A good presentation of your marketing plan enhances and highlights information. It adds clarity and aids understanding. Presentation is important but only to communicate content. Expensive paper, expensive bindings, and excessive presentation are not really needed. Make the paper whatever quality necessary to make the plan easy to read, and avoid some of the more fibrous papers that can interfere with the printed content. Make the binding a good coil, or some other binding that will hold up to use, but keep it practical. Impress with content, not expense.
Good text formatting should make the text easy to read. Use a legible font with a mix of headings and subheadings to make the organization visible. Bullet points are generally easier to read than long paragraphs and the variation adds interest. Color is impressive for charts, when it makes numbers easier to understand, but gets in the way when used for text. Good charts are dynamite when they make numbers easier to read quickly, and they can be essential when numbers are complex.
With the computer tools available, you should be able to produce a good looking plan, with text, tables, and charts merged together into a design that’s easy to read and to follow.
• A cover page and table of contents is recommended.
• Keep the tables and charts together with the related text so that your readers can refer to them while they read.
• Keep your plan in a vertical (portrait) layout that is easier to read, with summary tables. Then put your monthly forecasts into horizontal (landscape) format to display all the months on a single page.
• Appendices are a good way to include backup details, such as monthly forecasts. They are also a good way to handle problems of page layout.