Marketing, when done right, helps buyers understand how your product or service can help them be successful. Good marketing, however, seldom occurs by chance. Poor marketing is a key reason cited by founders for the failure of their company according to a study by CB Insights, which analyzed 101 postmortem reports from failed startups. Developing a marketing plan is priceless because it sharpens your awareness of what makes your business unique and how to evangelize it effectively. A well-crafted marketing plan explains the benefits of your product, evangelizes how you are better than competitive approaches, describes the channels you will use to reach your target audience and how you intend to price your product. It also helps you set clear, realistic and measurable objectives for your business. Most likely, a marketing plan will be built around the launch of a company or product. This doesn’t always have to be the case however, as there are many other reasons for developing a marketing plan. And, no matter the reason for its original creation, it will benefit your business if this planning process is repeated at least a couple of times a year—a marketing plan is not a document that you create once and store in your bottom drawer.