sample marketing business plan

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Blog Marketing What is a Marketing Plan & How to Create One [with Examples]

What is a Marketing Plan & How to Create One [with Examples]

Written by: Sara McGuire Oct 26, 2023

A marketing plan is a blueprint that outlines your strategies to attract and convert your ideal customers as a part of your customer acquisition strategy. It’s a comprehensive document that details your:

• Target audience:  Who you’re trying to reach
• Marketing goals:  What you want to achieve
• Strategies and tactics:  How you’ll reach your goals
• Budget:  Resources you’ll allocate
• Metrics:  How you’ll measure success

In this article, I’ll explain everything you need to know about creating a marketing plan . If you need a little extra help, there are professionally designed marketing plan templates that’ll make the process much easier. So, let’s ditch the confusion and get started!

Click to jump ahead:

What is a marketing plan?

How to write a marketing plan , 9 marketing plan examples to inspire your growth strategy.

• Marketing plan v.s. business plan
• Types of marketing plans

Marketing plan FAQs

A marketing plan is a report that outlines your marketing strategy for your products or services, which could be applicable for the coming year, quarter or month.  

Watch this quick, 13-minute video for more details on what a marketing plan is and how to make one yourself:

Typically, a marketing plan includes:

• An overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals
• A description of your business’s current marketing position
• A timeline of when tasks within your strategy will be completed
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) you will be tracking
• A description of your business’s target market and customer needs
• A description of how you will measure marketing plan performance

For example, this marketing plan template provides a high-level overview of the business and competitors before diving deep into specific goals, KPIs and tactics:

Learning how to write a marketing plan forces you to think through the important steps that lead to an effective marketing strategy . And a well-defined plan will help you stay focused on your high-level marketing goals.

With Venngage’s extensive catalog of marketing plan templates, creating your marketing plan isn’t going to be hard or tedious. In fact, Venngage has plenty of helpful communications and design resources for marketers. If you’re ready to get started, sign up for  Venngage for Marketers   now. It’s free to register and start designing.

Whether you’re a team trying to set smarter marketing goals, a consultant trying to set your client in the right direction, or a one-person team hustling it out, Venngage for Marketers helps you get things done.

As mentioned above, the scope of your marketing plan varies depending on its purpose or the type of organization it’s for.

For example, you could look for performance marketing agency to create a marketing plan that provides an overview of a company’s entire marketing strategy:

A typical outline of a marketing plan includes:

• Executive summary
• Goals and objectives
• User personas
• Competitor analysis/SWOT analysis
• Baseline metrics
• Marketing strategy
• Tracking guidelines

Below you will see in details how to write each section as well as some examples of how you can design each section in a marketing plan.

Let’s look at how to create a successful marketing plan (click to jump ahead):

• Write a simple executive summary
• Set metric-driven marketing goals
• Outline your user personas
• Research all of your competitors
• Set accurate key baselines & metrics
• Create an actionable marketing strategy
• Set tracking or reporting guidelines

1. Write a simple executive summary

Starting your marketing plan off on the right foot is important. You want to pull people into your amazing plan for marketing domination. Not bore them to tears.

One of the best ways to get people excited to read your marketing plan is with a well-written executive summary. An executive summary introduces readers to your company goals, marketing triumphs, future plans, and other important contextual facts.

Basically, you can use the Executive Summary as a primer for the rest of your marketing plan.

Include things like:

• Simple marketing goals
• High-level metrics
• Important company milestones
• Facts about your brand
• Employee anecdotes
• Future goals & plans

Try to keep your executive summary rather brief and to the point. You aren’t writing a novel, so try to keep it under three to four paragraphs.

Take a look at the executive summary in the marketing plan example below:

The executive summary is only two paragraphs long — short but effective.

The executive summary tells readers about the company’s growth, and how they are about to overtake one of their competitors. But there’s no mention of specific metrics or figures. That will be highlighted in the next section of the marketing plan.

An effective executive summary should have enough information to pique the reader’s interest, but not bog them down with specifics yet. That’s what the rest of your marketing plan is for!

The executive summary also sets the tone for your marketing plan. Think about what tone will fit your brand ? Friendly and humorous? Professional and reliable? Inspiring and visionary?

2. Set metric-driven marketing goals

After you perfect your executive summary, it’s time to outline your marketing goals.

(If you’ve never set data-driven goals like this before, it would be worth reading this growth strategy guide ).

This is one of the most important parts of the entire marketing plan, so be sure to take your time and be as clear as possible. Moreover, optimizing your marketing funnel is key. Employing effective funnel software can simplify operations and provide valuable customer insights. It facilitates lead tracking, conversion rate analysis, and efficient marketing optimization .

As a rule of thumb, be as specific as possible. The folks over at  VoyMedia  advise that you should set goals that impact website traffic, conversions, and customer success — and to use real numbers. Complement your goals with website optimization tools (e.g., A/B testing speed with Nostra – check Nostra AI review to learn more) to further improve conversions.

Avoid outlining vague goals like:

• Get more Twitter followers
• Write more articles
• Create more YouTube videos (like educational or Explainer videos )
• Increase retention rate
• Decrease bounce rate

Instead, identify  key performance metrics  (KPI) you want to impact and the percentage you want to increase them by.

Take a look at the goals page in the marketing plan example below:

They not only identify a specific metric in each of their goals, but they also set a timeline for when they will be increased.

The same vague goals listed earlier become much clearer when specific numbers and timelines are applied to them:

• Get 100 new Twitter followers per month
• Write 5 more articles per week
• Create 10 YouTube videos each year
• Increase retention rate by 15% by 2020
• Decrease bounce rate by 5% by Q1
• Create an online course  and get 1,000 new leads
• Focus more on local SEO strategies
• Conduct a monthly social media report to track progress

You can dive even deeper into your marketing goals if you want (generally, the more specific, the better). Here’s a marketing plan example that shows how to outline your growth goals:

3. Outline your user personas

Now, this may not seem like the most important part of your marketing plan, but I think it holds a ton of value.

Outlining your user personas is an important part of a marketing plan that should not be overlooked.

You should be asking not just how you can get the most visitors to your business, but how you can get the right visitors.

Who are your ideal customers? What are their goals? What are their biggest problems? How does your business solve customer problems?

Answering these questions will take lots of research, but it’s essential information to get.

Some ways to conduct user research are:

• Interviewing your users (either in person or on the phone)
• Conducting focus groups
• Researching other businesses in the same industry
• Surveying your audience

Then, you will need to compile your user data into a user persona  guide.

Take a look at how detailed this user persona template is below:

Taking the time to identify specific demographic traits, habits and goals will make it easier for you to cater your marketing plan to them.

Here’s how you can create a user persona guide:

The first thing you should add is a profile picture or icon for each user persona. It can help to put a face to your personas, so they seem more real.

Next, list demographic information like:

• Identifiers
• Activities/Hobbies

The user persona example above uses sliding scales to identify personality traits like introversion vs. extroversion and thinking vs. feeling. Identifying what type of personality your target users tend to have an influence on the messaging you use in your marketing content.

Meanwhile, this user persona guide identifies specific challenges the user faces each day:

But if you don’t want to go into such precise detail, you can stick to basic information, like in this marketing plan example:

Most businesses will have a few different types of target users. That’s why it’s pertinent to identify and create several different user personas . That way, you can better segment your marketing campaigns and set separate goals, if necessary.

Here’s a marketing plan example with a segmented user persona guide:

The important thing is for your team or client to have a clear picture of who their target user is and how they can appeal to their specific problems.

Start creating robust user personas using Venngage’s user persona guide .

4. Conduct an extensive competitor analysis

Next, on the marketing plan checklist, we have the competitor research section. This section will help you identify who your competitors are, what they’re doing, and how you could carve yourself a place alongside them in your niche — and ideally, surpass them. It’s something you can learn to do with rank tracking software .

Competitor research is also incredibly important if you are starting a blog .

Typically, your competitor research should include:

• Who their marketing team is
• Who their leadership team is
• What their marketing strategy and strategic marketing plan are (this will probably revolve some reverse-engineering)
• What their sales strategy is (same deal)
• Social Media strategy (are they using discounting strategies such as coupon marketing to get conversions)
• Their market cap/financials
• Their yearly growth (you will probably need to use a marketing tool like Ahrefs to do this)
• The number of customers they have & their user personas

Also, take as deep a dive as you can into the strategies they use across their:

• Blog/Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• SEO Marketing
• Video marketing
• And any other marketing tactics they use

Research their strengths and weaknesses in all parts of their company, and you will find some great opportunities. Bookmark has a great guide to different marketing strategies for small businesses if you need some more information there.

You can use this simple SWOT analysis worksheet to quickly work through all parts of their strategy as well:

Click the template above to create a SWOT chart . Customize the template to your liking — no design know-how needed.

Since you have already done all the research beforehand, adding this information to your marketing plan shouldn’t be that hard.

In this marketing plan example, some high-level research is outlined for 3 competing brands:

But you could take a deeper dive into different facets of your competitors’ strategies. This marketing plan example analyses a competitor’s inbound marketing strategy :

It can also be helpful to divide your competitors into Primary and Secondary groups. For example, Apple’s primary competitor may be Dell for computers, but its secondary competitor could be a company that makes tablets.

Your most dangerous competitors may not even be in the same industry as you. Like the CEO of Netflix said, “Sleep is our competition.”

5. Set accurate key baselines & metrics

It’s pretty hard to plan for the future if you don’t know where your business stands right now.

Before we do anything at Venngage, we find the baselines so we can compare future results to something. We do it so much it’s almost like second nature now!

Setting baselines will allow you to more accurately track your progress. You will also be able to better analyze what worked and what didn’t work, so you can build a stronger strategy. It will definitely help them clearly understand your goals and strategy as well.

Here’s a marketing plan example where the baselines are visualized:

Another way to include baselines in your plan is with a simple chart, like in the marketing plan example below:

Because data can be intimidating to a lot of people, visualizing your data using charts and infographics will help demystify the information.

6. Create an actionable marketing strategy

After pulling all the contextual information and relevant metrics into your marketing plan, it’s time to break down your marketing strategy.

Once again, it’s easier to communicate your information to your team or clients using visuals .

Mind maps are an effective way to show how a strategy with many moving parts ties together. For example, this mind map shows how the four main components of a marketing strategy interact together:

You can also use a flow chart to map out your strategy by objectives:

However you choose to visualize your strategy, your team should know exactly what they need to do. This is not the time to keep your cards close to your chest.

Your strategy section may need to take up a few pages to explain, like in the marketing plan example below:

With all of this information, even someone from the development team will understand what the marketing team is working on.

This minimalistic marketing plan example uses color blocks to make the different parts of the strategy easy to scan:

Breaking your strategy down into tasks will make it easier to tackle.

Another important way to visualize your marketing strategy is to create a project roadmap. A project roadmap visualizes the timeline of your product with individual tasks. Our roadmap maker can help you with this.

For example, this project roadmap shows how tasks on both the marketing and web design side run parallel to each other:

A simple timeline can also be used in your marketing plan:

Or a mind map, if you want to include a ton of information in a more organized way:

Even a simple “Next, Now, Later” chart can help visualize your strategy:

7. Set tracking or reporting guidelines

Close your marketing plan with a brief explanation of how you plan to track or measure your results. This will save you a lot of frustration down the line by standardizing how you track results across your team.

Like the other sections of your marketing plan, you can choose how in-depth you want to go. But there need to be some clear guidelines on how to measure the progress and results of your marketing plan.

At the bare minimum, your results tracking guidelines should specify:

• What you plan to track
• How you plan to track results
• How often you plan to measure

But you can more add tracking guidelines to your marketing plan if you see the need to. You may also want to include a template that your team or client can follow,  for  client reporting ,  ensure that the right metrics are being tracked.

The marketing plan example below dedicates a whole page to tracking criteria:

Use a task tracker to track tasks and marketing results, and a checklist maker to note down tasks, important life events, or tracking your daily life.

Similarly, the marketing plan example below talks about tracking content marketing instead:

Marketing plan vs. marketing strategy

Although often used interchangeably, the terms “marketing plan” and “marketing strategy” do have some differences.

Simply speaking, a marketing strategy presents what the business will do in order to reach a certain goal. A marketing plan outlines the specific daily, weekly, monthly or yearly activities that the marketing strategy calls for. As a business, you can create a marketing proposal for the marketing strategies defined in your company’s marketing plan. There are various marketing proposal examples that you can look at to help with this.

A company’s extended marketing strategy can be like this:

Notice how it’s more general and doesn’t include the actual activities required to complete each strategy or the timeframe those marketing activities will take place. That kind of information is included in a marketing plan, like this marketing plan template which talks about the content strategy in detail:

1. Nonprofit marketing plan

Here’s a free nonprofit marketing plan example that is ideal for organizations with a comprehensive vision to share. It’s a simple plan that is incredibly effective. Not only does the plan outline the core values of the company, it also shares the ideal buyer persona.

Note how the branding is consistent throughout this example so there is no doubt which company is presenting this plan. The content plan is an added incentive for anyone viewing the document to go ahead and give the team the green light.

2. Social media marketing plan

Two-page marketing plan samples aren’t very common, but this free template proves how effective they are. There’s a dedicated section for business goals as well as for project planning.

The milestones for the marketing campaign are clearly laid out, which is a great way to show how organized this business strategy is.

3. Small business marketing plan

This marketing plan template is perfect for small businesses who set out to develop an overarching marketing strategy for the whole year:

Notice how this aligns pretty well with the marketing plan outline we discussed in previous sections.

In terms of specific tactics for the company’s marketing strategy, the template only discusses SEO strategy, but you can certainly expand on that section to discuss any other strategies — such as link building , that you would like to build out a complete marketing plan for.

4. Orange simple marketing proposal template

Marketing plans, like the sample below, are a great way to highlight what your business strategy and the proposal you wan to put forward to win potential customers.

5. One-page marketing plan

This one-page marketing plan example is great for showcasing marketing efforts in a persuasive presentation or to print out for an in-person meeting.

Note how the fact sheet breaks down the marketing budget as well as the key metrics for the organization. You can win over clients and partners with a plan like this.

6. Light company business fact sheet template

This one-page sample marketing plan clearly outlines the marketing objectives for the organization. It’s a simple but effective way to share a large amount of information in a short amount of time.

