What is a Company Overview in a Business Plan?

Your company overview is a key piece of content that gives people an insight into of who you are, what you do and how you do it. It should communicate what makes you stand out from your competitors and address your core values as a company and a brand.

This is Your Story, an important piece of content can be adapted consistently across promotional areas such as your website, social media profiles, business directory listings as well as marketing and promotional materials.

What to include in a Company Overview

Your company overview will be made up of 6 key sections. It should be informative, concise, and communicate your business and brand accurately and effectively.

• Company details - (name / legal structure / locations / ownership / management team)
• Company history - (if relevant)
• Mission statement - (business opportunity / company ethos / values)
• Products and services - (include business USP's and competitive advantage)
• Target market - (and how your services meet their needs)
• Goals and objectives (current and for future growth)

Reading & Resources

• First, we recommend reading this useful article - "How to write an effective company overview"
• You can then explore the additional resources

Next Steps - Create your Company Overview

• Once you understand everything you need to include, you should write the first draft of your company overview.
• Your company overview contains a great deal of information, so it's essential to keep it clear, simple and interesting, always writing with your target audience in mind.
• Remember, it doesn't need to be perfect at this stage. We just need to get the ideas flowing and the basics in place.

Outline the business opportunity which you are looking to approach

You should now include a brief introduction to the business opportunity.

You should detail the problems your business is looking to solve, and be clear how your company above all others is perfectly suited to fulfil these needs.

You may want to revisit your initial draft further to completing the detailed business plan to include any key industry and market research facts and figures that provide value and insight to the reader.

Check out this great article from IBM on writing your business opportunity statement >>

Business Goals are needed to monitor your success

A critical part of your digital marketing plan is establishing clearly defined, quantifiable goals. You should think about exactly what you are looking to achieve from your digital marketing and assign goals that reflect this. Creating goals for your business can be anything from financial to process based. Both quantitative and qualitative goals are extremely important.

Such goals can be related to leads and sales or the quality of feedback about your services. For each goal you should identify what you want to achieve, the strategy to do this, how you will measure it, and the time in which you want this to happen.

These “Smart Goals” should be measurable and include deadlines as markers for success.

You should look to break your business goals down into smaller milestones so that you can track your progress.

Later in the guide, we will look at using these goals to introduce our metrics and defining how each will be measured. So for now, just identify the business goals, and we will expand on them later in your marketing plan to complete them with Key Performance Indicators.

Key Performance Indicators

Once you have established your business goals and target audience, it's a good time to start thinking about how you will measure the performance of your digital marketing campaign.

To do this, we use Key Performance Indicators.

A KPI is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for your business progress, milestones, and insights that assist you in measuring success and making important decisions for your company.

There are KPIs for every aspect of business, whether it's financial, marketing, sales, or operational. We look at the defined business goals and decide the metrics which will give us the best insights. We recommend that you create a spreadsheet or table with each of your business goals listed, the KPI for each of these goals and an area to add the value each month for ongoing comparison.

You can read our article on "How to identify and set effective Business Goals" to learn more.

Identify and understand your target audience and demographic

The next essential part of your plan is to identify who your marketing efforts will be geared towards. Before you launch any sort of marketing campaign or website, it is crucial to establish who you are communicating with.

This will affect every decision for your campaign, from the writing style and content, the use of images, the places you advertise and promote, even your branding style. Understanding your target demographic is extremely important, so let's define who our audience actually are.

We need to profile our audience, looking at factors including;

• Demographics
• Buying Habits
• Challenges and Goals

You can profile your audience in a number of ways, and once you understand who your audience is, you can make decisions on how best to reach them, and how to effectively manage your brand to resonate with them.

For some useful advice on how to identify your target audience, read our article here - "How to determine the target audience for your business"

Understanding and assessing your competitors

Competitor research is the process of identifying businesses in your industry that offer similar products or services and evaluating them based on a set of predetermined business criteria and Key Performance Indicators.

This will help you assess the ongoing performance of your business comparatively from the point of view of your customers. It is important to know how your customers view you in comparison to your competition. A competitor analysis will give you a better idea of what services are currently available to your target customer and what areas are being neglected.  

In this section we will address;

• What competitor research is and why it is important
• How to identify your competitors and how to conduct competitor research
• How to utilise your findings from competitor research

Read the full guide to build this information into your digital marketing plan - How to conduct competitor research for your business

Explore the competitive dynamics of your industry

Now that we have a wealth of information about ourselves, our target audience and our competitors, it's time to evaluate the industry as a whole. We need to understand the direction of the industry and factors which affect it before we start planning our promotional strategies.

To do this, we should research the current climate of the industry, consumer needs and requirements, and general challenges facing the market.

What's important in your industry landscape?

• Are there any common problems or opportunities facing your industry as a whole?
• Is the industry growing or in decline? Are there new competitors frequently emerging in the industry?
• How much “bargaining power” do suppliers and consumers have within the industry?
• Are there specific avenues to market which suit your industry better than others?
• What are the average price points for your services within the industry, and how do your prices stack up?
• Are there seasonal or circumstantial factors that affect the promotion and sales of your services and products?
• What are the political, economical, social or technological issues that impact the operation of your industry?

With a broad scope of factors to consider, you should read our guidance here - "Conducting Industry Research"

We then recommend bringing all of your research together by producing a “SWOT Analysis”.

Once you have evaluated the landscape, it's time to take all the information we have established to date and make a start into putting an actionable plan in place for the different branches of your campaign.

Creating the marketing section of your business plan

The marketing section is a fundamental part of your business plan. This is where you will utilise your previous research from your target audience, industry landscape, competitors and the overall business opportunity to clearly communicate 2 key factors;

• How you’re going to expose your potential customers to your product or service.
• How you’re going to get those potential customers to buy what you’re offering.

This will be presented in 4 key areas;

• Products / Services & Target Market
• Pricing Strategy
• Sales, Distribution & Access
• Advertising & Promotion

You should clearly detail everything that makes your product/service unique and what sets you aside from your competitors.

Explain why potential customers will find what you have to offer appealing and the rationale behind your pricing strategy.

Be clear about how consumers will access and purchase your products and services.

Create a detailed plan regarding how you plan to promote and advertise to your target market and why you have chosen these avenues.

In the next chapter of the Web Rocket, the Digital Marketing Plan, we will produce a detailed strategic document pertaining specifically to the online aspects of your marketing plan. However, for the purposes of your business plan, a clear explanation of all aspects of your marketing activities is required.

Next Steps

Read this informative article from Forbes - Preparing A Great Marketing Section For Your Business Plan

Once you have read the article and have a full understanding of what to include, create the marketing section of your business plan.