The One-Month Marketing Action Plan

You know your business. In one-month, we can help you frame and prioritize your marketing strategy into no more than five immediate actions. That is all anyone can practically handle.

Why Plan?

We have tried to work effectively by planning in our heads—that never works—or on presentation slides, but nothing beats writing down the plan, regularly reviewing progress against it, and updating it.

Like Harry S. Truman, we believe that the process of planning is more important than the document itself. For a plan to be effective, it must constantly change to reflect results, new knowledge, and changing conditions. We concentrate on the results and how best to achieve them.

There is no place for massive bookshelf-filling plans because nobody reads them, and bricks make better doorstops.

If you are a startup company seeking financing you may also need a polished and convincing business plan; we can help with that too.

Why One-Month?

One-month allows time for research, talking to you, talking to your customers, setting some directions, debating them with you and getting your approval.
One-month is not so long that we can get into unnecessary detail or attempt perfection. We are looking for a good, sound plan, and perfect is the enemy of good.

If you have many products and services, complex markets, or cannot afford much time to work with us, the plan will take longer. We will discuss that with you upfront.

What’s in the One-Month Marketing Action Plan?

The contents of the plan vary according to the type of organization, products vs. services, and the overall strategy followed.

Here is a typical outline

Marketing Action Plan Software

We use Marketing Plan Pro, from Palo Alto Software, as the template for the plan, modifying it as needed. It is a useful package, and perhaps the only one available; it contains excellent prompts and examples, and is friendly enough for anyone to keep up. The Palo Alto Software web site also offers training.

Keeping It Up

If your team wants to take responsibility for ongoing maintenance of the plan, we can help and train you. Often, even with the best intentions, the marketing or business plan is shelved. iWrite marketing offers long-term maintenance and management of the plan as a service, through monthly marketing update meetings.