What really works with this example is that includes a mission statement, key contact information alongside all the key metrics.

7. Marketing media press kit template

This press kit marketing plan template is bright and unmistakable as belonging to the Cloud Nine marketing agency . The way the brand colors are used also helps diversify the layouts for each page, making the plan easier to read.

We like the way the marketing department has outlined the important facts about the organization. The bold and large numbers draw the eye and look impressive.

8. Professional marketing proposal template

Start your marketing campaign on a promising note with this marketing plan template. It’s short, sharp and to the point. The table of contents sets out the agenda, and there’s a page for the company overview and mission statement.

9. Social media marketing proposal template

A complete marketing plan example, like the one below, not only breaks down the business goals to be achieved but a whole lot more. Note how the terms and conditions and payment schedule are included, which makes this one of the most comprehensive marketing plans on our list.

Marketing plan vs. business plan

While both marketing plans and business plans are crucial documents for businesses, they serve distinct purposes and have different scopes. Here’s a breakdown of the key differences:

Business plan is a comprehensive document that outlines all aspects of your business, including:

• Mission and vision
• Products or services
• Target market
• Competition
• Management team
• Financial projections
• Marketing strategy (including a marketing plan)
• Operations plan

Marketing plan on the other hand, dives deep into the specific strategies and tactics related to your marketing efforts. It expands on the marketing section of a business plan by detailing:

• Specific marketing goals (e.g., brand awareness, lead generation, sales)
• Target audience analysis (detailed understanding of their needs and behaviors)
• Product:  Features, benefits, positioning
• Price:  Pricing strategy, discounts
• Place:  Distribution channels (online, offline)
• Promotion:  Advertising, social media, content marketing, public relations
• Budget allocation for different marketing activities
• Metrics and measurement to track progress and success

In short, business plans paint the entire business picture, while marketing plans zoom in on the specific strategies used to reach your target audience and achieve marketing goals.

Types of marketing plans that can transform your business strategy

Let’s take a look at several types of marketing plans you can create, along with specific examples for each.

1. General marketing strategic plan / Annual marketing plan

This is a good example of a marketing plan that covers the overarching annual marketing strategy for a company:

Another good example would be this Starbucks marketing plan:

This one-page marketing plan example from coffee chain Starbucks has everything at a glance. The bold headers and subheadings make it easier to segment the sections so readers can focus on the area most relevant to them.

What we like about this example is how much it covers. From the ideal buyer persona to actional activities, as well as positioning and metrics, this marketing plan has it all.

Another marketing plan example that caught our eye is this one from Cengage. Although a bit text-heavy and traditional, it explains the various sections well. The clean layout makes this plan easy to read and absorb.

The last marketing plan example we would like to feature in this section is this one from Lush cosmetics.

It is a long one but it’s also very detailed. The plan outlines numerous areas, including the company mission, SWOT analysis , brand positioning, packaging, geographical criteria, and much more.

2. Content marketing plan

A content marketing plan highlights different strategies , campaigns or tactics you can use for your content to help your business reach its goals.

This one-page marketing plan example from Contently outlines a content strategy and workflow using simple colors and blocks. The bullet points detail more information but this plan can easily be understood at a glance, which makes it so effective.

For a more detailed content marketing plan example, take a look at this template which features an editorial calendar you can share with the whole team:

3. SEO marketing plan

Your SEO marketing plan highlights what you plan to do for your SEO marketing strategy . This could include tactics for website on-page optimization , off-page optimization using AI SEO , and link building using an SEO PowerSuite backlink API for quick backlink profile checks. Additionally, incorporating a rank tracker can help monitor keyword performance and track the impact of your optimization efforts.

This SEO marketing plan example discusses in detail the target audience of the business and the SEO plan laid out in different stages:

4. Social media marketing plan

Your social media marketing plan presents what you’ll do to reach your marketing goal through social media. This could include tactics specific to each social media channel that you own, recommendations on developing a new channel, specific campaigns you want to run, and so on, like how B2B channels use Linkedin to generate leads with automation tools and expand their customer base; or like making use of Twitter walls that could display live Twitter feeds from Twitter in real-time on digital screens.

For B2C brands, you can target Facebook and Instagram. Gain Instagram likes to build trust for your brand’s profile and post engaging content on both platforms. Leverage AI social media tools to automate and scale your content plan..

Edit this social media marketing plan example easily with Venngage’s drag-and-drop editor:

5. Demand generation marketing plan

This could cover your paid marketing strategy (which can include search ads, paid social media ads, traditional advertisements, etc.), email marketing strategy and more. Here’s an example:

What should marketing plans include?

Marketing plans should include:

• A detailed analysis of the target market and customer segments.
• Clear and achievable marketing objectives and goals.
• Strategies and tactics for product promotion and distribution.
• Budget allocation for various marketing activities.
• Timelines and milestones for the implementation of marketing strategies.
• Evaluation metrics and methods for tracking the success of the marketing plan.

What is an executive summary in a marketing plan and what is its main goal?

An executive summary in a marketing plan is a brief overview of the entire document, summarizing the key points, goals, and strategies. Its main goal is to provide readers with a quick understanding of the plan’s purpose and to entice them to read further.

What are the results when a marketing plan is effective?

When a marketing plan is effective, businesses can experience increased brand visibility, higher customer engagement , improved sales and revenue, and strengthened customer loyalty.

What is the first section of a marketing plan?

The first section of a marketing plan is typically the “Executive Summary,” which provides a concise overview of the entire plan, including the business’s goals and the strategies to achieve them.

Now that you have the basics for designing your own marketing plan, it’s time to get started:

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• How to create a winning marketing plan, ...

How to create a winning marketing plan, with 3 examples from world-class teams

A marketing plan helps leaders clearly visualize marketing strategies across channels, so they can ensure every campaign drives pipeline and revenue. In this article you’ll learn eight steps to create a winning marketing plan that brings business-critical goals to life, with examples from word-class teams.

To be successful as a marketer, you have to deliver the pipeline and the revenue.”

In other words—they need a well-crafted marketing plan.

Level up your marketing plan to drive revenue in 2024

Learn how to create the right marketing plan to hit your revenue targets in 2024. Hear best practices from marketing experts, including how to confidently set and hit business goals, socialize marketing plans, and move faster with clearer resourcing.

7 steps to build a comprehensive marketing plan

How do you build the right marketing plan to hit your revenue goals? Follow these eight steps for success:

1. Define your plan

First you need to define each specific component of your plan to ensure stakeholders are aligned on goals, deliverables, resources, and more. Ironing out these details early on ensures your plan supports the right business objectives, and that you have sufficient resources and time to get the job done. 

Get started by asking yourself the following questions: 

What resources do I need? 

What is the vision?

What is the value?

What is the goal?

Who is my audience?

What are my channels?

What is the timeline?

For example, imagine you’re creating an annual marketing plan to improve customer adoption and retention in the next fiscal year. Here’s how you could go through the questions above to ensure you’re ready to move forward with your plan: 

I will need support from the content team, web team, and email team to create targeted content for existing customers. One person on each team will need to be dedicated full-time to this initiative. To achieve this, the marketing team will need an additional $100K in budget and one new headcount. 

What is the vision?  

To create a positive experience for existing customers, address new customer needs, and encourage them to upgrade. We’ll do this by serving them how-to content, new feature updates, information about deals and pricing, and troubleshooting guides. 

According to the Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) , CEOs and go-to-market leaders report that more than 60% of their net-new revenue will come from existing customers in 2023. By retaining and building on the customers we have, we can maintain revenue growth over time. 

To decrease the customer churn rate from 30% to 10%, and increase upgrades from 20% to 30% in the next fiscal year. 

All existing customers. 

The main channel will be email. Supporting marketing channels include the website, blog, YouTube, and social media. 

The first half of the next fiscal year. 

One of the most important things to do as you create your marketing strategy is to identify your target audience . As with all marketing, you need to know who you’re marketing to. If you’re having a hard time determining who exactly your target audience is, try the bullseye targeting framework . The bullseye makes it easy for you to determine who your target audience is by industry, geography, company size, psychographics, demographics, and more.

2. Identify key metrics for success 

Now it’s time to define what key marketing metrics you’ll use to measure success. Your key metrics will help you measure and track the performance of your marketing activities. They’ll also help you understand how your efforts tie back to larger business goals. 

Once you establish key metrics, use a goal-setting framework—like objectives and key results (OKRs) or SMART goals —to fully flush out your marketing objectives. This ensures your targets are as specific as possible, with no ambiguity about what should be accomplished by when. 

Example: If a goal of your marketing plan is to increase email subscriptions and you follow the SMART goal framework (ensuring your objective is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) your goal might look like this: Increase email subscription rate from 10% to 20% in H1 . 

3. Research your competition 

It’s easy to get caught up in your company’s world, but there’s a lot of value in understanding your competitors . Knowing how they market themselves will help you find opportunities to make your company stand out and capture more market share.

Make sure you’re not duplicating your competitors’ efforts. If you discover a competitor has already executed your idea, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board and brainstorm new ways to differentiate yourself.  By looking at your competitors, you might be surprised at the type of inspiration and opportunities you’ll find.

To stay ahead of market trends, conduct a SWOT analysis for your marketing plan. A SWOT analysis helps you improve your plan by identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Example: If your competitor launches a social media campaign identical to what you had planned, go back to the drawing board and see how you can build off their campaign. Ask yourself: How can we differentiate our campaign while still getting our message across? What are the weaknesses of their campaign that we can capitalize on? What angles did they not approach?

4. Integrate your marketing efforts

Here’s where the fun comes in. Let’s dive into the different components that go into building a successful marketing plan. You’ll want to make sure your marketing plan includes multiple supporting activities that all add up into a powerful marketing machine. Some marketing plan components include: 

Lead generation

Social media

Product marketing

Public relations

Analyst relations

Customer marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Conversational marketing

Knowing where your consumer base spends the most time is significant for nailing this step. You need to have a solid understanding of your target audience before integrating your marketing efforts. 

Example: If your target audience is executives that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, focus your social media strategy around placing branded content on LinkedIn. 

5. Differentiate with creative content

Forty-nine percent of marketers say visual images are hugely important to their content strategy. In other words, a clear brand and creative strategy is an essential component to every marketing plan. As you craft your own creative strategy, here are some tips to keep in mind: 

Speak to your audience: When defining your creative strategy, think about your audience—what you want them to feel, think, and do when they see your marketing. Will your audience find your creative work relevant? If your audience can’t relate to your creative work, they won’t feel connected to the story you’re trying to tell. 

Think outside the box: Find innovative ways to engage your audience, whether through video, animations, or interactive graphics. Know what screens your creative work will live on, whether desktop, mobile, or tablet, and make sure they display beautifully and load quickly across every type of device. 

Tie everything back to CTAs: It’s easy to get caught up in the creative process, so it’s important to never lose sight of your ultimate goal: Get your audience to take action. Always find the best way to display strong Calls to Action (CTAs) in your creative work. We live in a visual world—make sure your creative content counts.

Streamline creative production:   Once you’ve established a strong creative strategy, the next step is to bring your strategy to life in the production stage. It’s vital to set up a strong framework for your creative production process to eliminate any unnecessary back and forth and potential bottlenecks. Consider establishing creative request forms , streamlining feedback and approval processes, and taking advantage of integrations that might make your designers’ lives easier.

Example: If your brand is fun and approachable, make sure that shows in your creative efforts. Create designs and CTAs that spark joy, offer entertainment, and alleviate the pressure in choosing a partner.

6. Operationalize your marketing plan

Turn your plan into action by making goals, deliverables, and timelines clear for every stakeholder—so teams stay accountable for getting work done. The best way to do this is by centralizing all the details of your marketing plan in one platform , so teams can access the information they need and connect campaign work back to company goals.  

With the right work management tool , you can: 

Set goals for every marketing activity, and connect campaign work to overarching marketing and business objectives so teams focus on revenue-driving projects. 

Centralize deliverables for your entire marketing plan in one project or portfolio .

Mark major milestones and visualize your plan as a timeline, Gantt chart, calendar, list, or Kanban board—without doing any extra work. 

Quickly loop in stakeholders with status updates so they’re always up to date on progress. This is extremely important if you have a global team to ensure efforts aren’t being duplicated. 

Use automations to seamlessly hand off work between teams, streamlining processes like content creation and reviews. 

Create dashboards to report on work and make sure projects are properly staffed , so campaigns stay on track. 

With everything housed in one spot, you can easily visualize the status of your entire marketing plan and keep work on track. Building an effective marketing plan is one thing, but how you operationalize it can be your secret to standout marketing.

Example: If your strategy focuses on increasing page views, connect all campaign work to an overarching OKR—like “we will double page views as measured by the amount of organic traffic on our blog.” By making that goal visible to all stakeholders, you help teams prioritize the right work. 

See marketing planning in action

With Asana, marketing teams can connect work, standardize processes, and automate workflows—all in one place.

7. Measure performance

Nearly three in four CMOs use revenue growth to measure success, so it’s no surprise that measuring performance is necessary. You established your key metrics in step two, and now it’s time to track and report on them in step eight.

Periodically measure your marketing efforts to find areas of improvement so you can optimize in real-time. There are always lessons to be learned when looking at data. You can discover trends, detect which marketing initiatives performed well, and course-correct what isn’t performing well. And when your plan is complete, you can apply these learnings to your next initiative for improved results. 

Example: Say you discover that long-form content is consistently bringing in 400% more page views than short-form content. As a result, you’ll want to focus on producing more long-form content in your next marketing plan.

Marketing plan examples from world-class teams

The best brands in the world bring their marketing plans to life every day. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out these examples from successful marketing teams.

Autodesk grows site traffic 30% three years in a row

When the Autodesk team launched Redshift, it was initially a small business blog. The editorial team executed a successful marketing plan to expand it into a premier owned-media site, making it a destination for stories and videos about the future of making. 

The team scaled content production to support seven additional languages. By standardizing their content production workflow and centralizing all content conversations in one place, the editorial team now publishes 2X more content monthly. Read the case study to learn more about how Autodesk runs a well-oiled content machine. Trinny London perfects new customer acquisition 

In consumer industries, social media is crucial for building a community of people who feel an affinity with the brand—and Trinny London is no exception. As such, it was imperative that Trinny London’s ad spend was targeted to the correct audience. Using a work management tool, Trinny London was able to nail the process of creating, testing, and implementing ads on multiple social channels.

