In this article, you’ll find a complete, step-by-step guide to developing a marketing plan that will provide your organization with a strategic course of action.
Included on this page, you’ll find examples of a marketing plan, as well as pre-built marketing plan templates to suit your needs, including a Small Business Marketing Plan, Digital Marketing Plan, Strategic Marketing Plan, and more. Then, our experts show you how to create a marketing plan and what to include.
Download Marketing Plan Template
A marketing plan is a high-level document that guides your strategic initiatives and ensures your marketing goals are aligned with your overall business objectives. Use this pre-built marketing plan template to outline the purpose your business serves, as well as its strategic goals, target market, and standards of performance, to ensure you have a thorough and deliberate plan of action.
Download One-Page Marketing Plan Template
This customizable one-page marketing plan takes the comprehensiveness of a formal marketing plan and pares it down to the key elements for easy scannability. This template has space for a concise business summary, overall objectives, target market, marketing strategy, financial requirements, and more. It also contains an action plan to detail marketing activities, role assignments, deadlines, and costs.
Download Business Marketing Plan Template
This template takes all of the essential elements of a marketing plan and organizes them into sections, but you can also add and remove components of the plan according to your needs. Use this customizable template to write your executive summary, mission and vision statements, marketing strategy, core capabilities, main goals, budget, and more, with an appendix included to back up your research and findings.
Download Small Business Marketing Plan Template
A small business marketing plan can be simple or elaborate, depending on your needs and the nature of your organization. This marketing plan template is fully customizable, and will guide your small business in the identification and description of your project, the mission and vision of your company, the problem you are solving, short and long-term marketing goals, the 4Ps of your marketing mix, marketing channel strategy, and more.
Download Marketing Plan Template for Startups
This pre-built marketing plan template for startups provides the savvy entrepreneur with a strong foundation from which to build his or her marketing strategies. This template will help you develop clear short and long-term business goals, identify your target market, learn your buyer’s buying cycle, pinpoint your unique selling proposition (USP), track standards of performance and measurement methods, and more, so you can feel confident in a solid plan of action.
Digital Digital Marketing Plan Template
This digital marketing plan template includes sections for online advertising and analytics, content marketing and SEO strategy, social media, and tools for tracking metrics. The template is divided into months, so you can create a timeline for your digital marketing plan. Use this template to create a comprehensive plan of action for online marketing.
Download Real Estate Marketing Plan Template
This pre-built real estate marketing plan template is customizable, and comes ready to outline your strategic and tactical goals, conduct a SWOT analysis (including a competitor SWOT analysis), identify your target client type (e.g. first-time buyer, home seller, renter, etc.), define your marketing channels, provide financial forecasts, and more. It also includes a built-in plan of action for you to plan activities, assign roles, and set projected dates.
Download Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template
This marketing plan template is tailored to meet the unique requirements of a nonprofit business. Use this customizable template to detail the organization’s background, funding climate, a comparative analysis of competitors, profile of stakeholders, short and long-term marketing goals, positioning statement, financial requirements, and more.
Download Strategic Marketing Plan Template
This free strategic marketing plan template includes sections for online marketing campaigns, media relations, trade shows and events, other branding efforts, and sales campaigns. The plan clearly identifies objectives, along with target market and total costs. Months of the year are broken down into weeks for easy planning. You can modify this template to include any elements that are vital to your marketing plan.
Download Sales & Marketing Plan Template
This sales and marketing plan template facilitates planning around sales goals and promotional activities. This is an annual marketing calendar template that shows all 12 months on one worksheet. There are sections for public relations, online content marketing, advertising, and research. Monthly sales goals are defined at the top of the template, and there is space at the bottom for metrics to evaluate marketing effectiveness.
Download Tactical Marketing Plan Template
Keep track of the tactics that need to be completed as you implement your marketing strategy. This tactical marketing plan lists each task, the person responsible for the action, expenses, dates, and status. Use this template to keep your plan on schedule and to assess progress.
Download Product Marketing Plan Template
This pre-built product marketing plan template enables you to differentiate your product offering from the competitors by homing in on your unique selling proposition. This template has space to detail the company’s vision, conduct a competitive analysis, define the target market, and establish the market position to ensure your marketing goals stay aligned with the company’s objectives.
Download Service Marketing Plan Template
Use this customizable service marketing plan template to clearly define your goals and initiatives, analyze your competitors, and outline the characteristics and preferences of your target persona. With space to detail your company’s vision at the top of the template, you can ensure your marketing strategy and initiatives support the mission and values of your company.
