Marketing Plan Defined: How to Create a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a report or document that outlines a company’s strategy for marketing its products or services to its customer base during a specific time frame. The plan—which serves as a roadmap for business owners and their marketers—outlines marketing campaigns and objectives, unique selling propositions (characteristics that make the company superior to its competition), pricing strategies, and public outreach efforts for their target audience.

A marketing plan may also detail the messaging the company will employ to reach specific demographics in its target markets and how it will use marketing channels—such as digital marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing—to relay this information. Finally, a marketing plan will include metrics that analyze the measurable results of the campaign within the set time frame.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to align a company’s marketing strategy with its business objectives, which can include acquiring a larger market share, developing new products, or expanding the target market to attract new customers.

An effective marketing plan will serve as a template to help leadership understand how to meet those business goals. The plan will detail the market research needed to formulate marketing campaigns, the marketing strategies that research will yield, and how to allocate funds from the marketing budget to implement those strategies successfully. This information will provide business owners with a picture of the potential return on investment for the budget.

The marketing plan may also assign tasks to marketing team members and provide a history and analysis of the company’s previous market planning. This analysis allows the company’s lead marketers to see which initiatives resonated with customers so they can develop successful marketing plans using this information.

There are several steps to creating a marketing plan, including:

• Prepare an executive summary: Compile an executive summary report, an abridged version of your marketing plan that includes your company’s mission statement, milestones, and future plans. The executive summary comes first in the marketing plan’s table of contents in terms of layout.
• Establish a budget: Establishing a budget is a crucial component of any marketing plan. While there are many ways to leverage free marketing tools like social media or video sources, others will require funds, such as hiring full- and part-time employees and freelance contributors to help execute the plan. Outline these roles in your marketing plan to provide an accurate budget.
• Define marketing goals: The marketing goals section is where facts and figures come into play. This section will include a breakdown of your key performance indicators (KPIs) or key performance objectives, which are the business goals you aim to achieve, such as improvements in customer retention or an expansion of a customer base. Using metrics, such as the percentage to which the company predicts increases and the time frame in which it will happen, will support the sense that these goals are achievable.
• Identify buyer personas: Buyer personas give a demographic profile of the ideal customer that the company wishes to target with their marketing campaigns. Market research on current customers can provide demographic and psychographic data, which is information derived from their personality or lifestyle traits. This information will give you a clear picture of potential customers to target with the campaign.
• Research the competition: Businesses can gain a competitive advantage over similar businesses in their field by researching their competitors’ marketing strategies. This research should include data on competitors’ leadership, sales, and marketing teams, yearly growth, and strengths and weaknesses in the previous and current marketing plans. Leadership can also employ a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to examine how they’ve fared with various marketing tactics, such as digital content marketing strategy, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) marketing.
• Detail content initiatives: This section will detail the content initiatives in the marketing plan, including how frequently your company will release content (daily, weekly, or monthly), the platforms on which you’ll promote it, and the KPIs for each type. You should also have a firm idea of which digital marketing strategy to employ for the content and a set time frame to measure the marketing plan’s efficacy.
• Outline responsibilities: After outlining the essential details, assign specific duties to team members. Make team leaders and their team members aware of their group and individual responsibilities. Empower team leaders to assign day-to-day responsibilities.

Though the terms “marketing plan” and “marketing strategy” are often used interchangeably, a marketing plan is only one element of a marketing strategy. The marketing plan outlines marketing activities, such as monthly or yearly marketing efforts, for a particular time frame.

In contrast, the marketing strategy provides the “big picture” of a company’s marketing goals and value proposition, or what their product or brand can deliver to target customers.

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