With the help of a centralized tool, Trinny London improved its ad spend and drove more likes and subscriptions on its YouTube page. Read the case study to learn more about how Trinny London capitalized on paid advertising and social media. 

Turn your marketing plan into marketing success 

A great marketing plan promotes clarity and accountability across teams—so every stakeholder knows what they’re responsible for, by when. Reading this article is the first step to achieving better team alignment, so you can ensure every marketing campaign contributes to your company’s bottom line. 

Use a free marketing plan template to get started

Once you’ve created your marketing strategy and are ready to operationalize your marketing plan, get started with one of our marketing templates . 

Our marketing templates can help you manage and track every aspect of your marketing plan, from creative requests to approval workflows. Centralize your entire marketing plan in one place, customize the roadmap, assign tasks, and build a timeline or calendar. 

Once you’ve operationalized your entire marketing plan with one of our templates, share it with your stakeholders so everyone can work together in the same tool. Your entire team will feel connected to the marketing plan, know what to prioritize, and see how their work contributes to your project objectives . Choose the best marketing template for your team:

Marketing project plan template

Marketing campaign plan template

Product marketing launch template

Editorial calendar template

Agency collaboration template

Creative requests template

Event planning template

GTM strategy template

Still have questions? We have answers. 

What is a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a detailed roadmap that outlines the different strategies your team will use to achieve organizational objectives. Rather than focusing solely on the end goal, a marketing plan maps every step you need to reach your destination—whether that’s driving pipeline for sales, nurturing your existing customer base, or something in-between. 

As a marketing leader, you know there’s never a shortage of great campaign and project ideas. A marketing plan gives you a framework to effectively prioritize work that aligns to overarching business goals—and then get that work done. Some elements of marketing plans include:

Current business plan

Mission statement  

Business goals

Target customers  

Competitive analysis 

Current marketing mix

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Marketing budget  

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

The purpose of a marketing plan is to grow your company’s consumer base and strengthen your brand, while aligning with your organization’s mission and vision . The plan should analyze the competitive landscape and industry trends, offer actionable insights to help you gain a competitive advantage, and document each step of your strategy—so you can see how your campaigns work together to drive overarching business goals. 

What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy? 

A marketing plan contains many marketing strategies across different channels. In that way, marketing strategies contribute to your overall marketing plan, working together to reach your company’s overarching business goals.

For example, imagine you’re about to launch a new software product and the goal of your marketing plan is to drive downloads. Your marketing plan could include marketing strategies like creating top-of-funnel blog content and launching a social media campaign. 

What are different types of marketing plans? 

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, what your timeline is, or which facet of marketing you’re driving, you’ll need to create a different type of marketing plan. Some different types of marketing plans include, but aren’t limited to:

General marketing plan: A general marketing plan is typically an annual or quarterly marketing plan that details the overarching marketing strategies for the period. This type of marketing plan outlines marketing goals, the company’s mission, buyer personas, unique selling propositions, and more. A general marketing plan lays the foundation for other, more specific marketing plans that an organization may employ. 

Product launch marketing plan: A product launch marketing plan is a step-by-step plan for marketing a new product or expanding into a new market. It helps you build awareness and interest by targeting the right audience, with the right messaging, in the right timeframe—so potential customers are ready to buy your new offering right away. Nailing your product launch marketing plan can reinforce your overall brand and fast-track sales. For a step-by-step framework to organize all the moving pieces of a launch, check out our product marketing launch template .

Paid marketing plan: This plan includes all the paid strategies in your marketing plan, like pay-per-click, paid social media advertising, native advertising, and display advertising. It’s especially important to do audience research prior to launching your paid marketing plan to ensure you’re maximizing ROI. Consult with content strategists to ensure your ads align with your buyer personas so you know you’re showing ads to the right people. 

Content marketing plan: A content marketing plan outlines the different content strategies and campaigns you’ll use to promote your product or service. When putting together a content marketing plan, start by identifying your audience. Then use market research tools to get the best insights into what topics your target audience is most interested in.

SEO marketing plan: Your SEO marketing plan should work directly alongside your content marketing plan as you chart content that’s designed to rank in search results. While your content marketing plan should include all types of content, your SEO marketing plan will cover the top-of-funnel content that drives new users to your site. Planning search engine-friendly content is only one step in your SEO marketing plan. You’ll also need to include link-building and technical aspects in order to ensure your site and content are as optimized as possible.

Social media marketing plan: This plan will highlight the marketing strategies you plan to accomplish on social media. Like in any general or digital marketing plan , your social media strategy should identify your ideal customer base and determine how they engage on different social media platforms. From there, you can cater your social media content to your target audience.  

Related resources

How Asana drives impactful product launches in 3 steps

How Asana streamlines strategic planning with work management

Write better AI prompts: A 4-sentence framework

What is content marketing? A complete guide

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3 Marketing Plan Examples To Inspire Your Business

With real-world marketing plan examples, learn how to outline your business’s promotional strategies and goals.

Picture this: You’ve developed What Was I Saying, a new smartphone app to help those who lose their train of thought mid-sentence. To prepare for launch and jumpstart your marketing efforts, you ask your team to line up social media influencers and buy ads; you also task the engineering team with submitting your product to the App Store.

But the launch date arrives and there aren’t any marketing campaigns to be found. The influencers are silent, the ads appear on the wrong sites, and the app isn’t available for download. It turns out the timeline was unclear and no one was on the same page during preparation. 

A formal timeline and clear marketing goals could have prevented this miscommunication. For businesses, detailed marketing plans provide the framework for communication and execution. 

Read on for some marketing plan examples to inspire building your own marketing plan.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a comprehensive outline of the promotional strategies and goals a business hopes to achieve within a specific timeframe. Marketing leaders build these plans and use them to communicate priorities and new initiatives to relevant team members. 

A successful marketing plan includes all of the marketing objectives your team aims to meet as well as the details your team needs to begin building marketing campaigns—including information about marketing budgets, marketing mix, and marketing channels. Depending on your goals, your plan may involve all available channels or focus on just a few. For example, if you run a clothing brand that partnered with an Instagram influencer on a capsule collection, you might prioritize a social media marketing plan to take advantage of your collaborator’s audience. 

These plans may also include timelines and spending priorities. A foundation of market research supports successful marketing plans, meaning demographic insights and competitive analysis shape the marketing planning process.

Marketing strategies vs.marketing plans

While both marketing strategies and marketing plans are necessary to meet key performance indicators (KPIs), the two are not the same. 

• Marketing strategy: the overall efforts you take to position your business, wherein the marketing goals you set ladder up to company-wide initiatives.
• Marketing plan: the specific steps you’ll take to achieve your business objectives within a specific timeframe.

For example, to increase traffic to your ecommerce site, your marketing strategy might be to run ads on social media platforms where your content has performed well organically. Your marketing plan would include the steps needed to bring that social media campaign to life—including a paid marketing plan for when to run ads and for how long.

3 marketing plan examples

Great jones.

A comprehensive marketing plan includes research, goals, and an overview of the company’s newest marketing initiatives. Marketing plans typically follow a standard structure, but their contents are unique to each company. Consider the following examples to see how several Shopify merchants created plans to support their own business goals:

Known for its colorful enamel cookware, Shopify merchant Great Jones launched its first product line in 2018. As a new, rapidly growing company, the Great Jones team embraced experimentation and adaptation as core components of its marketing strategy. 

Great Jones CEO Sierra Tishgart explains that a detailed marketing plan helps the team focus its creative efforts: “It’s really helpful to have the structure of goals while also recognizing that we’re a young creative brand.”

Great Jones’s cast-iron Dutch ovens are designed to last a lifetime, but Sierra says this makes it difficult to attract repeat customers—once you’ve purchased one, you probably don’t need another. Recent customers represent a significant portion of the company’s email subscribers and social media followers, so the team adjusted its annual marketing plan to appeal to this audience by incorporating a gift-giving program. To support this marketing strategy, it implemented marketing tactics that added appropriate language to email copy and formed a partnership with the gift-giving platform Zola. It also added an option to include a personal note to the gift recipient. 

Key components of this successful marketing plan example

This creative marketing plan example was informed by the Great Jones team’s: 

• Deep understanding of their products and target audience
• Ability to identify the right marketing channels for their detailed marketing programs

Sabai 

Crafted in the US, Sabai is a modern, eco-friendly furniture retailer. Its founder and CEO, Phantila Phataraprasit, says consumer research helped her company craft a digital marketing strategy that resonated with its audience. Sabai’s team defines its target audience as “individuals who are passionate about sustainability and the well-being of our planet, particularly those juggling busy lives and family responsibilities.” 

Phantila emphasized Sabai’s commitment to understanding customers: “Data analytics is pivotal in shaping our marketing decisions. By continuously measuring web, email, and social media analytics on a monthly, weekly, quarterly, and yearly basis, we gain deep insights into our customers’ preferences and behaviors.”

Insights gained from customer data inspired Sabai to develop a new program called Repair Don’t Replace . “We meticulously considered every touchpoint to create a program that resonated with our audience’s commitment to sustainability and practicality,” Phantila says. Sabai designed the Repair Don’t Replace initiative to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability and deepen relationships with customers committed to an eco-friendly lifestyle.

This creative marketing plan example was informed by the Sabai team’s: 

• Nuanced insights into customer behavior via marketing data analytics
• Drive to stay true to the brand’s mission statement

ALOHA 

Plant-based protein bar brand ALOHA is committed to providing easy access to nutritious food. Its VP of brand and content, Julia Shapiro, described the competitive consumer packaged goods sector as one of the brand’s biggest challenges. The ALOHA team used in-depth market and competitive analysis to build an effective marketing plan that made the product stand out.

“In a rapidly changing category, research allows us to keep an ear to the ground, tracking shopping, eating, and media consumption habits,” Julia says. 

The ALOHA team used multiple market research techniques in its competitive analysis—including customer surveys, category surveys, and focus groups —to sharpen its assessment of the competitive landscape. 

“We conduct[ed] primary research of the broader category to gain a better understanding of the different shopper segments and how and where we might reach them,” Julia adds. “This allowed us to learn things we wouldn’t otherwise learn through our own shoppers, helping to lay out a path for growth and expansion.” 

To complete its research, the marketing team conducted a SWOT analysis , which focused on the business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. “Our SWOT helped us to better understand the options shoppers are faced with and why they might choose one brand over another, including ours,” Julia says.

Combining the insights from these market research efforts helped the team develop a differentiation strategy to market its new product. “The recent launch of our Paʻakai bar is a great example of a campaign success story,” Julia says. “The Paʻakai is our second special edition bar and was created using ingredients from local farms in Hawaiʻi, including macadamia nuts and 100% pure Hawaiian sea salt. Ten percent of proceeds from this bar also goes to our local non-profit partner, to help fund education programs in Hawaiʻi. This bar represents what people have come to expect from ALOHA: providing healthy food with top-quality ingredients while using business as a force for good.” 

• Market research tactics
• SWOT analysis 

💡Ready to create a marketing plan for your business? Download a free marketing plan template to get started today. 

Marketing plan example FAQ

What is the difference between a marketing plan and a business plan.

Marketing plans outline a business’s goals and different marketing strategies for product promotion. Marketing teams use them to make decisions and plan marketing activities. Business plans , on the other hand, cover the entire organization’s strategic direction. These plans include broad business strategy goals as well as product development programs and financial projections. Company leaders often present business plans to external stakeholders and investors.

What makes a good and effective marketing plan?

A winning marketing plan provides all the information your team needs to start promoting your product. Effective plans establish clear marketing goals and provide the steps to follow to achieve them. The best examples include specific success metrics that derive from a solid foundation of consumer and market research.

How do you prepare a marketing plan?

To create a marketing plan, start by researching your target market. Select a set of specific, measurable goals that support your overall business initiatives. Determine the digital marketing mix you will use to achieve your goals and write out an implementation plan. To jumpstart the process, consider reviewing a sample marketing plan or downloading a free marketing plan template .

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How to Write a Marketing Plan

By Joe Weller | March 28, 2024

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A  marketing plan is a guide for achieving marketing initiatives on a set timeline. It includes analysis of a company's target audience, competitors, and market sector. Teams can build an organized strategy with that information to reach their goals.  

Inside this article you’ll find a detailed, step-by-step guide to writing a marketing plan, with a free, downloadable  marketing starter kit for beginners .

A  marketing plan includes analysis of the target audience, the competitors, and the market so that teams can determine the best strategy for achieving their goals. The plan’s length and detail depend on the company's size and the scope of the marketing project. A marketing plan is useful for all types of marketing, including digital, social media, new product, small business, B2C, and B2B. Follow the steps below to write a comprehensive marketing plan. 

1. Prepare for Success 

Before you begin writing your marketing plan, set yourself up for success by conducting thorough market research and assembling a team with diverse skills in marketing strategy, content creation, digital marketing, and data analysis. Be sure to consult all your team members as you progress through these steps. It might also be helpful to assign leaders to complete different sections of the plan, depending on their areas of expertise. For example, you might assign the market analysis section to a team member with strong analytical skills and experience in data analysis.  

2. Use a Marketing Plan Template

Download a free  marketing plan template  to ensure consistency and thoroughness in your final marketing plan.

For more template options, see this collection of  free marketing plan templates and examples.

3. Identify Your Target Customers

To identify target customers for your marketing plan, collect information about their location, demographics (such as age, gender, and income), interests, values, and purchasing behaviors. This knowledge enables you to focus your marketing goals and tactics to meet their specific needs and preferences.

A  customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer that provides valuable insights for strategic decision-making. Use one of these  customer persona templates  to craft a detailed profile of your ideal customer.   

4. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is an important part of any marketing plan, because it helps identify a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to the market environment. To start, divide a page into four quadrants and label each as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Next, brainstorm with your team to fill in each section. Be as honest and specific as possible, considering factors such as market trends, competition, and your own resources and capabilities. This information will allow the team to capitalize on strengths, prepare for challenges, and make sound strategic decisions throughout the marketing plan. 