A marketing plan is a document that outlines your marketing strategy. It serves as a roadmap for how your organization aims to raise awareness about a product or service and how it plans to deliver that product or service to target customers. The fundamental purpose of a marketing plan is to align marketing goals with overall business objectives to aid marketing project managers in improving the success of your business or organization.
What your marketing plan looks like will depend on the size and type of your business, but even small businesses and nonprofits can benefit from careful planning.
In this section, you’ll find a comprehensive guide for creating a marketing plan, including an example of a marketing plan outline and links to pages containing free strategic marketing templates.
Pro tip: Save time by using one of the free marketing templates above as a start.
A marketing plan outline allows you to structure your plan in a way that makes sense with the product or service you are delivering, and can also serve as a table of contents for your finalized plan. Whether you are a business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) company, a small business, or a large enterprise, the details of your plan will vary based on the nature of your business and relative marketing position.
Below, you’ll find an example of a basic marketing plan outline that you can modify to suit your organization’s needs:
A mission statement is a brief summary of your company’s main purpose, and how your company provides value to its customers. In other words, it should convey your company’s reason for existence, and serve as a point of reference for future planning initiatives. Get started on developing your mission statement by using a free mission statement worksheet.
A vision statement details the future aspirations of a company or entity, and should serve as a framework for short-term and long-term strategic planning. The purpose of a vision statement is to guide internal decision-making for future courses of action. Create a compelling vision statement by using a free vision statement worksheet.
Your marketing strategy will not be as effective without a clear picture of the overall health of your business. Gaining deeper insight into your organization’s internal and external environment will allow you to develop a plan that capitalizes on opportunities and reduces risk, and enables you to position your business in the market in a way that sets you apart from competitors.
Three methods you can use to analyze the elements that impact the health of your business are a SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five Forces Analysis, and 5C Analysis.
SWOT Analysis
This method is one of the most commonly used tools for analyzing the internal strengths and weaknesses of a business, as well as the external opportunities and threats. When detailing the internal strengths and weaknesses of a business, keep in mind that these are the factors that your company has control over. By contrast, when defining external opportunities and threats, recognize that these are factors that impact your business from the outside, and that you cannot control.
The main purpose of the of a SWOT analysis is to identify weaknesses that can be turned into strengths, and then to leverage strengths in order to take advantage of opportunities and mitigate threats in the market. Choose from a variety of free SWOT Analysis templates, including a SWOT Competitor Analysis template to see how you measure up to competitors.
Porter’s 5 Forces
This framework is used to evaluate your competitive landscape and to identify factors in your industry that may strengthen or weaken your position. The five forces include the following components:
Once you have assessed each of the five forces and rated them from low to high, you will be better equipped to pinpoint and enhance your organization’s competitive position within the industry.
5C Analysis
This marketing framework is used to assess the five key drivers of marketing decisions for a business. The five Cs of the marketing mix include the following:
Performing a situational analysis by utilizing these methods will allow you to critically analyze your organization and industry landscape, identify opportunities, establish goals, and create a plan of action to take steps toward achieving those goals.
Once you’ve conducted your situational analysis and have a clear understanding of the internal and external factors impacting your business, identify the core capabilities of your organization that you can capitalize on to gain a competitive foothold.
One way to home in on your core competencies is to gather feedback from your team by asking the following questions:
Your core competencies should be a reflection of your mission and vision statement, and these statements should be modified as core competencies change.
Are you trying to raise brand awareness? Meet a sales quota? Achieve growth within a specific timeframe? Whatever your primary business, financial, or marketing goals may be, you must ensure they are detailed and data-driven, and that you have the resources needed to achieve them. In other words, you need to establish S.M.A.R.T. goals, which are defined as the following:
If you’re feeling uncertain about the main goals you are trying to achieve, here are some questions you can ask yourself to get started on developing them:
Once you’ve answered the above questions, develop and track your S.M.A.R.T. goals by downloading a free goal planning and tracking template.
Once you’ve identified your main goals, the next step is to identify target customers that your business will direct its marketing resources to in order to achieve those goals. Since it isn’t efficient or practical to target everyone, the idea is to focus in on customers that are more likely to choose you over competitors, and to stay loyal to your brand. Read below for tips to help you define your target market.
