After you have the foundation and it's structure you can organize it into a nice, tidy format. Keep in mind that a marketing plan should be revised subtly every month and drastically every six months which means always having a notebook on hand. Marketing is a process that once put into action requires tweaking, changing, and down right overhauling to make it perfect. Times change, consumers change, environments change which means your business must change with it to thrive. Buy a small tape recorder to talk to in your car and to pop on in the middle of the night when something hits you and it will.
Ideas generate ideas.
The more you work with your plan the more your plan will work for you and the problem will begin to be putting all the ideas to use, not coming up with ideas in the first place. The problem with this thinking is that it gives your competition an ever increasing amount of power. Smart business owners know who their competition is, what they are doing and if they are lucky, how they are doing it. They know their competition's motto, their logo, their customer service ideal and how they reach their buyers. Simply put, they know as much as possible.