See this collection of  marketing plan SWOT analysis templates  for additional guidance.   

5. Conduct a Market Analysis 

A  market analysis is an assessment of a market's size, growth, trends, customer segments, and competitor dynamics. Include it in your marketing plan to provide critical insights for strategic decision-making, helping to tailor products to customer needs, differentiate from competitors, and identify new opportunities. 

To conduct a market analysis for your marketing plan, determine each of the following factors:    

• Market Size: This is the total potential sales that a particular product or service can achieve within a defined market. Determine the market size by estimating the number of potential buyers for a particular service and multiplying that by the estimated number of purchases over a specific timeframe. (Number of Target Customers) x (Number of Purchases in a Given Time) = Market Size Imagine your company sells wireless headphones, and you estimate that the average consumer purchases a new pair every two years. If your market includes 1 million target customers, and assuming each customer buys one pair of headphones every two years, the calculation for annual market size would be as follows: (1 million target customers) x (0.5 purchases per year) = 500,000 pairs of wireless headphones per year   
• Market Growth Rate:  This measures the change in a market’s size over a specific time period and is typically expressed as a percentage. To determine the market growth rate, use the following formula: [(Current Market Size − Previous Market Size​) ÷ Previous Market Size] × 100% = Growth Rate For example, if the market for wireless headphones was worth $1 billion last year and is worth $1.1 billion this year, the market growth rate would be as follows: [($1.1 Billion – $1 Billion) ÷  $1 Billion] x 100% = 10%  

Market Share:  This is the percentage of total sales in an industry generated by a particular company over a period of time. It provides a benchmark for assessing performance relative to competitors. Use this formula for calculating market share: (Company’s Revenue ÷ Total Industry Revenue) x 100% = Market Share  

Tip:  Keep in mind that the market size, share, and growth rate are all estimates. It’s impossible to be exact. To obtain the most accurate numbers, review the latest industry reports and seek insight from experts.  

• Market Demand:  This is the amount of a product or service a consumer is willing to purchase and how much they are willing to pay for it. To determine market demand in a market analysis, begin by conducting comprehensive research on consumer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns related to your product or service. Use tools such as surveys, SEO analytics, and interviews to gather data on potential customer interest and willingness to pay, and analyze competitor pricing and offerings.  
• Market Trends:  This is the growth or decline direction of a product or service’s price over a specific timeframe. To identify a market trend, monitor industry developments, consumer behavior, and technological advancements over time. Review industry reports and expert analyses to understand broader market movements and future projections. Summarize these observations and include them in your plan to highlight the direction in which the market is heading.        

Market Segments:  The broader market includes specific groups, categorized by shared characteristics. Generally, there are four types of market segments: geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral. In your marketing plan, detail how you'll target each segment by adapting your strategies to their unique characteristics. This targeted approach ensures more effective engagement with each segment.   

• Competitor Analysis:  A competitor analysis involves examining your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, market positioning, product offerings, and marketing strategies. Describe how you'll conduct a comprehensive evaluation of key competitors by analyzing their market share, pricing, distribution channels, and promotional tactics. For more guidance, try downloading this competitor analysis template. Use it to identify areas where your rivals succeed and why. Their strengths indicate areas for improvement, while their weaknesses indicate opportunities.  

6. List Your SMART Goals 

Include SMART goals in your marketing plan to ensure that objectives are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound, providing a clear direction for strategic actions and performance evaluation. Start by identifying key performance areas that align with your overall business strategy. Then, for each goal, apply the SMART framework. 

Here are two examples of SMART marketing goals:   

• By Q4 end, increase search results page (SERP) position from 14th to the top three for keywords pertaining to our brand and lead to more organic traffic. 
• Increase social media following, reach, and engagement by 25 percent in six months and 50 percent in one year.

Learn more about SMART goals and find a customizable  SMART goals worksheet  in this comprehensive  guide to writing SMART goals . 

7. Create a Marketing Strategy

A  marketing strategy is the plan for achieving your SMART goals.   

“A marketing plan should include strategic and tactical elements,” says Gayle Kalvert, Founder and CEO at  Creo Collective , a full-service marketing agency. “From a strategic standpoint, it is critical that the marketing plan aligns to the overall goals of the organization. Tactically, what initiatives will the marketing team execute, and why? Tactics with no strategy lead to spotty results and poor-quality leads.”

Use one of these  marketing strategy templates to get started. A successful marketing strategy will include the following elements: 

7a. Customer Buying Cycle

The  customer buying cycle is the path a potential customer follows from first having exposure to a product or service to becoming an advocate for it. Understanding this process allows marketers to effectively target communications and strategies at each stage in their marketing plan. 

Pro Tip: “Consider your persona’s buyer's journey and ensure marketing has a role at each stage of the journey, especially after the close,” says Kalvert. “That is when customers can become advocates, sources of referral, and great subjects for marketing content for future buyers.”

7b. Unique Selling Proposition

A  unique selling proposition (USP) is a specific benefit or advantage that sets your product or service apart from the competitors. By including a USP in a marketing plan, you help ensure that the team communicates why customers should choose your offering over others. 

For example, Google’s USP is its powerful and accurate search algorithm that delivers relevant search results faster and more efficiently than its competitors.

7c. Branding 

Branding is the development of a unique identity, image, and experience for a company. Marketers convey a brand through messaging, tone, logo, colors, and web design. The marketing strategy needs to align with the company’s brand in order to maintain consistency in messaging and experience, which ultimately builds customer trust.

7d. Marketing Mix A marketing mix refers to the set of actions that a company takes to promote its brand or product in the market, typically encapsulated by the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. Go through each of these steps when including the marketing mix in your strategy:  

• Product: Describe the product and the problem it solves for your target customers. What makes your product or service different from the competition? Why is it special? 
• Price: Explain how much your target customer is willing to pay for the product or service based on its real and perceived value. What do your competitors charge for a similar product? Will you run any seasonal promotions or discounts? 
• Place:  Describe where your product or service will be available for purchase by your target customers. Will you sell it online, through retail partners, or both? How will you manage logistics and supply chain to ensure your product is accessible to your target market?
• Promotion:  Detail the strategies you will use to communicate your product’s value to consumers. This includes advertising, public relations, social media marketing, email campaigns, sales promotions, and direct marketing tactics.    

7e. Channels 

Identify the specific mediums and platforms — or  channels — where you’ll share your message to your target audience. These should include distribution channels, communication channels, and engagement channels. 

As you list them, explain how they will be used to effectively reach and engage with your target audience. For example, if you’re marketing a new fitness app, one distribution channel would be a direct download from the App Store to reach fitness enthusiasts directly on their smartphones. An engagement channel could be an in-app community feature for users where they can share progress.

Here is a brief list of popular marketing channels:  

• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Website marketing

7f. Tactics Tactics are the specific actions you will take to reach the goals outlined in your strategy. They cover everything from the creation and distribution of marketing materials to the scheduling of campaigns to the platforms used for advertising and engagement.  Detail the specific actions and tools you will use to execute your marketing strategy, along with timelines, responsibilities, and budget allocations for each activity. This includes specifying the exact steps for product promotion, customer engagement, content creation, digital marketing efforts, and any other methods chosen to reach and convert your target audience. “Equally as important as using data is to build in time and resources to be flexible,” says Kalvert. “The marketing landscape is evolving at such a rapid pace. Tactics that worked last year may not work this year. Be open to experimenting with new tactics and adjusting your approach based on feedback and results.”

8. Determine the Budget 

Start by estimating the costs associated with each tactic and channel outlined in your strategy, taking into account factors such as content creation, platform fees, and personnel costs. Next, prioritize spending based on the expected ROI for each tactic. Finally, document the budget in a clear, detailed format within your marketing plan, including an itemized list of costs for each tactic, total expenditure, and a contingency fund.

For more resources and help estimating marketing project costs, take a look at this collection of helpful free  marketing plan budget templates . 

9. Create a Calendar

Create a calendar to schedule and track deliverables. Include time for brainstorming, planning, executing, and analyzing results. List objectives, start dates, end dates, due dates, and responsible parties. Keep the calendar in a central location so that team members can easily access it.

10. List Marketing Tools and Technology

List any marketing tools or technologies your team will use to help achieve their goals. These can include email marketing software, blogging software, social media management software, or any other programs you plan to use.

11. Identify Metrics and KPIs

Identify the metrics for measuring and tracking your marketing goals. Metrics and KPIs eliminate ambiguity so that you can accurately measure progress. Select indicators that directly reflect the success of your marketing objectives, such as conversion rates, website traffic, lead generation, and customer acquisition costs.

12. Write an Executive Summary

Once you’ve completed all the sections in your marketing plan document, return to the first section to write the executive summary. Completing this section last ensures that you have a thorough understanding of all key elements before summarizing them. 

Concisely highlight the main objectives, target market, and key strategies of the plan, providing a snapshot of the market analysis and expected outcomes. Outline the budget, resources required, and the metrics for measuring success. This section serves as a compelling overview, enticing stakeholders to delve into the plan.

For more detailed information on executive summaries, see this guide to  writing an effective executive summary.  You can also download a helpful template from this collection of  free executive summary templates

Marketing Starter Kit for Beginners

Download Marketing Starter Kit for Beginners

Get everything you need for creating a marketing plan with this free, downloadable marketing plan starter kit. The kit includes an executive summary template, a customer persona worksheet, a SWOT analysis template, a competitor analysis template, a SMART goals worksheet, a marketing strategy template, and a calendar template with a budget tracker, all in one easy-to-download file.

In this kit, you’ll find the following:  

• An  executive summary template  for Microsoft Word to help you introduce the content of your marketing plan.    
• A  customer persona worksheet  for Microsoft Word to collect information about your ideal customer.  
• A  SWOT analysis template for Microsoft Word to guide strategic decision-making based on the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 
• A  competitor analysis template  for Microsoft Word to help you compare and evaluate your competitors. 
• A  SMART goals worksheet  for Microsoft Word to ensure each marketing objective follows SMART guidelines. 
• A  marketing strategy template  for Microsoft Word to outline the plan for achieving your goals. 
• A  calendar template with budget tracker  for Excel where you can organize, track, and manage marketing deliverables and their costs. 
• A  marketing plan template for Microsoft Word  to ensure consistency and thoroughness in your final marketing plan.

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Marketing is an often misunderstood profession. Peers often stereotype marketing with massive budgets, loosey-goosey timelines, haphazard tactics, high-profile influencers, and Snapchat filters. In reality, modern marketing plans are more complex and orchestrated than a Premier League-winning football team.

Businesses have big goals to hit and fine margins to walk—and they need realistic, yet imaginative, marketing plans to make it happen. Sure, bigger companies can spend all willy-nilly hiring Taylor Swift for a commercial op and dropping a quarter million on Facebook advertising, but small businesses and startups have to get downright strategic with every dollar they spend.

If your business is trying to stretch every penny, you’ve come to the right place. This article will show you how to create a marketing plan in 2024 that actually works with a down-to-earth budget. We’ve included step-by-step actions, outlines, examples, and more to give you everything you need to take an idea to the market with laser precision.

Table of Contents

What is a marketing plan?

How to create a marketing plan

Marketing plan template

Marketing plan example

Marketing Plan FAQs

What Is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a documented roadmap for how you plan to drive awareness, sales, signups, attendance, or other marketing initiatives. It outlines your KPIs, budget, and timeline, dictating everything from the critical milestones to the nitty-gritty to-do items.

Marketing plans come in all shapes and sizes. You could build an overarching marketing plan to document and guide your entire department’s annual goals and strategies for the upcoming year. Or you might create a marketing plan detailing the launch strategy for the brand-new product release coming out next quarter. Big plans can even include small plans, just like an adorable collection of Russian nesting dolls.

Plans can be short, long, fat, or thin—just remember what your plan is trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to pitch an idea to a team of venture capitalists or a local bank, you might need a chunky document with accompanying spreadsheets and financial figures. However, if you’re trying to communicate the plan to your marketing team leads, you’ll want to skip straight to the point with tactics, deadlines, and deliverables.

Regardless of your use case, the next section will give you the building blocks you need to create a marketing plan that works.

How to Create a Marketing Plan

This section will show you the 7-step process to creating a marketing plan. Plans are fluid and versatile, so we don’t recommend filling out one of these with pen and paper—get your eraser ready because a marketing plan is never perfect from the get-go.

Here’s an overview of the 7-step process:

• Establish Your Marketing Goal
• Identify Your Audience and Competitors
• Set Your Marketing Budget
• Determine Your Deadline(s)
• Pick Your Marketing Channels and Tactics
• Outline the To-Do List and Make Assignments
• Track Performance and Review Analytics

Don’t worry too much about making it all nice and pretty right now. Later, you can use our provided marketing outline to copy, paste, and format a more articulated version for widespread distribution. For now, just focus on hashing out each section and answering the thought-provoking questions.

1. Establish Your Marketing Goal

Define exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to drive more sales? How much? What about recurring customers? How many? Do you need to increase brand awareness? To whom and by how much?

Work out the details of what you want to accomplish, why, and how you’re going to measure it. Establish your KPIs early on to measure the success of your marketing campaign. You’ll refer to these numbers throughout the rest of your marketing plan, so get specific.

For example, how many website visitors you’re trying to drive will affect your marketing budget, deadlines, and tactics. And if you’re targeting a specific demographic, you may need to engage different marketing teams to use the appropriate channels and messaging.

Fine-tune your marketing goal so that you can communicate it simply in a single sentence. For example: “The goal is to drive 25,000 key decision-makers to the new product page by the end of October with a limited marketing budget of $75,000.”

2. Identify Your Audience and Competitors

Explain who this campaign is targeting. If you’ve already built out your buyer personas, you’ll just plug in the persona appropriate to this campaign. However, if this is your first time thinking long and hard about your target audience, really get to know the person you’re marketing to.

Depending on your product, industry, and market, you’ll want to know demographics like:

• Marital status

These details help you identify a broad audience, but you’ll want to narrow it down with psychographics.

Psychographics dig deeper . They cover your audience’s:

• Influencers
• Shopping behaviors

Demographics explain the “who,” while psychographics explain the “why.”