Once you’ve established who you are targeting, you need to create a plan for how you will reach them and ultimately convert them into a customer. Ask yourself how you will get in front of your target audience to bring awareness to your product, and how you will convince them to purchase from you. Read below for effective concepts you can use to develop your strategy.
Identify your buyer’s buying cycle.
Now that you’ve pinpointed your target buyer, the next step is to develop a content strategy to encourage the buyer through each stage of the customer’s journey. Understanding how your customers make purchase decisions will allow you to align your content strategy accordingly. The stages of the customer’s buying cycle include the following:
Before creating content for each stage of the buying cycle, you must first establish your content goals for each stage, strategies to implement to meet those objectives, and the key metrics to measure results.
Develop your content strategy for each phase of the cycle and choose from a wide variety of free content marketing templates.
Determine the 4Ps of your marketing mix.
In order to effectively guide potential customers through each phase of the buyer’s lifecycle, use your marketing project management skills to create a strategy to get your brand in front of them, and then motivate them to purchase your product. As you develop your strategy, refer to the following 4Ps of your marketing mix:
According to Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg, authors of the book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, some key marketing channels to use to raise awareness about your brand include the following:
Create your budget.
Setting a budget will give you parameters to work within as you are implementing your plan. It also enables you to prioritize your needs before your wants so you can dictate resources (e.g. talent acquired) toward high priority goals first. Here are some helpful tips you can use to create your marketing budget:
Find a wide range of free marketing budget templates to start planning your budget.
Once you have established your marketing tactics and set out a budget to work within, you’ll need to prioritize your plan of attack by going after low hanging fruit. In other words, you need to act on the high value items that don’t require as much effort to complete, or the “easy wins.”
Take each initiative and assign it to a quadrant within the following matrix to determine if the time and resources needed to complete the initiative are worth the value it will return.
This segment of the plan shows the financial projections you have determined to be relevant to the project based on the research you have completed for your marketing plan. This component of the marketing plan is critical in order to gain buy-in from stakeholders and investors, and to guide your decisions throughout the duration of the project.
Common financial data to add to your marketing plan include the following:
Find a free sales forecast template, financial projections template, and other templates to prepare your financial data by checking out this page with free startup plan, budget and cost templates.
The primary purpose of setting performance standards is to communicate clear expectations and desired results for an organization’s marketing efforts. For example, a performance standard might be that the total budget for X will equal a specific percentage of the yearly promotional budget for the coming year.
Before you can adequately measure the outcome of marketing initiatives, there are some steps you must take to lay the groundwork.
Once you’ve completed these steps, you can begin the process of tracking performance by doing the following:
Once you’ve identified the standards to use to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, the next course of action is to implement your plan, measure performance, and adjust accordingly.
Although the executive summary is placed at the beginning of your marketing plan, it is the final step to be completed. This section summarizes all the key takeaways from each segment of the marketing plan, and should ultimately answer each of the following questions:
Learn more about how to create an effective summary, and find free checklists and templates to support your efforts by visiting “How to Write an Effective Executive Summary to Yield Results.”
It’s important to remember that a marketing plan is not static, but rather a living document that should be referenced regularly, and updated as changes occur within your business and the larger business climate.
In this section, you will find examples of marketing plans created by established companies, along with sample marketing plan, to help guide you in your efforts in creating your own plan.
This first example is a marketing plan that was created for a cosmetics company. You will note that design elements throughout this plan are consistent to the brand, and sections are broken up by catchy graphics and illustrations.
This example is a marketing plan that was created for a real estate company. This plan emphasizes the benefits that a customer receives by using their services, and details the promotional strategy used to connect customers to their business.
This sample shows a marketing plan for a hypothetical company. Although this plan does not display any design elements or graphs, it breaks the plan up into the key components of a basic marketing plan.
A strong marketing plan can serve as a roadmap for your organization, and taking the time to write a formal plan — rather than relying on esoteric goals or vague strategy — can heighten the success of your overall marketing efforts. A marketing plan can help you accomplish the following:
Ultimately, your marketing plan acts as a reference document that will hold you accountable and help you execute your marketing strategy.
You can elevate the utility of your marketing plan by taking extra time to add elements and perform in-depth analysis of your audience, brand, and budget. Below are some tactical and analytical tips that will help you get the most out of your marketing strategy planning:
You can also tap into several accessory activities to strengthen your marketing planning. These include the following:
Presentation is key when it comes to showcasing your marketing plan to potential investors and stakeholders. Below are some basic best practices to keep the look of your plan interesting and streamlined:
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