Chapter 17: Designing and Implementing a Marketing Plan

Main purpose of this chapter is to broaden current knowledge of marketing plan design and implementation. In this context, main scope is to explain why marketing planning is a crucial managerial function and procedure for tourism business ventures.

Literature review combined with examples and a case study is the methodological approach of this chapter.

This chapter presents the main components of a marketing plan and it explains in a practical way with simple steps how marketing objectives can be set up and how monitoring and evaluation can be developed.

Although the study is not completely theoretical, as it has several practical examples and a case study, it still is based on literature review.

Tourism businesses have to develop marketing plans to help them cope with the market’s dynamism. In this chapter, we present the main elements of a marketing plan. SMEs usually are unable on focusing on long-term goals since they have significant time constraints. This chapter explains which procedure business should follow to achieve smart objectives set by entrepreneur/manager with limited resources.

This chapter presents the main elements that should be taken into consideration before starting to design a marketing plan, as well as its components. Additionally, a very interesting case study is presented to illustrate a real-time example of successful implementation of a marketing plan by a tourism enterprise.