Think about if you were trying to sell a baseball glove. How you market that glove is going to be very different depending on the buyer. Are your messaging and channels targeting a college athlete, recreational youngster, mom, dad, or low-income family? It’s hard to know what to say and how to say it unless you know who you’re talking to.

Don’t just gloss over this section. Without a target audience, you’ll be blindly throwing darts at a board—sure, some plans might work out, but it’ll come down less to strategy and more to sheer luck. A target audience and replicable formula make your success a science and not a game of Russian roulette.

Once you’ve identified your audience, you need to figure out who’s also targeted the same people. Competition research is a way to understand who you are up against for eyeballs, SEO rankings, and influence, but it also can serve as an opportunity to fill gaps in our needs that your competitors are missing.

One easy way to do this is to look at comment sections or reviews of similar companies in your industry. Look for:

• Frequent complaints about product design.
• Consistent issues with customer service.
• Ads or branding language that falls flat.
• If the competitor hasn’t made a product their customers are asking for.

By identifying your competitor’s weaknesses or gaps their missing with their customers, you’ll have a treasure trove of marketing copy to use in order to differentiate your business from the pack.

3. Set Your Marketing Budget

Marketing plans need budget constraints. Without a cap, plans could hypothetically include:

• 60-second Super Bowl commercial
• Cristiano Ronaldo as a celebrity endorser
• Billboard advertisements along the entirety of Route 66

For most startups, that’s just not a possibility.

And it’s not where the magic happens. Powerful marketing plans turn tiny marketing budgets into impressive ROI. They prioritize the right channels, messaging, and tactics to stretch every dollar to the max.

Decide beforehand how much budget you’ll need to allocate to meet the goals you set in Step 1. When push comes to shove, you may need to throw additional money at the campaign later to get it across the finish line, but stay strong and do your best to create a marketing plan that works with the budget constraints.

Tight on budget but full on creativity? Check out our Small Business Marketing Guide: From Scratch to Success .

4. Determine Your Deadline(s)

Deadlines create the boundaries to your marketing campaign—you can’t have a plan without them. No deadlines mean there’s a never-ending period to achieve your objective, and it’s probably not a good idea to have a 20-year free pass to accomplish that sales goal you set.

Set your deadline. Be realistic, but also be ambitious. The faster you achieve this goal, the faster you can move on to the next one—and each progressive goal should be moving your business forward.

Establish the final deadline for achieving your primary KPI. Then, set the necessary milestones along the journey. For example, you might set milestones for launching different aspects of your campaign, such as hosting 4 webinars, publishing 10 supporting blog posts, or earning a callout in 2 prime news outlets.

Finally, set the start date for when you’ll need to get the ball rolling to meet your deadlines. Don’t assume it’s ASAP—you might have a few weeks to get your ducks in a row instead of immediately heading off into a chaotic marketing battle.

5. Pick Your Marketing Channels and Tactics

This is arguably the funnest part of creating a marketing plan. This is the step where you get to choose the channels, tactics, and deliverables. The right channels and tactics will vary depending on your audience and product or service, but here are the most popular ones to consider:

• Email Marketing: Email marketing is one of the tried-and-true tactics of the digital marketing world. It generates an average ROI of $40 for every $1 invested —you can’t get much more bang for your buck than that. (Check out our complete email masterclass to learn how to conquer this lucrative channel.)
• Social Media Marketing: Whether you’re running organic strategies or targeted paid campaigns , social media marketing is an excellent modern-day tactic for reaching consumers where they’re most comfortable: Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, or TikTok.
• PPC Marketing: Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing lets you run advertising campaigns on search engine pages and other websites across the internet. It’s a competitive way to get your content in front of the right eyeballs.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing paired with a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is a long-term tactic that can drive organic traffic (read: free) to your website for years to come.

And do you know what all these channels have in common? They each give you the ability to monitor your results and track your progress to prove if a channel is worth your time and money. Unlike traditional outbound advertising and its estimated impressions and influence, you know exactly what you’re getting with these digital marketing strategies.

6. Outline the To-Do List and Make Assignments

Here’s where you get into the nitty-gritty of your marketing plan. Step 6 is where you’ll outline everything that needs to get done:

• Launch meeting
• Recurring meetings and syncs
• Creative assets
• Promotional channels
• Post-mortems

And that’s just the start. Outline everything that needs to happen to make your plan a reality. Once you know what needs to happen, it’s time to start making assignments. Someone needs to be responsible for every deliverable.

Here’s where you may run into roadblocks. You may discover that your creative team is overwhelmed and won’t be able to handle the creative requests until later, or you may find that other email campaigns or social media advertisements are the top priority.

If that’s the case, go back to Step 4 to revisit your timeline. Make adjustments to ensure there’s bandwidth available to make your marketing plan a reality.

7. Track Performance and Review Analytics

No marketing plan will go off without a hitch. That’s why you need your ear to the ground to understand what’s working. Through analytic tools, you can understand if your marketing plan’s target audience, messaging, or creative needs adjusting. Thankfully, most digital tactics allow you to do this on the fly.

Make sure you familiarize yourself with these basic marketing analytics tools:

• Facebook Ads Manager
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Semrush or Ahrefs for SEO

For more on analytics, read our marketing metrics guide .

Marketing Plan Template (Copy/Paste)

Marketing Plan Template: [Name of Project]

Marketing Plan Example (Filled Out)

Here’s a fake content marketing plan example for a fictitious shoe company.

Marketing Plan Template: [Project Zeus Running Collection]

Marketing Goal Drive $200,000 in sales for the new Zeus running collection within the first 4 months of launch day.

Target Audience The primary audience is 35 to 50-year-old male recreational runners who tend to run 30-40 miles a week at an average page of 8:00-10:00 minutes per mile. They’re not overly competitive, but they like to race 5K and 10K races occasionally throughout the year and are always trying to beat their personal best. Many have experienced mild injuries over the last few years that the Zeus Running Collection can help alleviate.

Marketing Budget We have a budget of $40,000 for the initial launch period. If we can prove out the Zeus Running Collection, we’ll allocate additional budget after the first 4 months.

• Launch Day: June 1
• Marketing Assets Ready to Go: May 28
• Pre-Launch Teaser: May 24
• Creative Assets Finished: May 21
• Product Beta Tester Reviews Submitted: May 10
• Written Content Creation Period: April 12 – May 7
• Enlist Beta Testers: April 12
• Project Kickoff Meeting: April 5

Marketing Tactics

• Social Media Marketing: Target runners on Instagram and Facebook with paid ads featuring our endorsed runner racing in the shoe.
• Email Marketing: Email existing customers with a 15% off discount code on the new Zeus Running Collection. Email prospects with a link to the product breakdown page with a code for free shipping.

Responsibilities and Assignments

• Lizzy K: Creative assets
• Mark B: Blog post announcement + product page
• Spencer S: Beta tester outreach
• Larry G: Email and social media marketing campaigns
• Carly M: Project manager

Do I need to write a marketing plan for everything?

As stated earlier, marketing plans can come in all shapes and sizes. But that doesn't mean you need one for every single Facebook ad or whitepaper your team creates. The best marketing plans serve as a source of truth for your team to reach a goal. Within the marketing plan, you should have enough wiggle room to adjust your strategy and tactics. Marketing is an art and science, so there are bound to be surprises once you start executing your plan.

How do I know if my marketing plan is a success?

One of the most common mistakes marketers make is creating a seemingly perfect marketing plan and then going off script as soon as there's a sign of trouble or distraction. Using the SMART goal method (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound) is a simple way to ensure your marketing plan is applicable. Every marketing plan should be a success, whether you hit your goal or not, because you'll learn something new about your customer, tactics, and business throughout the process.

Who should make a marketing plan?

If you're reading this article, ideally you. A marketing manager or marketing team member typically writes marketing plans, but marketing strategy should start at an enterprise level. The more people understand the marketing plan for your business, the more you can work together (not in silos) to achieve a common goal. You'll see this happen in larger organizations where the marketing team works plan that the product or sales team have no idea about.

Plan It Out—Make It Happen

Every great campaign starts with an even better plan. Don’t leave your startup’s success up to chance—give it all the thought and attention you can.

With the right plan in place, you won’t be crossing your fingers on launch day or during the quarterly review. You’ll be sitting confidently, knowing that everything is running according to plan.

Need a high-level plan for your startup? We got you covered with our foundr+. Get access for $1. .

About Jesse Sumrak

Jesse Sumrak is a writing zealot focused on creating killer content. He’s spent almost a decade writing about startup, marketing, and entrepreneurship topics, having built and sold his own post-apocalyptic fitness bootstrapped business. A writer by day and a peak bagger by night (and early early morning), you can usually find Jesse preparing for the apocalypse on a precipitous peak somewhere in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

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10 Marketing Plan Examples to Inspire Your Campaigns

What do hiking a trail, driving to a friend’s house, and executing marketing campaigns all have in common? Each requires you to closely follow directions.

Directions are a critical part of our daily life. Used correctly, they can guide decision-making processes, make labor more efficient, and get where you want to go as quickly as possible. 

But failing to keep track of directions could cost you — and not just gas money. When it comes to marketing strategies, not having a clear goal tanks web traffic, dissipates brand interest, and costs companies across the United States a whopping $400 billion a year.

Designing a marketing plan is certainly no easy task, but it can be made easier with best practices, strategic tips, and concrete examples from successful businesses all over the world.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic document that acts as a guide for marketing campaigns and strategies. These critical road maps detail where you are, where you’re going, and how you plan to get there.

The average marketing plan consists of seven major sections:

• Writing an executive summary
• Discussing the mission statement
• Listing marketing objectives
• Performing a SWOT analysis
• Completing market research
• Designing a market strategy
• Determining a budget

The more detailed a marketing plan is, the more efficient it will be at accomplishing its goals. 

As you might imagine, marketers who bother to write a concrete marketing plan enjoy several benefits :

• Organized marketers have a 674% higher chance of reporting success
• Marketers who set goals are 377% more successful than those who don’t

It’s clear that a successful marketing plan opens pathways to other forms of business success — although the process is underutilized at best. More than three out of four small business owners lack an overarching marketing plan if they don’t have a clear path of growth. Creating a holistic marketing plan is absolutely necessary to scale brands at any level of development.

10 marketing plan examples from every industry

It’s much simpler to design a plan of action when the groundwork already exists. Below are 10 marketing plans sourced from real companies and brands around the world, highlighting unique approaches to researching, crafting and implementing a marketing strategy . 

1. Contently

Popular SaaS Contently developed a visual marketing plan for developing future campaigns. The strategy depicts its plan in a “waterfall” format, with goals blending into methods of application that eventually lead to success metrics. Although far more casual than other examples on this list, the work provides an excellent overview of a marketing plan’s necessary components.

2. Visit Baton Rouge

The Baton Rouge area of Louisiana generates millions of dollars every year from tourism alone. The Visit Baton Rouge marketing plan was born from a need to better position the area and create long-term strategies for generating interest. This 38-page document goes into detail describing different destinations, events, and calendars, including recommended measurements for success.

Created by SaaS company HubSpot , this template includes a business summary, SWOT matrix, market strategy, budget, and other important aspects of a marketing plan. By filling it out, you can make informed decisions about your company’s positioning and your marketing in general.

4. Evernote

Evernote provides a comprehensive marketing plan template for businesses of any size. Create a plan that walks through overviews, timelines, research, personas, and all other elements of an airtight campaign. If desired, you can also implement this template into your Evernote account to start developing a marketing plan almost immediately.

5. University of Illinois

Even educational institutes need marketing plans. The University of Illinois created a very straightforward document that encapsulates its market context, research efforts, and current campaigns. Objectives and success metrics are completed in the third section, with about 40 pages overall. 

6. Monday.com

Monday.com is a project management platform providing in-house templates to all active users. This marketing plan offers various categories and subcategories that track project progress with data visualizations. Detailed objectives and KPIs can be identified in-app, including columns for a projected cost range.

Popular health and hygiene brand Lush released a comprehensive marketing plan walking through some products, positioning, and a marketing calendar for upcoming product releases. One of the highlights includes a detailed SWOT analysis with easy to read graphics. This is particularly helpful for brands in the personal care industry, among others.

8. Coca-Cola

Industry titan Coca-Cola released a strategy video that encompasses all seven elements of a holistic marketing plan. The proposal primarily explains the major content initiatives for the coming year, and focuses on how the brand’s initial ideas can be practically implemented into the existing strategy. 

9. Naperville Park District

Publicly funded recreational parks often have limited access to resources, which is why the Naperville Park District created a strategic marketing plan right at the beginning. This extremely detailed document walks through the company’s mission, situational analysis, strategy, and budget, on a micro-level.

10. Starbucks

Unlike the longform documents we’ve seen already, Starbucks takes a more concise approach. This six-page release details a strategy to elevate CX and brand ambassadors around the world. The marketing plan touches on individual strategies and tactics, as well as the methods used to ensure success. It’s important to note the detailed customer journey profiles that fit into a five-year strategy.

How to approach a marketing plan

Now that you know what a marketing plan looks like, it’s time to explore the initial stages of drafting and publishing your very first plan. Once you establish some basic starting points, a little research is all you need to get started.

Determine your goals

Directions simply don’t matter without an endpoint in mind. Craft some meaningful goals for your marketing campaign that envelop your brand’s values, objectives, and year-end plans. It’s best to use the SMART goal framework:

The more specific your goals are, the more effective your marketing plan will be.

Check your competitors

Staying abreast of your competitors and market share is critical in the early stages of a marketing plan. Using competitive analysis tools or an internal process, take some time to evaluate the approach that others are using — and how you can do better.

You might want to:

• Perform a competitive analysis
• Keep a close eye on industry news
• Browse competitor social media content

Keep in mind that it’s possible to hire freelancers to perform competitive analysis for you, depending on your needs and time constraints.

Identify your audience

Understanding your target market — including their goals, ages, values, and demographics — is the golden rule of marketing. This can be done several ways, either by using data, creating personas, or outlying features in a document.

It’s best to consider everything that may be relevant to your audience in the marketing plan, including how products can be positioned in a way that makes them relevant. For example, a customer with a degree in IT would be more interested in ads that speak to their experience and industry pain points.

If you don’t have a target audience in mind yet, consider using programs like Google Analytics or in-platform insights from Facebook to identify specific segments.

