Business V Marketing Plans

[beth1]

A business plan and a marketing plan? As part of my FDey course Personal Development and Management module we have to make a mock marketing plan for the appendix. I was thinking of making one up for a small day nursery that I would like to run one day.

 

TIA

 

 

Beth

Edited March 16, 2007 by beth1

[Running Bunny]

Hi Beth,

A business plan is where you would set your budgets for a given period - 12 months, 6 months, monthly or weekly.

You would show all your income - parents fees, funding, NEF, donations etc under different headings. You would then total up income from each heading and a grand total of income for that period.

You would then detail all your expenditure - staffing, resources, catering, nappies, creams/wipes, books, accounting/management costs etc and again total up each bit and then have a grand total.

You would then do a grand total of income minus expenditure and hopefully (!) there would be a surplus rather than a deficit.

 

You would also include aims for the business as a whole, identifying occupancy, training, staffing, raising quality etc again with short term goals and longer term aims and objectives.

 

A marketing plan would again be done of a set period of time (almost long, medium and short term) to show what you would like to do as far as promotion and advertising is concerned and what outcome you would achieve from this.

For example:

Leaflet drop in immediate area, how much it would cost, target audience and result (more children attending setting?)

Change in fee structure to accomodate flexible working patterns, target existing parents, would increase hours per child spent in setting

Advertising in shop windows, minimal cost for paper and printing, raise awareness of business and services offered, possible uptake of new places.

 

Hope that helps? I've just found a sample of our marketing exercise we use with providers....

 

Marketing_Exercise.doc

 

I'm sure I've missed some things but I know that others out there will be able to add to this!

 

RB x

[Steve]

Hi Beth -

Just a general comment. You might find you get more response to topics if you give them meaningful titles. The first few words of a sentence followed by some dots doesn't really attract attention in the same way as, for example, "Business Plan v Marketing Plan" would.

 

Although given RBs excellent reply, maybe that's not necessary...

[beth1]

Thanks Steve, I just couldn't find a name for the title.

 

 

Beth

[Guest]

Actually it caught my eye

We are just setting up an afternoon club for younger children to take part in the room where I run a F.U. mornings only. We have to build our numbers up. I have done this successfully with my F.U just by word of mouth. This is excellent to help us at this stage so a big thankyou.

[Guest]

Not sure if they have made the question very clear - A marketing plan is linked to your business development plan and from what you have written I would think that they are looking for a marketing audit which might be the first thing you would probably do before you undertook your business plan. For your marketing audit you will need need to have undertaken perhaps a SWOT and PESTEL analysis, looking at the area you want to develop depicting all the areas of opportunities and threats, Stengths and weaknesses within the extenal and internal envrionment (macro and micoenvironment) that will affect your business development plan and this will support how you arrived at your business plan. You should undertake an audit of the proposed provision outlining all these things. For instance, if you were looking at developing a nursery with after school care before you could develop your business plan you would need to look at the number of potential children within the area who might want that service, local authority audits would support this and then you would need to look at Governmet legislation, what they propose doing, future impact e.g. NEG funding, grant availability etc.

 

So I am not sure what they mean by plan - Runing Bunny has highlighted all the press and publicity areas within the marketing plan but I cannot open her attachment so cannot see the plan. So I might be barking up the wrong tree and maybe all they want is how you want to promote the setting but the way I see it is in order to develop your business plan you need to have undertaken a marketing audit (plan?) first.

Lets see what other people say but thats my understanding.

 

Nikki

[Guest]

A business plan and a marketing plan? As part of my FDey course Personal Development and Management module we have to make a mock marketing plan for the appendix. I was thinking of making one up for a small day nursery that I would like to run one day.

 

TIA

Beth

 

Sounds to me from that they are only interested in marketing. You will need to say what you would do to market your product do you have any unique selling points that you could use, where you would advertise in the community and how you would go about making sure all parts of the community were reached.

 

A business plan is more about your future plans for the entire business and where you see it going, the income and expenditure that running bunny was talking about is included in this but as a cash flow sheet.

 

I always find the best thing to do with these questions is to highlight keywords do get a real understanding of what they are after and reading what you have written there is no request for a business plan they just want to know about marketing.

 

Those are my thoughts anyway

 

Deb