Marketing Plan

Your Marketing Plan is designed to tap into the Hidden Job Market and generate pro-active conversations about hidden opportunities.

It is a future-oriented and evolving plan.

A Marketing Plan is a simple one-page document that clarifies your goal, your unique skills, competencies & personal brand. It is helpful to you in directing your job search effectively and expanding your opportunities. It is helpful to others as a conversation starter and to help them to assist you effectively.

When should I use a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is most effective when used as part of a 1-1 informational meeting. It is used to help you improve your search in any of the following areas:

• Identifying additional occupations to target
• Identifying additional competencies that you should promote or develop to improve your search
• Identifying additional target companies who will value the skills and competencies that you possess.
• Connecting with individuals at your target companies via a first-hand referral.

How do you learn all this? At an informational meeting with someone who is an expert within your target field.

How to write a Marketing Plan

This section briefly describes your marketing plan and some of the dos and don’ts for writing it section by section.

There is a sample marketing plan here. Feel free to print it if you find that helpful.

Header

This is simply your name and contact information. You can format this to match your resume which will make a nice impression if you pursue a job lead with this organization at a later date.

In this section you can include a brief list of the types of job titles for which you are qualified and that are target occupations for you. Don’t narrow this too much since the marketing plan is designed to broaden the possibilities not narrow them.

For possible a list of possible job titles you can put in a sample keyword in O*NET. Then O*NET database will then generate a list of occupations that are related.

Summary – It’s about Future Outcomes

A good summary is powerful and essential. This summary should focus on your uniqueness and brand. What does this mean?

• Your summary should emphasize what makes you stand out from others in the same field as you. Your Personal Brand. (Two thought leaders on this are Seth Godin and Dan Schawbel.)
• It should focus on the outcomes you can achieve for an organization/customer.
• Remove references to past employers, industries, market segments or jargon that might narrow the perception of your value.
• It should include powerful but general information about how you achieve these outcomes. Leave specific details, competencies, methods, applications, etc... to the Key Competencies section.

Key Competencies

This section includes the key areas of expertise that support your ability to achieve the outcomes you presented in your Summary.

In this section you should consider and include the following:

• Job-specific knowledge (applications, platforms, etc…)
• Skills and abilities
• Core work-related values

It is a common practice to group this section or put it in table format (see examples). Do this to avoid the appearance of either a long list or a text-dense paragraph.

Target Criteria

Target criteria describe the framework within which you are searching. This section is primarily for your reference. Be selective about what information in this section that you share with others. Remember that this is a conversation starter designed to lead to more possibilities so you might not include criteria that would limit someone else’s thinking.

Industries, Company Size, Company Location.

These criteria are critical for you but may not need to be included in the Marketing Plan that you share with others.

Target Companies

This is a list of companies that you want to learn more about and for whom you are considering working. The benefit of including this section is that the reader may know someone at one of your target companies with whom you could meet.