Craft final KPIs

The difference between a good marketing plan and a great marketing plan starts with key performance metrics (KPIs). These will be used to measure the effectiveness of your campaign and provide detailed information about what worked, what didn’t, and what you can change in the future.

Every marketing plan should rely on its own unique set of metrics, all fitted to individual needs. If you’re looking for specific examples, you might want to try:

• Raising the number of followers on a social media account
• Generating a certain amount of website leads 
• Achieving higher email open rates 

Keep in mind that your final metrics should adhere to the SMART method for best results.

Perform your revisions

The marketing plan is a living document and must be updated regularly to remain current. The average plan only has a shelf life of one to five years , on average, and should receive regular revisions in the meantime.

Take a closer look at your past goals, competitors, audience, and KPIs. Are any of these outdated or ill-aligned? What has changed for the company since its initial publication date? Make these adjustments accordingly (and hopefully with members of a team or committee).

Create marketing plans that guide your business well

It’s not enough to just write a marketing plan. In an increasingly competitive world of iron-clad strategies, marketing pros should take their time developing a plan that lasts. The above examples are a great place to start, especially as you craft an approach that is catered to your industry. 

Keep an eye on the growth of your business once your marketing plan hits the shelves. Continue to find new ways to optimize, refine, and otherwise make what you have even better than before. With an airtight marketing plan by your side, the possibilities are virtually limitless.

Want to learn more?

• How to Create a Killer Social Media Marketing Plan
• The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Influencer Marketing
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• Instagram Marketing Tips to Shoot Up Your Sales

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How to Write a Marketing Plan: A Comprehensive Guide [w/ Template]

Trying to market your business without a plan is a little like going on a road trip without GPS. You’ll end up somewhere, but it’s anyone’s guess where — and you might find yourself worse off than when you started.

Let’s not let that happen.

In this article, newly updated for 2023, we’ll give you all the information you need to write a marketing plan — plus a free template and planning worksheet you can use to help ensure that your business gets where it needs to go. We’ll be focusing on digital marketing, but the strategies and concepts can be expanded to encompass your entire marketing department.

9 Reasons You Need a Marketing Plan

For today’s marketers, creating an integrated marketing plan that includes paid digital marketing (PPC) , social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and SEO — all tenets of a strong inbound marketing strategy — is necessary in order to attract and convert new customers online.

Here are nine important benefits of creating a marketing plan:

• Goal Setting: A marketing plan will help your business define its marketing objectives and set measurable goals. It provides a clear roadmap of what you aim to achieve in terms of lead generation, sales, market share, brand awareness, customer acquisition, or other specific targets.
• Strategic Direction: A good marketing plan outlines the overall strategy and approach that your business will take to promote its products or services. It will help you identify your target audience, understand their needs and preferences, and develop strategies to effectively reach and engage them.
• Budgeting and Resource Allocation: A marketing plan assists in effectively allocating resources such as budget, personnel, and time. It will help your team prioritize marketing activities and distribute resources based on their importance and potential return on investment (ROI).
• Market Analysis: A marketing plan requires you to conduct thorough market research and analysis. This process will help you gain insights into the state of the market you’re in, including customer demographics, behavior, competitors, and industry trends.
• Competitive Advantage: When you create a marketing plan, you’ll define and leverage your unique selling proposition (USP) or competitive advantage. This will empower you to position your products or services effectively in the market and differentiate yourself from competitors, leading to a stronger market presence.
• Consistency and Integration: A marketing plan ensures consistency in branding, messaging, and customer experience across various marketing channels and touchpoints.
• Risk Mitigation: Developing a marketing plan will help your business anticipate potential risks and challenges in the market. By analyzing market conditions, competitive threats, and changing customer needs, you will be able to proactively develop strategies to mitigate risks and adapt to market dynamics.
• Measurement and Evaluation: A marketing plan establishes key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. It provides a framework for tracking and evaluating marketing performance, enabling you to identify successful strategies, make data-driven decisions, and continuously improve your marketing efforts.
• Long-term Sustainability: A well-structured marketing plan paves the way to long-term growth and sustainability. It promotes a strategic mindset, encourages proactive marketing initiatives, and ensures that your business stays responsive to changing market conditions, customer demands, and emerging trends.

The steps you take today to create a functional and straight-forward marketing plan will lay the foundation for your year ahead, helping you to achieve measurable, quantifiable results.

Let’s take a look at how your marketing plan should be structured.

Marketing Plan Outline

Here are the 11 sections that should be in every digital marketing plan.

• Business Summary: Provide an overview of your business, including your headquarters, mission statement, and members of your marketing team.
• Executive Summary: Highlight key points of your marketing plan for easy reference.
• Business Goals: State what overarching business goals your marketing activities will support.
• Market Analysis : Provide information about the current state of the market as it pertains to your business. Include a SWOT analysis identifying your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Competitive Analysis : List your main competitors, along with relevant information about their brands and positions in the marketplace.
• Target Market: Include detailed buyer’s personas that cover the types of buyers you will be marketing to.
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Explain what sets you apart from the competition in a way that leads your audience to choose you over the others.
• Marketing Initiatives: Identify the major marketing initiatives or projects you will focus on in order to support your business’ overarching goals.
• Marketing Channels: Explain what channels you will use to launch your marketing initiatives.
• Measurements and KPIs: Detail how you’ll be tracking the progression of your marketing plan.
• Budget: How much money will the business allocate to the year’s marketing activities?

How to Create a Marketing Plan

Now that you know what to include in your marketing plan, let’s dive into the step-by-step process of creating one.

1. Write your business summary

In theory, this should be the easiest step in creating your marketing plan. That’s because everything this section contains pulls from information many companies already have documented, including creative marketing ideas . However, it’s not uncommon to discover some gaps when the time comes to sit down and start writing. Here is what you should include in your business summary:

• Company name
• Headquarters
• Brief overview of what market category your company is in and what products or services you provide
• Mission statement
• Marketing team members

Pretty straightforward — unless your company lacks a mission statement. If that’s you, now is the time to create one. Start with your business overview. That might look something like this example for a fictional company:

“Eco Eats manufactures 100% biodegradable, compostable disposable plates, cutlery, cups, and straws.”

Next, ask “why?” What is the purpose of your business? What problem are you trying to solve? What’s your vision for the future?

Once you have your “why,” move on to your “how.” What concrete actions is your company taking to achieve your purpose?

Put the two together, and you have a mission statement. Here’s an example mission statement for Eco Eats:

“At Eco Eats, our mission is to empower food service organizations to reduce their carbon footprint and contribute to the stewardship of our environment by providing a cost-effective alternative to single-use plastics.”

Your mission statement might be a little longer or a little shorter, but you should strive to make it as simple and easy-to-understand as possible.

2. Do your market research

In order to write an effective marketing plan, you need to understand the climate of the market you’re operating in. This includes the size of the market — dollars spent, quantity of products sold, and overall number of customers or consumers — as well as any trends and conditions that are affecting the market, for better or for worse. Even if you’ve done this sort of research before, you’ll need to refresh it yearly for your marketing plan.

Along with this general information, the Market Analysis section of your plan should include an analysis of your company’s current status in the market. To get there, you’ll include what’s known as a SWOT analysis, detailing your business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

A SWOT analysis is a standard component of any business or marketing plan. The SWOT analysis will help you understand what differentiates you from your competition and how you should position yourself in the market. It will also help you develop your messaging and your unique selling proposition. Brutal honesty is imperative for a truly insightful SWOT. Use bullets and aim for 4-5 in each section. Limiting your lists will help you to focus on the most critical points and help retain focus.

In addition to completing a SWOT for your overall marketing plan, it’s helpful to do a SWOT analysis for the different segments within your marketing plan.

For example, as we will discuss further down in this piece, content marketing, social media, and SEO will all be important parts of your overall inbound marketing plan and would benefit from SWOTs of their own.

3. Research the competition

In order to determine the likelihood of success and define your marketing strategy, you need to understand the competition. In the world of digital marketing , there are a handful of strategies that can be useful when researching competitors. Using email and social media while surveying the content landscape will give you an immense amount of knowledge about your industry.

Here are some quick tips to help you understand who you’re up against:

• Subscribe to receive your competitors’ emails.
• Follow your competitors on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and any other social media site where you can find them.
• Examine what content your competitors are creating — who it is aimed at, how often it’s produced, who is writing it, what the content topics are, etc.
• Use a tool like SpyFu to identify what keywords your competitors are ranking for organically and targeting with paid search advertising (PPC).

Here’s an example of some competitive research for our fictional company Eco Eats, showing the top performing paid search ads for a (real) company that produces plant-based food and beverage packaging. You can use research like this to inform your own paid search strategy.

It’s important to note that many companies have two different kinds of competitors: those you compete against for actual customers and digital marketing competitors. Digital marketing competitors are companies that target the same keywords and/or audience segments online. While you might not directly lose customers to these competitors, they can make it harder for you to meet your goals for website traffic, conversions, and online leads. Both types of competitors should be accounted for in the Competitive Analysis section of your marketing plan.

For more on digital marketing competitors, read up on Competitive Research in SEO from Moz .

4. Create buyer personas

When it comes to writing your digital marketing plan, creating buyer personas will help you understand:

• Who you are marketing to
• What their pain points are
• Where they spend time online
• And a number of other demographic traits

This information will help you personalize your marketing materials so they are targeted and highly relevant to your audience segments.

Remember: You aren’t trying to catch every fish in the sea. You’re only trying to catch the ones you want, the ones you are targeting because they have the strongest potential to turn into leads. Your net doesn’t need to be wide — it needs to be precise.

For more guidance on this step of creating your marketing plan, check out our guide to creating buyer personas .

5. Write your unique selling proposition (USP)

Now that you know all about the market, your competitors, and your buyers, it’s time to turn inward and create a USP. This section of your marketing plan defines what makes you different and better than your competition, and why your target audience should choose to buy from you. Knowing and communicating your USP is critical if you want to beat your competition and solidify your company’s value in the marketplace.

Like the rest of your marketing plan up to this point, your USP should be revisited at least once a year. What made you stand out when your business was founded may not hold the same value in today’s market.

For tips on formulating your USP, check out The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition .

6. Define your goals

If you’ve been following along since our marketing plan outline, you may have noticed that we skipped a few of the items on the list: the executive summary and the goals. That’s because, while the executive summary is the second section of your marketing plan, you can’t actually write it until you’ve created the rest of the plan. And it’s important to do the research steps we’ve already covered before you move on to setting goals.

Your goals should start with the high-level outcomes your business needs to achieve in order to support sustainable growth. In digital marketing terms, that usually means increasing online leads and/or sales by a certain percentage. You can then break those high-level goals down into sub-goals that will help ensure your overall success. For example, if you want to increase your leads, sub-goals might be:

• Increase website traffic by 50%
• Increase online conversion rate by 25%

Be sure not to confuse goals with tactics. If your goals are what you want to achieve (e.g. to increase traffic by 50%), your tactics are the steps you’ll take to reach your goals. Creating a content marketing calendar to rank organically for more high-value keywords is an example of a tactic that will help increase site traffic. Your tactical plan is the next step in writing your marketing plan.

7. Describe the initiatives and projects you’ll undertake to achieve your goals

We just gave one example of a tactical project you might include in your marketing plan — creating a content marketing calendar. To complete this step in writing your plan, you’ll examine each of your strategic goals and create your roadmap for how to get there. Other examples of digital marketing initiatives and projects that might be included in a marketing plan include:

• A website redesign to improve user experience (UX) and increase conversion rates
• A paid advertising (PPC) initiative to drive traffic, promote your content, and increase conversions
• An email lead nurture campaign to increase calls to your sales team

In your marketing plan, you should name each initiative or project along with a description of the steps you’ll take to complete it. Make sure to define what success looks like so your team has a clear destination in mind.

8. List your marketing channels

For each of your tactical projects or initiatives, provide information about where and how you’ll launch them. Some projects might have only one marketing channel associated with them — for example, email marketing. Others might have multiple channels. Examples of digital marketing channels include:

• Pages on your website
• Your website’s resource center
• Guest blogging
• Paid search advertising on Google, Bing, or other search engines
• Paid display advertising on Google’s display network
• YouTube videos and/or advertising
• Organic and/or paid social media

9. Create your plan for tracking, measuring, and reporting on success

Each of your marketing initiatives should be associated with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll track and report on in order to determine what’s working and what’s not. This is a critical component of your marketing plan. Here are some examples of KPIs you might want to report on:

• Email open rate, click rate, click-through rate, and response rate
• PPC cost per click, conversion rate, and leads and/or revenue generated
• Organic keyword rankings
• Website traffic by page
• Video engagement

When at all possible, set up full-funnel attribution for your initiatives so that you can track which interactions actually lead to increases in sales and revenue. In fact, even before you have implemented your strategy, you should be measuring to establish your baseline. What have you done in the past and what were the results? How can those strategies shift to improve ROI?

It’s important to note that you should plan on reporting on your KPIs at least monthly — and as often as weekly for rapidly changing metrics like PPC and email results. (It typically takes much longer for organic rankings to show results.) And don’t be afraid to change course based on what your reports tell you.

10. Set your budget

Beginning with your overall marketing budget, the next step in writing your marketing plan is to determine how much money to allocate to each marketing initiative and platform. Be sure you have enough available to achieve the results you want in each area. If you’re not sure what your marketing budget should be, you can benchmark against other businesses in your industry, or start from the very rough “rule of thumb” of spending 10% of your expected revenue on marketing — and then adjust for the realities of your business.

In general, your budget will depend on factors such as:

• Stage of development (start-ups may need to spend a higher percentage of their projected revenue on marketing than long-established businesses)
• Company revenue
• Overall expenses
• Brand awareness (the less people are aware, the more you’ll need to spend on marketing)
• Marketing goals and initiatives

Like your marketing plan as a whole, your budget should have some flexibility built into it in order to respond to what’s working throughout the year. For example, if your paid advertising campaigns are demonstrating strong, measurable increases in revenue, you’ll want to double down and increase your PPC budget accordingly. Or, on the other hand, you may realize that your budget for content marketing isn’t sufficient to get the results you want. You’ll either need to increase the budget or revise your content marketing strategy.

