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How to Write a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given time period. Marketing plans can include separate marketing strategies for the various marketing teams across the company, but all of them work toward the same strategic business goals.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down your tactics and strategies in an organized fashion. This prevents random acts of marketing so that you can track and measure the success of your campaigns.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Playbook

Types of Marketing Plans

Time-Based Plans (like quarterly or annual)

These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you’ll take on in a certain period of time.

Paid Marketing Plan

This plan could highlight paid strategies, such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media promotions.

Social Media Marketing Plan

This plan could highlight the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media.

Content Marketing Plan

This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you’ll use content to promote your business or product.

New Product Launch Marketing Plan

This plan will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you’ll implement to promote a new product.

A Quick Word on Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

Keep in mind that there’s a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular mission or goal. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and software they’ll use to execute on that mission and track its success.

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It is the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created, and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Define Marketing Goals and Events

If your business’s mission is “to improve quality of life for people living with stomas,” your marketing mission might be “to attract an audience of patient and healthcare providers, educate them on the superior design of your product, and convert them into users of that product following ostomy procedures.”

Determine the KPIs to track and measure goals and events

Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission’s progress. To do so, you’ll need to determine your key performance indicators, or “KPIs” for short. KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.

Let’s take our example marketing mission from the above step. We might track web page visits to order samples using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.

Identify your target audience (buyer personas)

What characteristics define your target audience? This can include age, sex, location, family size, job title, and more. Each buyer persona should be a direct reflection of your business’s customers and potential customers. Therefore, it’s critical that business leaders all agree on what your buyer personas are.

Again, we have this topic covered in a separate article. Check What Are Key Market Segments?

Define your marketing budget.

A content strategy might leverage many free channels and platforms, but software for managing leads should be able to integrate into those platforms, and that software isn’t free. There are a number of hidden expenses to a marketing team that need to be accounted for.

Whether it’s freelance fees, paid ad placements, new hires, or scheduling software, evaluate these costs to develop a marketing budget. Outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.

Identify your competition

Part of marketing is knowing whom you’re marketing against. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one in this section.

Describe your unique value proposition (USP)

Define your USP (why you stand out from the competition). What sets you apart from you competitors? How do you plan to disseminate that information to your target audience? Paid search? Robust blog? Social media posts? This will require a coordinated effort across various channels, and should be clearly outlined in this section.

Explicitly define team member roles and responsibilities

With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it’s time to explain who is doing what. You don’t have to delve too deeply into your employees’ day-to-day projects, but it should be known which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

Ready to write a marketing plan of your own? We can help craft a strategy that will boost conversions, leads and sales. Start here.