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STOP, before you do anything else for your business or product, start your Marketing Plan. Before you do that make sure you read this article. It will save you time and money.

Where do you start your marketing plan? Where do I find a template for the marketing plan? How much do I spend? What's the strategy? These are all questions most business people and executives go through as soon as they think about their marketing plan.

If you are one of these people the answer is very simple. You need a bit more information or maybe a whole lot more information. The marketing plan should be up there at #1 or #2 in your business plan because it helps you with everything, attracting the right executives, landing investors, getting loans, not to mention selling your product or service, getting it to your customers and providing spectacular service.

If you don't know where to start it's a good thing you are here, reading along. Your marketing plan and strategy should be at the center of your company's culture. You should have best practices, training, 'image police', and all the bells and whistles.

Please don't concentrate first and foremost on your product and then try to market and sell it. This is, in my experience, the No. 1 problem in business; at least for my customers. They try to find a great product or import it or develop it and manufacture it. They spend a lot of time and money on it, on designs, development, on refining the product. Once they spent the money, many times even produced the product, they say, 'OK, it's time for the marketing plan'. NOOOOO!!!

It's backwards! First you do some marketing in the form of market research to see if your product is ready for the market or, in better terms, if the market is ready for your product. Is there any competition, what is the best price for your products, who is your potential customer, where are they, are there any distribution strategies?

One of the best ways of doing this quick research is with competitors. OK now, please don't tell me 'I don't have any competitors'really'. I've heard that many times and every single time without fail I find at least 5 competitors in less than 5 minutes of research. IMPORTANT: --It does not matter if you think or don't think you have competitors, it matters if your potential customers perceive another company as being your competitor or a competitor to your product-- You can quote me on this one!

Back to the issue at hand, your marketing plan. My first recommendation is to do a bit more research, study more, read some articles, case studies and books (read some of mine!). After you have a better idea of what marketing is about you will be 100% ready to start your marketing plan. Don't forget to involve others in the process, your sales team, production team, shipping, accounting, everyone. It's important to make marketing a team effort. After all, you are in business to market, in other words, to produce money from the marketplace.

Copyright ' Jorge Olson 2007