A strategic plan is essential for any business as part of your Innovative Marketing Plan. To help you setting it up, there is a list of key factors to take into consideration.
Executive Summary
An Executive Summary is a key component of your strategic plan, which should be finalized at latest stage as it makes a summary of the other parts of your plan. It aims at helping your key stakeholders such as your employees, advisors, and investors, have a quick understanding of your plan in order to support it.
Elevator Pitch
The elevator pitch provides for a short description of your business. It has to be part of your strategic plan but may be updated every year. It is important that your employees master precisely your business so as not to miss business opportunities.
Mission Statement
Setting out the Mission Statement of your company helps to give a concise explanation of what your business is trying is achieving. It will help your employees take the right decisions in line with your company’s strategy.
SWOT
Including a SWOT analysis (analysis of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) in your Strategic Plan helps you set out the best opportunities and strategies to pursue in order to achieve your growth goals. It gives you insights of your strengths and weaknesses you must work on to improve your company.
Goals
Goal setting and goal achievement are the key to success of your company. Goals are split into long-term goals (for 5 years or more) and short-term (1 year). You should stick at achieving short-term goal in order to be successful in the long-term ones.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Setting out your KPIs and tracking them provides you with clear insights about the performance of your business, while at the same time, you may perform adjustments when required according to how your business is performing and so you can adjust as needed.
Customer Targeting
Here, you must clearly identify the wants and needs of each of your target customer groups. This remains critical for your marketing strategy regarding ROI of your advertising expenditures. The more you interact with your target customer wants and needs, the better you will attract them.
Industry & Competitive Analysis
The industry analysis is conducted to make sure whether the market is growing or not so as to take the best decision in relation to diversification and identification of new growth opportunities. Regarding competitive analysis, you just have to define your key competitors and perform a SWOT about them.
Marketing Plan
Developing a comprehensive marketing plan will help you describe how you will attract prospects, convert them to paying customers and maximize your lifetime customer value.
Team
This component takes into account your human resources needed for the execution of your opportunities and achievement of your goals. You may list down members of your team and what type of profile you are going to hire to achieve your identified goals.
Operations Plan
By putting in place your operations plan, you will be able to transform your goals and opportunities into reality. Here you would identify each of the individual projects that form part of your larger goals and the way in which these projects will be completed. Finally, you would make a planning to identify when each project will start and who will be leading them.
Financial Projections
The last part of your Strategic Plan remains your financial projections. Your financial projections help in various ways. First, it can be used as a financial model to assess the potential results for each opportunity you want to pursue. Then, it will help in mapping out your goals.
More on: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davelavinsky/2013/10/18/strategic-plan-template-what-to-include/
