A marketing plan is a roadmap of how you’re going to market your business over a period of time. A good marketing plan contains goals, a timeline, specific tactics to meet your goals, and KPIs to track your progress. Putting this all together may seem intimidating at first, but with a little advice and examples to guide you along the way, you’ll be on your way in no time.
Marketing has a lot of moving parts. Even for small businesses. Modern digital marketing means effectively using and tracking several online marketing channels from social media to your website to attract potential customers’ attention and keep them coming back. Without a marketing plan, you might just be throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks.
Not all marketing plans are the same. They can serve a variety of purposes depending on the time of year and business goals they are trying to accomplish.
Quarterly and annual plans highlight all of the strategies or campaigns you'll take on in the quarter or the year. They are typically more general overviews than other types of marketing plans.
Paid plans are specific to paid marketing strategies, including but not limited to:
These plans typically cover content promotions like blog posts, email marketing, videos, webinars, and more. Sometimes they also include social media, but the focus is on longform content.
Many marketing departments create marketing plans specific to social media. Others include it in their paid or content marketing plans, but sometimes it’s worth it to have a separate social media marketing plan that covers all the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to run.
Every time you release new products and services into the market, it’s a good idea to create a plan for it. It should include new market research on this specific offering and the differences and similarities between how you promote your other products and services.
Marketing plan and marketing strategy sound similar enough, but they’re not the same thing.
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Marketing Plan |
Marketing Strategy |
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An overview of marketing over time |
A detailed layout of individual marketing campaigns |
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Describes multiple strategies |
Describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal |
There isn’t a hard and fast rule about what a marketing plan looks like, but here are the main things to make sure you include to keep your marketing department on the right track.
Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business's main mission statement. Be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you'll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.
For example, if your business's mission is "to make booking travel a delightful experience," your marketing mission might be "to attract an audience of travelers, educate them on the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform."
Any good marketing plan includes how you plan to track its progress towards the mission. That’s where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. KPIs are metrics that measure the success of specific pieces of a marketing campaign. These metrics help you set short-term goals and communicate your progress towards achieving them. Some examples of KPIs include:
A buyer persona is a description of the target audience you want to attract. Most businesses have more than one to represent different market segments. Think about these questions as you create them:
Base your buyer personas on market research and make sure that all of the leaders agree that they reflect the ideal customer you want to reach.
This is where you include an overview of your content strategy. Choose your content marketing efforts wisely and explain how you'll use them to meet your goals.
The standard buyer’s journey includes:
In this part of your marketing plan, lay out what these stages look like to your company and how you’ll reach people at each stage.
Even if you use free marketing channels and platforms whenever possible, marketing costs money. From running ads to hiring people, use these costs to outline a budget in this section of your marketing plan. Be sure to spell out how much money you plan to spend on each marketing tactic.
In order to effectively market your business, you have to know how you stack up to other companies that are competing for your audience’s attention. Research the key players in your industry and outline their marketing styles in this section. Who has the better search ranking? Who has the better social media presence? What can you learn from each of them.
The final step of a marketing plan is to decide who does what. In this section of the marketing plan, delegate tasks to the members of your team.
Now let’s put the ingredients together.
The first step is to find out what other people think about your company. This should include employees, customers, shareholders, community members, and anyone else who is impacted by your company. Ask for their honest opinions about your strengths and weaknesses. You’ll use this information for the SWOT analysis section of your marketing plan.
You can’t know what goes on in your competitors’ marketing teams behind closed doors, but you can find out how effective they are. Your research on your competitors could include
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis is a simple, effective way to analyze and communicate where your company is now and where you want it to go. Use the information from the research you conducted to put it together and figure out your best path to growth.
The goals section should answer the question “how do you want your business to be different after the plan is carried out. These should be SMART business goals like “Increase annual sales by 10% by the end of the year.”
While the goals are related to the business in general, marketing objectives are what the marketing plan has to accomplish to reach them. For example, “Reach 5,000 sales prospects with an email campaign with an open rate of at least 30% and a click-through rate of 5%.”
This is where the buyer personas come in. The idea is to specify who you want to reach with your campaigns and how you plan to do so.
What do you want your target audience to know about your company to drive them to take action? That’s your message. The message is usually related to the company’s unique selling proposition, or USP, which states the unique benefits your company offers and thus the reason for doing business with you instead of your competitors.
Your marketing strategy is the plan of campaigns that will reach your objectives. Think of these questions while you develop it:
Tactics are what you will actually do to achieve your goals and and how you will do it. Some examples of marketing tactics are:
Be sure to choose tactics that are appropriate for your business goals, target audience, and budget. If you’re a solo entrepreneur or other small business without a marketing department, consider consulting with a seasoned marketing professional.
Write out a month by month timeline of when and how long each tactic will happen. This will keep your team on the right track to meet your goals.
Even the best laid plans need a little tweaking once they are implemented. Be sure to update your marketing plan regularly to account for real world happenings that affect it.
Now that you know what should go into a marketing plan, take inspiration from these examples from the pros.
Plan Type: Content Marketing Plan
Plan Type: New Product Launch Marketing Plan
Plan Type: Content Marketing Plan
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