For more guidance, read our post on planning a marketing budget (with a handy template) .

11. Write your executive summary

Now that you’ve done all the hard work of researching and planning your marketing goals, initiatives, platforms, and budget, it’s time to sum it all up for easy reference. The executive summary is the second section of your marketing plan, and it is arguably one of the most important components.

That’s because the plan itself is a pretty lengthy document, and it’s going to be read by different people in different roles, from your CEO to your marketing agency partners to your investors, and so on. It’s important to give everyone an easy-to-understand overview to increase the chances that they’ll actually read the whole thing, and that they’ll understand the big picture when they do.

Your executive summary should be one or two pages long. Here’s what to include:

• Overview : Write a compelling introduction setting the stage for your marketing plan. Treat this section as a short, engaging narrative that tells the story of where your company stands, where it’s going in the next year, and what role marketing will play in that journey.
• Market Summary: Explain the main findings from your market analysis and competitive research.
• Customer Summary: List your different buyer persona types along with a summary of their buyer’s journey with respect to your company’s products and services. How do they become aware of the problems or pain points you solve? How do they go about researching solutions? How will you reach them, and why will they choose your brand over the competition?
• Budget Breakdown: Provide your overall marketing budget and a line-by-line breakdown by initiative.
• Goals and Strategies: Briefly summarize your marketing goals and the high-level strategies for achieving them.
• Conclusion: Wrap it up with a few sentences to encourage your audience to read the entire plan.

There is a lot that goes into creating a marketing plan. But when it’s done right, it will be the most valuable asset your marketing department has.

Download Our Free Marketing Plan Template

As we like to say at Vital, “Plan the work; work the plan.” To help get you started, we have included a marketing plan template so you can plan and track throughout the year.

At Vital we believe in digital marketing because we’ve seen the results first hand. It is how we market our business and how we market our clients’ businesses. If you would like help in developing your digital marketing plan, give us a shout .

Get The Marketing Plan Template

Fill out the form below to download this Word Document template so you can write the best marketing plan ever.

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How to Write a Marketing Plan (with Templates and Example)

Written by Dave Lavinsky

What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a roadmap that explains how your business will generate more leads and sales. It includes every key marketing strategy that will affect your marketing results from your brand positioning and pricing to your promotional efforts.

Download our Ultimate Marketing Plan Template here >

It’s important to remember that a marketing plan is not something you create in one sitting. This is an ongoing project that requires research, planning, and revision over time before it can truly be finalized.

Although creating a marketing plan can seem like a daunting task, it can actually be quite simple if you know what information should be included in your marketing plan template and where to find examples. Below you will learn everything you must include in your marketing plan so you can effectively grow your business.

What are the Key Components of a Traditional Marketing Plan?

For a comprehensive marketing plan, you should include the following 11 key components:

Executive Summary

Target market segments, unique selling proposition (usp), pricing and positioning strategy, distribution strategy, marketing materials, promotions strategy, digital marketing plan.

• Conversion, Referral and Retention Strategy

Financial Projections

Each of these sections is explained in detail below along with examples.

How to Write a Marketing Plan + Examples

The executive summary is the first section to appear and the last to be written in a marketing plan. The contents include a condensed version of all the findings of the rest of the marketing plan.

The executive summary may include:

• What does the marketing plan intend to accomplish? Why?
• Who handles the daily operations and execution of the marketing plan?
• How will you measure success to determine the effectiveness of the marketing plan?

Keep the executive summary brief and to the point so anyone who reads it immediately understands the salient points.

Marketing Plan Executive Summary Example

TechSmart is an electronics company that specializes in the production of quality products at reasonable prices. A unique selling point (USP) is that our quality products are competitively priced to allow our target market to be able to purchase the items they need without breaking their budget. After assessing my current distribution strategy, we will continue the development of more localized stores in order to cater to the high-earner segment of our market.

A more localized approach will also help support our business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy. We can work with various schools and universities to implement training measures that teach technicians the proper ways to use our products for a variety of applications. This is important because it will give us a larger market share by cementing ourselves as a go-to company for this segment, which in turn boosts sales overall.

After reviewing the insights from our research, we decided on some broad target markets based on income levels, age brackets, and other variables that might affect their spending power. To start, we want to focus primarily on B2C marketing strategies with these segments while sending out newsletters promoting upcoming products and discounts. In order to reach out to these new segments, we will need to promote our products and services based on the differentiation of their quality and affordability.

TechSmart plans to spend $10,000 a month on marketing activities in order to develop its business within the next six months. Currently, TechSmart has been operating on a small marketing budget while focusing more on its B2B marketing strategy, but it has achieved limited success with this approach. After assessing its current situation, TechSmart’s market research suggests the company needs to shift towards a more consumer-focused B2C marketing strategy in order to achieve growth and reach out to more potential clients that might be interested in purchasing its products or hiring its services.

In order to build awareness for our product line, we plan to launch large-scale online marketing campaigns as part of an integrated multimedia strategy as outlined in the Digital Marketing Plan section. This will allow us to target potential customers who might be interested in our products while promoting awareness of our brand through engaging social media outlets.

To determine success, the Marketing Team will measure whether or not our marketing plan is effective by tracking consumers who buy our products online through the company website; how much revenue was generated from each promotion; what percentage of users signed up for the mobile app, and any other relevant data that helps us track progress towards reaching our marketing goals. We will communicate our success to the C-suite at quarterly reports and work with them to track any changes in revenue from year to year.

To successfully market something you first need to analyze the market’s needs to figure out where the right opportunity exists. Unless you have this information, you will be shooting in the dark and your marketing ROI (return on investment) will suffer. So, start with a detailed analysis of your target customers and their wants and needs.

For example, if you are selling a teeth whitening product, you may identify your customers as single men aged 30 to 40, making between $50,000 and $60,000 per year, living in Manhattan, and own dogs.

What are their needs? In the above case, their primary need as related to your product could be to convey an attractive and professional appearance. Other needs for different products or services could include safety, convenience, ambiance, price, variety, and exclusivity. Finding out the key problems of your target audience will effectively direct all other marketing decisions.

For each customer segment, create a unique buyer persona that will help you develop the appropriate content marketing to speak to their unique needs. Buyer personas can help you sit in your customers’ shoes and understand their perspectives when it comes to buying products and services.

You also must note the 80/20 rule when creating your buyer persona. The 80/20 rule states that 20% of your customers will generate 80% of your revenue.

The point is this….clearly some people who buy from you will not fall neatly into the detailed description of your target customer. That’s ok. By focusing on marketing to and serving your core customer, you’ll get more of the 20% you want and thus much more “bang for your marketing buck.”

Marketing Plan Target Market Segments Example

TechSmart is an electronics company that specializes in the production of quality products at reasonable prices. The TechSmart target market consists of two segments: high-earners with children, and busy parents.

Our primary market is high-earners with children. These customers are parents who are either working or staying at home, and they have money to spend on their children. They are making roughly $150,000-250,000 annually and they want to provide the best for their kids. They also care about quality when it comes to electronics. When these parents shop, they will carefully analyze what needs to be purchased for their child in order to provide the best quality of life.

The high-earners will be the ones looking at the offer of complementary products like headphones, tablets, and games which can be used with our products. They also will be more likely to sign up for the warranty through the mobile app so they get access to freebie offers through holidays like Christmas and Independence Day.

The busy parents segment of TechSmart’s target market typically exhibit the following shopping behaviors:

• They prioritize a good bargain over trendy styles.
• They want to spend as little time as possible at the store.
• They shop for children and themselves.
• They use the internet for product comparison, but will still go to stores to buy items from brands they trust.

Your product and/or service’s USP helps put them ahead of similar offerings made by your competitors – think of it as your competitive advantage. Therefore, it is vital that you create a strong and memorable USP that will make your product and/or service more desirable. A USP could be physical in nature like a product’s form, quality, durability, design, or features. It could also be the additional services you provide when a customer buys your product like delivery, customer service, or installation. Your target market research will come in handy here as it will tell you exactly the kind of products and services your target group needs and desires the most.

Here are some more USP examples used by local businesses:

• We are the only car repair shop that will buy your car if you are not 100 percent satisfied (USP of customer service)
• Delivered in 30 minutes or less (USP of speed)
• Our recipe is so secret, only three people in the world know it (USP of exclusivity)

If you are having trouble identifying your business’s USP, complete a SWOT Analysis to identify your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will help you determine the best strategy to capitalize on your strengths and opportunities while you address the weaknesses and threats. Use the SWOT Analysis template below to help you.

Continuing with our TechSmart example below, their USP focuses on the quality of their products.

Marketing Plan Unique Selling Proposition Example

The TechSmart unique selling point (USP) focuses on our quality products that are competitively priced to allow our target market to be able to purchase the items they need without breaking their budget.

Your pricing strategy attempts to fulfill one or more of the following marketing goals: improve sales, market share, or profits, get ahead of a competitor or create barriers for any new entrants. Focus on what your most pertinent business objectives are and formulate your prices accordingly.

Furthermore, the strength of your product’s USP also influences your pricing flexibility. More unique products can legitimately quote higher prices, while a product with a more generic USP will have a hard time doing so.

Pricing strategy can also influence the value of your business from a buyer or investor’s perspective. Companies that are able to secure ongoing revenue streams in the form of subscriptions or monthly recurring payments tend to generate higher valuations as there is greater revenue certainty in these models.

Positioning your product and/or service a certain way also will determine its perception among your customer base. For example: Even though both Hondas and Mercedes cars can safely and effectively transport you from point A to point B, Hondas are positioned as value purchases and therefore priced lower than more exclusive Mercedes vehicles.

Marketing Plan Pricing & Positioning Strategy Example

The main concern of my high-income earners is that they want to provide the best for their children and that means quality consumer products. But we know that it can be difficult to make high-quality products and still make them affordable. We want our customers to feel comfortable spending their money on our products, but we also care about providing quality.

Your distribution strategy details how customers will buy from you. It could include a brick-and-mortar store, an e-commerce site, wholesale distributors, retail stores, mail catalogs, or some combination of the above. Base your decision on customer research. That is, find the methods or places your customers find most convenient to buy from and offer your product through those marketing channels.

For example, consider the California cannabis brand Dosist. Dosist distributes through a highly curated network of partner boutique dispensaries as well as through two flagship brick-and-mortar stores. Through its flagship stores, it provides consumers an in-person way to experience the brand. Through its retail partnerships, it gleans wider distribution than it could in a single location.

Marketing Plan Distribution Strategy Example

TechSmart will continue identifying new target market opportunities within our region and build out additional localized stores in order to expand our distribution to our target audience in other high-income areas of the region.

To further distribute our products, we will partner with several retail stores. Location number one is close to a high-income area and is in the mall. Location number two is located near schools that house young parents who are also students at the university across the street.

Offers like buy-one-get-one-free, discounts, and guarantees are classic offers that when leveraged correctly attract new customers and maintain the loyalty of existing customers. Ideally, you can position offers in a way that makes them a win-win for your business and customers.

For example, Package Free Shop, an e-commerce store dedicated to providing reusable and earth-friendly everyday products, regularly offers discounts on products if you sign up for a subscription to those products. This offer is attractive to the consumer as they can get the same product for less and don’t have to remember to reorder. It’s attractive to Package Free Shop because it provides more certainty around cash flow on a monthly basis than one-off purchases.

You can use different marketing methods like the official website, mail catalogs, or brochures to help spread offers, identify what offers and materials might resonate most with your target audience, and spend your resources accordingly.

Marketing Plan Offers Example

TechSmart will run various offers that will allow customers to obtain a set of complementary products if they purchase the specific product mentioned in the offer. Offers will apply only in-store.

Each offer will vary in terms of the purchased product and the complementary set offered. The offer will be valid until it reaches the available quantity provided to each store or until a specific deadline is reached, whichever comes first. The details of each promotional offer will be detailed in the weekly e-newsletter, on our website, and through promotional print materials in-store.

Your marketing assets include the visual and tactical representation of your brand. These items include your logo and other visual identity elements; your website and social media accounts; signage, brochures, or other print collateral; and case studies and testimonials.

Having brand guidelines in place ensures that the look and feel of all assets are consistent between the materials themselves and with your overall brand. This consistency means customers will recognize and feel familiar with your brand, whether they are walking into your brick-and-mortar store, browsing your mobile app, or using your product.

Sample Brand Guidelines

Marketing Plan Marketing Materials Example

All TechSmart marketing assets will utilize our Brand Guidelines. Methods of marketing may include TV commercials, a Social Media Marketing Strategy – organic and paid advertising, promotional flyers for in-store shoppers, also available digitally on our website, and billboards.

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Your promotions strategy will determine how you communicate with your customers about your product and/or service. Your strategy could include advertisements on TV, billboards, radio, catalogs, product placements in movies, and more. Your choice of promotional channels must be influenced by who your target market is and how it likes to consume information. For instance, if your target customer base is adolescents then taking out an ad in a newspaper would largely be ineffective.

When detailing your promotions strategy, be sure to include a description of each tactic, the estimated cost involved, and how / when you will evaluate ROI and determine whether to modify the tactic or switch course entirely.

Marketing Plan Promotions Example

TechSmart’s promotional strategy targets high-income earners who want quality products for their children, but at the same time not break the bank. TechSmart will offer various promotions so that people can get a sense of what they are buying before they buy it, and free events where consumers can play with the products before they buy them. These events will be promoted through social media, primarily Facebook and Instagram, and through banners and/or pop-ups on our website.

Online marketing should be a central component of most any business’ marketing plan today as customers of all types increasingly spend time online transacting or evaluating potential transactions. There are several components to a successful online marketing strategy: your website, social media accounts, and supporting paid and organic web traffic efforts.

Your website is an extension of your business and should be consistent with the spirit of your brand and easy to interact with. A clunky, cluttered website will quickly turn off customers, who seldom give second chances when it’s as easy as a click of a button to move onto a better option.

Maintaining an active social media presence or leveraging influencers in your space to promote your product enables you to reach broad swaths of prospective customers. Your accounts must be engaging and attractive to your target market as well as content-specific to the platform itself.

For example, your LinkedIn account might include postings on a recent fundraise or supplier partnership, whereas your Instagram account might include beautiful, high-quality photos of your product.

