Most businesses and other organizations require some form of marketing to make themselves known to potential clients. To implement marketing effectively, most businesses choose to develop a marketing plan. This plan is a written description of the business' marketing goal and the strategies it will employ to accomplish them. While companies devote some parts of marketing plans to a long term strategy, a company also may include information about marketing in the short term.
Definition
In marketing, "short term" has no specific definition, and most people use it largely as a relative measurement. The exact time period specified by short term depends greatly on how often a company's marketing changes. For example, a fashion company that produces a new line of clothes every season may consider short term marketing as marketing strategies for the next three months, while a television station may consider daily or weekly ads as part of its short term marketing plan.
Contrast with Long Term Plans
Often, short term marketing includes all strategies that a company plans to use to promote a new good or service. In contrast, a long term marketing plans help position a company in the consciousness of consumers over many business cycles. While short term marketing may sell a new product, long term marketing plans help identifying how a company will brand itself in a year or longer.
Contents
Short term marketing plans generally contain information that is more specific than the information found in long term plans. A typical short term plan outlines the message of a marketing campaign, the formats or channels through which the the message will run and the cost of the project. Depending on the company, a short term marketing plan might resemble a finished blueprint of a marketing campaign or it might resemble a draft painted in relatively broad strokes.
Function
The best short term marketing plans accomplish two related tasks. First, as discussed, they identify a means of advancing the business in the short term through marketing. Secondly, effective plans also identify a way of integrating this near-term strategy into the company's longer term marketing vision. For example, while a short term marketing campaign might promote a new product, the branding of the company in the ad jibes with the company's long term vision, which can be repeated in future ads.
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