How to Design a Marketing Plan for a Product

There are strategic steps in order to build a marketing plan to sell a product. Those steps include: addressing the competition with facts and figures as well as a supporting structure; keeping adequate reports on a daily basis in regard to gathered data including the responses from interested buyers; gauging the attractiveness of your marketing materials including flyers, pamphlets and website; and choosing the most effective strategy. Here's how to get started.

Instructions

1. Determine who you expect to market the product to. If you have a new video game, the demographics will be younger than if you have a new hair-growth tonic. Focusing your market will help you determine exactly where to put your money and help you decide where to market your product most.

2. Gather data on the demographics expected for the product. Magazines and websites such as American Demographics can help you in a general way, but you may need to do niche market research yourself to put together the marketing plan. This may include phone calls, door-to-door research or Internet polling.

3. Determine how much money you have to spend to market your product. Once you do this, further break it down to how much you want to spend in each marketing area. If the product is for younger buyers, for example, more money might be set aside for Internet marketing than direct mail pieces. Conversely, if you have a product you want to sell to middle-aged, middle-class people, direct mail pieces may get you a better return on your marketing dollar.

4. Set up a photo session for the product. You will need good, well-taken photos of the product in most cases to sell it. You can do this yourself, but for a big product push, it is necessary to get a professional photographer. Photos should be both in print and in digital format for use in mailers, magazines, newspapers and on the Internet.

5. Pull it all together under one plan remembering to include who you believe will buy the product, how you will get the information about the product to that demographic, what it will cost, what materials will be needed, where you will advertise the product and how you will track the success of the product and its marketing efforts.