You've launched your business, and now it's time to promote your product or service. Although it may seem simple enough to make a few social media posts or blast a few promotional emails, disjointed marketing efforts will not only confuse your target audience, but, ultimately, they can harm your business. You need to create a marketing plan.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap for how you communicate (on and offline) with your target audience to successfully promote your products or services. Marketing plans range from extremely basic to highly detailed, depending on what you want to accomplish.
According to Molly Maple Bryant, head of marketing at ArcheMedX, a marketing plan is not simply a list of things you want to accomplish. Instead, it should list the outcomes you seek – measurable and contextual, like the pipeline you're developing, or leads you're generating – and it should explain the high-level strategies you will use to achieve those outcomes. Developing strategies can be difficult, but they make a major difference in keeping you on track and avoiding diversions, which is also referred to as "scope creep."
"Once you have an agreed-upon plan, you are able to compare any incoming requests against your strategies to determine 'Yes, this adheres to my strategy so we can add it,' or 'No, this sounds good in theory, but it doesn't adhere to our agreed-upon strategy, so we won't adjust resources,'" Bryant told business.com.
Types of marketing plans
There are several different types of marketing plans you can use based on certain strategies that make sense for your organization. Your business will likely need a combination of the following marketing plans to create an effective, comprehensive marketing strategy:
- An advertising plan
- A branding plan
- A content marketing plan
- A customer acquisition plan
- A direct marketing plan
- An email marketing plan
- A public relation plan
- A print marketing plan
- Reputation management
- A retention plan
- A search engine optimization plan
- A social media marketing plan
Depending on your product positioning, you may also want to niche marketing plans, like influencer marketing or video marketing.
Why it's important to have a marketing plan for your business
A marketing plan is a crucial resource for any small business. Essentially, it helps you identify the market needs your product or service meets, how your product is different from competitors, and who your product or service is for. Marketing plans also serve as a road map for your sales strategy, branding direction and building your overall business. This is important for successfully conveying your brand messaging to your target audience.
Another major benefit of a marketing plan for your company is that rather than simply guessing metrics, it forces you to sit down and do the math about your business goals and how to realistically fulfill them. When you look at your growth outcomes, you can delve further to determine what it will take to get to those numbers.
Bryant offered the following example: "Need $100,000 in revenue? How many sales is that? If 10, what's your close rate? Let's say 10% from lead to closed deal. Now you have a metric to start from – to get to 10 sales, we need 100 leads. Now, where will they come from, and what strategies will you use? The plan helps you put it all on paper so you can map out resources and tactics later with a lot of preparation and realism," said Bryant.
When analyzing outcomes and resources, you can save time and avoid scope creep by focusing only on those strategies that are relevant to your marketing plan. A marketing plan not only helps you think realistically about your strategies, it also gets your stakeholders on the same page and holds your marketing team accountable for their decisions.
"When everyone's tasks and goals are laid out for the stakeholders and company partners to see, it is much easier for the entire team to feel at ease about reaching sales goals and allowing the marketing team the space and freedom needed to execute work without constant supervision," said Cassady Dill, digital marketing consultant and owner of Ethos Agency.
Additionally, Dill said a marketing plan should be easily understood by your entire team, executives, and outside departments, and it should serve as an easy guide for future marketing managers and team members to understand and implement.
5 elements of an effective business marketing plan
A marketing plan should be customized to fit your business; however, Dill said, all marketing plans contain five key functions:
- Your business goals
- Key metrics (how you quantify and measure success)
- Strategies (an overview of implementation and how that will achieve goals)
- A plan (the details of execution and the human resources, departments, and software that will be involved)
- Reporting (what reports of progress will include and/or look like)
We broke down those five functions into 10 actionable categories to help you create a marketing plan that is unique and effective for your business.
1. Executive summary
The executive summary is a great place to give the reader of your plan an overview of your business's mission or goals, as well as the marketing strategy you're looking to employ. An executive summary is often written after you've completed the rest of the marketing plan, to ensure it covers all the important elements of your plan. If the executive summary is the only part of your marketing plan that someone reads (which is highly possible), you want to be sure they understand the most crucial details.
2. Mission statement
Your mission statement, not to be confused with a vision statement, is a statement that encompasses your company's values and how they relate to your overall goals as an organization. Here are some good questions to get you thinking:
- What does your company do today?
- What's important to your company?
- What would your company like to do in the future?
- What is your brand identity?
- What's your culture like?
- How does your company benefit customers, employees and stakeholders?
3. Target markets
Identifying your target market is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan. Without a defined target audience, the money you spend on marketing will be a waste. Think of it like this: Some people need your service or product, but they don't know it exists yet. Who are those people?
Here are some other questions to help you brainstorm your target market:
- What is the demographic of your customers (gender, age, income, education, etc.)?
- What are their needs and interests?
- What's their psychographic profile (attitudes, philosophies, values, lifestyle, etc.)?
- How do they behave?
- What are some existing products they use?
4. Products and services
In this section, don't just list what your product or service is. Think critically about what you have to offer your customers and what that value proposition means to them.
- What do you make or provide for customers?
- What are your customers' needs?
- How does your product or service fulfill customers' needs?
- What value do you add to your customers' lives?
- What type of product or service are you offering?
5. Distribution channels
At this point in your report, you should transition your thinking into actual marketing theory and practices. Distribution channels are the avenues you'll use to reach a prospective customer or business. Think of all current and potential sales channels that your specific target audience is active on. One distribution channel that works great for one organization may be useless to another. [Learn how CRM systems can help track your marketing leads based on various distribution channels.]
