Having A Plan.

Entry posted by LayneGreene July 3, 2013

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Hey guys,

I just posted a new thread asking about peoples opinions on traditional vs. new media for music marketing. As I started by saying over there, I've been working on a marketing plan for an album set to be recorded in a years time. Like any new and exciting project it's been running circles through my mind and it seems to be all I can think about lately. While working on my overall business plan I got to thinking more about the importance of having a plan and in what ways a plan can improve implementation of our strategies and ideas. In this entry I'm going to talk through how I go about working on plans.

Planning the Plan.

I'm entering my last year of university in the coming fall, 2 of my 3 completed years have been spent as a BBA student and in that time I've worked on a lot of different types of plans. The thing I've consistently noticed when starting these plans is that they are never perfect in their first draft. Probably similar to when many of us are writing songs, we're constantly revising parts and changing the wording. After a semester spent writing draft after draft of plans I decided to make it easy on myself and start planning for the plan.

This step is fairly easy and can save you a lot of time, all you need to do is grab a piece of scrap paper and write down key points. Write out important pieces of information that you want your plan to contain. These little scraps can be specific things like "November 15, I want to play my songs at " or more general concepts that are important but that you haven't given much thought to yet. These would be things like "work out promotion plan"or "Distribution Strategy" at this point, hopefully you'll have an idea of how you want to go about these things, but it's ok to not have specifics. Just make sure to keep the notes somewhat organized and relevant to what your goals are.

For some peoples purposes this may be as far as you need to go, a more detailed plan could just be a waste of time and energy.

Research

It is not impossible to make a plan without this step, but I personally feel that this can really separate a good plan from a bad one. If you're making a marketing plan at this step you'll probably want to find some statistics on your target market and try to figure out how likely they are to purchase your product. Also, make sure that your target market makes sense, always target people who have the ability, willingness, and authority to buy your product.

Study trends in the industry, see how others have done what you're trying to do. Look at success stories and failures and try to see what the differences are and how they handled them. You need to do a StrengthsWeaknessesOpportunitiesThreats (SWOT) analysis of yourself as a business venture and be brutally honest. This will help guide you and show you potential ways to find a niche market.

This step is a huge part of the plan, and as far as I'm concerned probably involves the most work. However this can really make your plan shine, this will take your plan from being an opinion

Draft the plan

This is where the bulk of the writing is done. Here you will try to combine your ideas from the planning phase with what you've learned from the research phase. If theres any issues between your research and your plans, try your best to make everything work out and make as much sense as possible. A plan is only coherent if it's grounded in reality.

Revise the plan

This should be the last step. Go over everything with a fine toothed comb, make sure that if you're using numbers or statistics for things that they are constant throughout, make sure theres no contradictions or half formed ideas.

This method has worked out really well for me, it might not work out so well for you. Thanks for reading.

Layne