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The Importance of Developing a Marketing Plan

A strategic market plan is an outline of the methods and resources required to achieve a public transit organization’s goals within a specific target market. It takes into account not only marketing, but also all functional aspects of a business that must be coordinated (i.e., finance, research and development, human resources, and marketing). The process of strategic market planning yields a marketing strategy that is the framework for a marketing plan. This component of the homepage focuses on the general elements involved in a public transit organization’s marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a written document that specifies the public transit organization’s resources, objectives, marketing strategy, and implementation and control efforts planned for use in marketing its operations. The marketing plan describes the organization’s current position or situation, establishes marketing goals or objectives for the transit system, and specifies how the organization will attempt to achieve these objectives. As such, a strategic market plan is not the same as a marketing plan; it is a plan of all aspects of an organization’s strategy in the public transit marketplace. A marketing plan deals primarily with implementing the market strategy as it relates to target markets and the marketing mix.

Figure 1 shows the components of strategic market planning. The process is based on the establishment of the public transit organization’s overall goals while staying within the bounds of the organization’s opportunities and resources. When the organization has determined its overall goals and identified its resources, it can then assess its opportunities and develop an overall corporate strategy. Marketing objectives must be designed so that their achievement will contribute to the corporate strategy and so that they can be accomplished through efficient use of the organization’s resources.