Some include examples of sales channels include:
- Website(s)
- Retail
- Mobile text message marketing
- Social media
- Resellers
- Print (newspapers, magazines, brochures, catalogs, direct mail)
- Broadcast (TV, radio)
- Press releases
- Trade shows, product demonstrations, event marketing
6. Competitive profile
One of the major aspects of your marketing plan is developing your unique selling proposition (USP). A USP is a feature or stance that separates your product or service from those offered by competitors. It's all about differentiation and distinguishing your company as a sole proprietor of one type of good or service. Conduct a competitive analysis to identify your competitive profile and how you stack up against the competition. It is important to remain unbiased when conducting this analysis.
Here are some ideas to consider:
- What's your USP?
- Who are your competitors? What do they offer?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competition?
- What needs of the market (or customer) are not being served? What can you do to meet those needs?
7. A pricing strategy
Pricing is something you should consider when drafting your marketing plan. Developing the right pricing strategy helps you better market your product. You want to consider your current and projected finances when developing a long-term marketing strategy that is realistic and beneficial for your business. Here are some key questions to ask yourself about your pricing:
- What are reasonable margins to make a profit and cover the costs of production?
- Is there a market for products or services at your projected price point?
- Are you willing to sacrifice profit margins in return for a greater market share?
- What are your marketing and distribution costs?
8. Objectives
Consider your objectives when developing a marketing plan. This aspect of your plan should involve specific goals related to market penetration and revenue targets. Be sure to keep your marketing objectives on-brand with your business. Here are some things to consider:
- Sales quotas
- Number of new customers gained
- Customer retention percentages
- Revenue targets
- Market penetration
- Brand awareness
- Website traffic
9. Action plans
With all of the above items outlined, determine what actual steps need to be taken to enact your marketing plan. This includes determining the proper steps, setting goals, breaking down responsibilities, and establishing an overall timeline.
It's also important to brainstorm potential roadblocks your business could face and some solutions to overcome them. Your research is useless if you don't have an actionable plan that can be realistically implemented to carry out your ideas.
10. Financial projections
This last step allows you to establish a realistic marketing budget and better understand what your marketing plan will look like from a cost perspective. In addition to setting a budget, consider the overall return on investment as well. Here are some other financial projections to consider:
- Cost of implementation
- Cost to produce product or service
- Existing and projected cash flow
- Projected sales
- Desired profit margin on projected sales
Templates for creating a successful marketing plan
The internet is full of useful tools, including paid and free marketing plan templates to help you build a successful marketing plan.
Whether you are looking for a free template generator to build a new marketing plan, a benchmarking tool to evaluate your current strategies, or a video tutorial to learn more about marketing plans, there are several great resources available. Keep in mind that the best marketing plan for your business will be a customized one.
"Ultimately, you should design a marketing plan that best serves the needs of your team as you see fit," said Dill. "Don't force yourself into a plan that doesn't fit your team. Use templates to shorten the workload time, but then adjust it for a more custom plan."
Marketing plan template
- Free marketing plan template: business.com has developed a free template that is fully customizable based on the needs of your business. Each section provides in-depth explanations, examples and resources to help you create an impressive marketing plan.
Marketing plan video tutorials
- Brief tutorial: If you are a visual learner, take advantage of one of the many marketing plan video tutorials online to get started. One of our favorites is this brief tutorial by marketing expert Neil Patel. He teaches his six-step marketing plan process in six minutes.
- Longer tutorial for beginners: If you are a new to marketing plans, or you want a slightly more formal (and lengthier) video to share with your marketing team, there are other video tutorials on YouTube as well.
Benchmarking tools and templates
- Smart Insights: In addition to offering marketing plan templates, some companies, like Smart Insights, offer marketing benchmarking templates to help you evaluate your strategy performance. These are accessible with a free Smart Insights membership.
- GERU: Similarly, GERU offers a funnel-planning, profit-prediction, and simulation tool to help you assess mock business ideas and simulations. This can help you identify weak points in your marketing strategy that need improvement. Although GERU requires users to sign up for a paid account, you can access a free trial to test it out.
How to take action with your new marketing plan
Before diving into marketing plan templates, it's important to understand how to think about a marketing plan.
A good marketing plan targets whom your buyers are, it establishes the service or product you are offering, and it determines your unique selling proposition. From here, you will tackle the marketing planning process and develop the best way to get your product in front of buyers who want your product or service.
Dill created a simple four-step process for how small businesses can take action with creating a marketing plan.
- The first step is to hold a marketing meeting with all the marketing team and executives or stakeholders. This gives them time to offer questions, concerns, and criticisms you haven't thought of so you can go back to the board room and revise your strategy or plan.
- Next, add a timeline to all your tasks and assign team members and all the help you'll need to execute that plan.
- Once your plan is in action, hold weekly check-ins in person or by email to keep everyone on track.
- Share a weekly progress report with all parties involved and execs to ensure you are moving in the right direction.
In addition to drafting your own plan, you can work with a digital marketing agency or use internet marketing and pay-per-click management services to leverage your online presence.
Once you've established a general road map, update it annually. Developing an evolving marketing plan sets your business up for continued success – it allows you to prepare for the unexpected and establish a connection between your brand and your audience.
Matt D'Angelo contributed to a previous version of this article.