Your marketing plan is the documented methods and procedures that you plan to use to measure your sales and to track your marketing success. This should be reviewed on a monthly basis but can be done on a weekly basis as well to ensure that your marketing efforts are on the right path. It is important to understand that this is not the instruction on how to create a marketing plan. These key steps are for those who have already made the effort to create a plan and want to ensure that their marketing plan is a top notch one.

In order to have an effective marketing plan, it must be able to address all of the areas of marketing that are impacted. Evaluating target markets, brand position and your competition. Creating the right marketing mix and structuring sales processes and making sure that you have allocated adequate budget to achieve these types of objectives are all a part of your marketing plan. Having a limited budget does not mean you cannot have a top notch marketing plan. It does mean, however, that you have to conduct a marketing plan audit to make sure that these objectives are properly met.

There are three important steps to take in auditing your marketing plan:

1. Choose your auditors wisely

Anyone with a conflict of interest, including yourself, should not be doing the auditing. The reason is that your objectivity is lower when there are other interests creating a demand. If possible, have more than one auditor make sure that they understand and agree with your audit plan. You will need honesty and constructive input from any auditor chosen.

2. Create audit criteria

Although this may seem self explanatory, it is important to lay out the key criteria by which your marketing plan will be audited. Make sure that your criterion includes essential facets such as research, goals, calendar of implementation, budget, target market and the like.

3. Develop an audit template

The criterion revealed from the audit provides the perfect foundation for developing an audit template for your marketing plan. A comprehensive template that ensures goals can be properly measured and is easy to use will offer success in having a marketing plan that creates success for your business.