Muscular Dystrophy in your local community").

Grand openings (or re-openings) are always attention-getters as are anniversary sales and seasonal promotions. A small business can host open house events and invite key target buyers to explain and demonstrate products and services.

Community involvement is a super way to good public relations and free publicity of the best kind. The old saying "you have to give to receive" holds true in business.

PR programs can often be created, managed, and executed completely by small business personnel. Many PR programs are simple to create and do, unlike advertising and some promotion events requiring outside experts to create, produce, manage, and execute.

Press releases, if you make them newsworthy, can lead not only to great free publicity but to valuable reprints you can use in your ad efforts.

Public relations (PR) efforts, like advertising, can help to build business and product awareness among target buyers and end users, often at a fraction of the cost of advertising. Many small and large businesses consciously utilize PR as a way to obtain free advertising about their products and services. PR can be an effective way to generate valuable word-of-mouth advertising, sometimes due to the greater credibility and availability of information provided in editorial articles and interviews with your company personnel.

Trade shows are essential to some types of wholesale and manufacturing businesses. Display design, booth location and pre- as well as post-show mailings are carried to high degrees of sophistication (and expense). A small business person thinking of using this form of advertising would do well to contact the trade or professional association for his or her industry and also to pick up a copy of How to Participate Profitably in Trade Shows, by Robert Konikow, published by Dartnell.

Direct mail and catalogs are gaining enormous popularity. L.L. Bean, Land's End, and Eddie Bauer represent virtually identical products being marketed nationally. Firms like these are masters of database marketing. If you even hope to get started in this arena, our advice is to start very small and narrow your niche to a needlepoint.

Signage is a key component of establishing and perpetuating your identity.

Telemarketing comes in various guises. We all gripe about the computer-dialed boiler room selling operations that pester us at dinnertime, but there are other ways of using the phone as a sales tool. For a small business, it might be best to start calling people you've been referred to by current clients or networking contacts.

If you get big enough to contemplate advertising in major newspapers or magazines or on radio or television, form your own in-house ad agency and save the usual 15 percent commission. This is as easy to do as printing up some letterhead with a name like XYZ Advertising Agency. Have a separate checking account if you're going to do a lot of this. This is standard procedure for medium-sized businesses who handle their own ad buys.

There are many things you can do in the way of advertising, promotion, and publicity that cost little or nothing. And when you become successful enough to be able to afford more sophisticated ad techniques, there are ways of measuring to some extent just how effective these methods are in terms of your business growth. As always, the chief concern is that the advertising do what it is intended to do: cause more people to purchase more from your business.

Advertising in telephone directories is, for some businesses, critically important. But it's definitely not cheap! Publishers of these directories have stringent guidelines that make it hard for you to distinguish your ad from your competitors' without spending a lot of money. If you go with this kind of ad, check out the alternatives — Sprint, Ameritech, SBC, whatever baby Bell you have in your area, as well as the cellular firms such as AT&T and Cingular and Verizon. Many areas receive directories published by more than one company. The cost of advertising varies, as does the market served. Try to pick the one that targets your potential customers the best at the lowest cost.

Classified ads and small display ads in local newspapers or magazines are a good way to reach your buyers. Get media kits from all your local publications (and any regional or national publications you may want to use as a model). Take a look at what they have to offer and at what price. The media kit will give you the demographic and geographic reach of the publication as well as rate information. Remember that the lowly classifieds are perused by a huge number of people, especially on weekends. Big-time auto dealers and real estate agents fill these pages up for a reason. If you slip a classified ad into the right category and keep it running consistently, you'll probably get a response strong enough to at least pay the cost of the ad.