These core pieces of online real estate are then supported by your paid and organic online advertising efforts. By including content-rich blog posts, articles or videos that include your industry’s key terms or words, you will boost your organic visibility in customers’ search results. Similarly, by investing in paid advertising you ensure that you appear in those same searches, but as an advertised result.

Marketing Plan Digital Marketing Strategy Example

TechSmart will use digital marketing to increase its brand awareness in the competitive marketplace. Digital marketing is an inexpensive way to advertise to a large number of potential customers in many different regions with minimal resources.

Generally, TechSmart will use Facebook and Instagram for social media posts about new products or store events. We will also run retargeting campaigns for website visitors and other engaged consumers. We are also considering launching a YouTube channel for tutorials on how to use various types of computer accessories, electronic devices, gaming platforms, and/or popular games.

We will also use Google Adwords to promote shopping ads when people are searching for similar items in our targeted market.

TechSmart will also participate in Influencer Marketing by working with bloggers with large followings in the target market who would be willing to provide reviews or advertise our products on their channels.

Conversion, Referral, and Retention Strategy

In this section of your marketing plan, you should detail each of your customer pathways and the resulting conversion from each path. For certain pathways (like an e-commerce site) this data will be more readily trackable and easier to discern. For other more qualitative marketing efforts (such as the purchase of an ad in a magazine), it may be more difficult to quantify your conversion results.

Think through and identify how you might improve your conversions across various pathways. For example, would showcasing the glowing reviews and ratings of past customers increase your conversion rate on your e-commerce site? Would placing small, trial-size products right next to the cash register in your brick-and-mortar store tick up your average purchase size?

Also, think through in this section what you can do to increase the conversions of referrals from past customers. Can you incentivize your happiest customers to leave you a great online review, gift a sample of one of your products to a friend or recommend you reach out to a family member who might benefit from your services?

All of the efforts outlined above will ensure you retain your best existing customers and build loyalty with them.

Marketing Plan Conversion, Referral, and Retention Strategy Example

To increase our conversion of new customers, we will add a function to the website where people can sign up for emails about upcoming promotions and store events. We can also add links to shop in popular social media marketing channels like Facebook and Instagram. People who visit the site without buying anything will be able to chat with one of our associates if they have any questions or concerns about his/her purchase.

We will also promote samples of games and apps so kids can try out before they buy them, and free events where parents can play with the products their children want before they buy them at home. To encourage past customers to refer friends and family members, we will offer discounts and exclusive offers for repeat, as well as publish reviews from happy customers on our website and social media.

To increase conversions of people who visit the site but do not buy anything initially, we will highlight products that are currently on sale or offer special discounts for first-time customers. We will also create content that explains how to use common devices like laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This will increase our conversion rates by ensuring people are familiar with the products they want to buy before arriving on site.

Our referral program can offer discounts or free samples of products if customers recommend us to friends and family who make a purchase within 24 hours. We can also advertise special deals like time-sensitive giveaways or contests for referrals through social media marketing on Instagram and Facebook. People who already shop with us frequently are likely to be more receptive in encouraging their friends and family members to do so as well.

We will contact past customers via email periodically asking them how they enjoyed their experience at the store, what they thought about specific items they purchased, or how they heard about our store in the past. If they mention that they found out about us through another customer, we will ask them who it was and thank them for their referral so we can send a small gift or coupon to the person they recommended.

This strategy ensures that we continue to offer competitive prices on our products while also increasing people’s trust in our company by implementing new policies and procedures across all pathways.

Every well-researched marketing plan must include projections that will estimate the overall cost of engaging in certain marketing strategies including the results of their implementation in terms of new sales, profits, and customers. Even though these will just be estimates they will still highlight which strategies have the potential to gross the highest ROI.

Your projections need to be revisited time and time again to assess how well the marketing plan has been implemented and what can be done better. Analyzing metrics like cost per sale, average ticket price and retention rates will help you understand which marketing tactics are working and which need to be revisited.

Marketing Plan Financial Projections Example

New Customers:

We project to acquire 160 new customers in Year 1 at a cost of $6,400. This means that the cost per customer acquisition is roughly $40.00.

Existing Customers:

We have 30 clients who are extremely valuable and spend more than once every two months on average. These loyal customers generate an average profit of $2,080 each time they purchase from TechSmart for an ROI of 5%. The total amount projected for existing customers is 120 transactions worth $24,000 or 4% of our revenue goal. With these calculations, it should be clear that investing resources into acquiring new users will result in better returns than capitalizing on people who have already purchased from us but don’t come back often. Furthermore, spending money to keep people returning for future buys is more effective than trying to convince the same person to purchase again after they have already done so once before.

Using these estimates, TechSmart will generate $138,000 in revenue in Year 1 with an average ticket price of $1,350. This equates to around 160 customers purchasing one item each or 320 transactions for a total of $138,000.

Marketing Plan Template

Below is a free strategic marketing plan template to use. Simply answer the key questions below to complete your plan:

• Our target customers are:
• Our unique selling proposition is:
• Our pricing and positioning strategy is:
• Our distribution strategy includes:
• The key offers we will use to attract customers include:
• The marketing materials we will use are:
• The promotional methods we will use to attract customers include:
• Our online marketing strategy includes:
• The strategies we will use to increase our customer conversion rates, referrals and customer retention include:
• Our key financial projections from implementing our marketing plan include:

Marketing Plan FAQs

What are the different formats used for a marketing plan.

Marketing plans can be made using one of four formats: the traditional marketing plan, the digital marketing plan template, the marketing mix, and the product launch.

When it comes to choosing a format, consider what factors are most important for your business. There is no right answer here as you'll have to choose what's best for you. If you want help, use the information below as a guide:

• The traditional marketing plan provides a comprehensive marketing strategy based on your business goals. This type of marketing plan involves research and analysis of the target market segments, unique selling proposition, pricing and positioning strategy, distribution and promotions strategies, and more. If you are seeking to really grow your business, it is helpful to provide this type of plan to provide the details of how you will bring your target audience to your business to generate more revenue. 
• The digital marketing plan focuses on planning steps and milestones to achieve success in your online marketing. Note that even if you are solely marketing online, there are many exercises, like improving your unique selling proposition, that are still critical. With a digital marketing plan template, you'll break your marketing plan down into these essential steps: objective, strategy, tactics, and measurement.
• The marketing mix plan focuses on the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, promotion, and place. If your business sales are driven by physical products or services, this is likely the best format for you. However, if you depend more on media and informational products (like a blog or an eBook), then this type of plan won't be as helpful for you.
• The product marketing plan focuses on launching and/or growing a single product. While the product will be unique, it generally will be branded under your company name so there are elements of the traditional marketing plan the are not required in developing it.

How Do You Develop a Marketing Plan?

First, choose a format for your marketing plan. Please refer to the 1st FAQ question for more information regarding marketing plan formats.

Now that you've chosen a format, it's time to start filling in the blanks. Keep in mind, though, that like any other type of writing (or planning for this matter), your document should be organized and easy to follow. 

To make sure your marketing plan is clear and concise:

• Create an outline . Using your chosen format as a guide, start creating an outline of the sections and subsections you'll include in your marketing plan.
• Fill out each section . Next, fill in the subsections composing each section of your plan. Keep them short and concise so you don't overwhelm yourself or your readers.
• Include examples . Use any relevant data or case studies you've collected to provide examples of strategies and tactics that will work with your business. It can be helpful to include screenshots for social media posts, images of ads, or infographics in sections where they're most relevant.
• Designate a timeframe . For each section, also decide on a timeframe for when you'll achieve the goals outlined for that particular section.
• Revise and update . No document is ever truly complete so it's important to remember to update your marketing plan over time. The work involved in planning, developing, and revising your marketing plan can be daunting at times but it will pay off in the long run when you have a thorough, detailed marketing strategy.

What Should Be Included in the Different Marketing Plan Formats?

You'll need to include different content in your marketing plan depending on which format you choose. When it comes to the digital marketing plan template, for example, there are three main topics that should be covered:

• Digital Marketing Strategy & Overview   - this section provides an overall view of how you're planning to use digital marketing in your campaigns. It includes information like how many channels (and which ones) you will use and why what budget has been set aside for marketing activities and your marketing objectives. This part will act as a roadmap for your digital campaign so make sure it's detailed enough - but not too long!
• Business Market Analysis - this section will help potential investors understand your business and its context. Here you'll include information about your competition, market trends, and industry growth. You'll also mention the opportunities and threats that your company faces so that viewers can get a sense of how it will operate in the future.
• Marketing Strategy - this section is where you explain your specific marketing strategy such as who's involved, what needs to be done and when, etc. Remember to break down each step into smaller chunks so that marketing activities are easier to follow throughout the year or quarter.

When writing content for any other format, simply remember: Keep it brief - no one likes reading long documents! Below we give examples of marketing plan templates for different types of marketing objectives, which should provide some guidance on the content.

Product Marketing Plan Template

• Company introduction & summary of company history (include any key milestones)
• Product description, including how it's different from other similar products offered by your competition
• Product usage statistics and potential markets
• Overview of the marketing strategy, including campaign timeline and key milestones. Also include information about product promotion strategy, pricing strategy, and distribution strategy.
• Summary of expected outcomes for the proposed marketing plan. Include financial projections where possible.
• References to product launch marketing plan template that the writer has used as reference

Marketing Mix Marketing Plan Template

• Description of brands & products within market category (include which brands you're using as competitive references)
• Description of marketing strategy, including marketing objectives and key action steps/tasks to achieve those objectives
• References to marketing mix example that the writer has used as reference

Digital Marketing Plan Marketing Plan Template

• The business overview, including a summary of your digital activities and achievements
• Digital marketing overview, including a description of how you use digital technologies in your business and a time frame for future plans
• References to a digital marketing plan that the writer has used as reference

What is the Difference Between a Marketing Plan and a Business Plan?

The main difference between a marketing plan and business plan is that a marketing plan is focused on customer satisfaction, while the business plan describes how the business will achieve its goals. Other differences include the marketing plan's focus on consumer demand, thorough market research and forecasting, while the business plan also includes financials and production details.

Other Helpful Business Plan Articles & Templates

• Design for Business
• Most Recent
• Presentations
• Infographics
• Data Visualizations
• Forms and Surveys
• Video & Animation
• Case Studies
• Digital Marketing
• Design Inspiration
• Visual Thinking
• Product Updates
• Visme Webinars
• Artificial Intelligence

Create a Marketing Plan [+20 Free Templates]

Written by: Mahnoor Sheikh

In this article, you'll find a step-by-step guide on how to create a  marketing plan that will work for almost every kind of business. We've also included 20+ free marketing plan templates throughout the post to help you get started on the right foot.

Here's a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit marketing plan templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more below:

Want to skip the tutorial? Create your marketing plan right away with Visme. Use ready-made marketing plan templates , download them as a PDF or share online.

Better yet, use Visme's AI Document Generator to create a fully designed marketing plan that aligns with your content. Prompt the generator with what you’re looking for, choose one of the styles and let the AI do its magic. Afterward, you can customize and finalize as you wish.

Table of Contents

What is a marketing plan, types of marketing plans, 10 marketing plan templates to get you started, why your business needs a marketing plan, how to create a marketing plan, marketing plan examples, marketing plan faqs.

A marketing plan is a roadmap that helps you set goals, understand your target audience and optimize the impact of your marketing campaigns.

• There are several types of marketing plans depending on the objective. Some examples include social media marketing, influencer marketing, video marketing, and email marketing.
• Your business needs a marketing plan to understand your business, align marketing goals with business goals, ensure everyone is on the same page, stay focused on what’s important and make better decisions.
• Learn how to develop a marketing plan in 7 steps, starting with the executive summary and ending with a digital document ready to share with a live Visme link.
• Discover 20 ready-to-use templates for different marketing plan types and get started straight away.

In simple words, it helps you get a clearer view of the what, why and how of all your marketing activities.

A good marketing plan also helps you communicate the “big” strategy and the different tactics involved to your marketing team . Last but not least, it lets you track the success of your campaigns.

A marketing plan should ideally include:

• Your long-term and short-term marketing goals
• A description of your target audience or buyer persona
• One or more high-level marketing strategies and tactics

Take a look at this one-page marketing plan template as an example.

Create your Marketing Plan with this easy-to-edit template! Edit and Download

If your plan is more detailed, you can also consider including:

• An overview of the current market situation
• Key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Any budget or financial considerations
• An execution timeline or roadmap

A marketing plan is usually presented as a PDF document, but you can also whip up a more creative version of it. For example, you can create an infographic , presentation and even an interactive web page to share your plan.

Or you can create a single-page marketing plan similar to the one above.

Scroll down to the end of this post to access seven full marketing plan templates.

Marketing Plan vs. Business Plan

Marketing plans and business plans are both essential pieces of business strategy, but their purpose is different. The terms are often used interchangeably or together: marketing business plan. But each plan is different and here's what sets them apart.

Business plans cover a business's overall strategy, from the branding strategy to the company-wide marketing strategies. A marketing plan solely concentrates on a specific marketing strategy or a branch of the overall department.

For example, one marketing plan can be for digital marketing strategies, while another can be for billboards. Likewise, a marketing plan can be for a single campaign, covering all marketing channels.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy and a marketing plan are key pieces in the company’s marketing puzzle. However, they serve different purposes.

A marketing strategy is the overall framework guiding a company's marketing efforts. It outlines how your organization will position itself in the market, target ideal customers, and create value for them. A marketing strategy is often long-term and forms the foundation for all your marketing activities.

A marketing plan is a detailed roadmap for organizing, executing and tracking your marketing strategy within a specific timeframe. It provides a step-by-step guide for achieving specific objectives, such as increasing sales, improving brand awareness, or entering new markets.

Simply put, a marketing plan translates your strategy into actionable steps with timelines for implementation and metrics for measuring success.

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Just as there are several types of marketing strategies, there are numerous types of marketing plans. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plan

Quarterly and annual marketing plans are high-level plans for all the marketing activities that will happen in the next quarter or year. From this overarching plan, your team will create smaller, more detailed plans according to specific strategies. These could be daily, weekly or monthly marketing plans.

Social Media Marketing Plan

Social media marketing plans highlight the goal and objective of a brand’s activities on social media that are geared toward marketing. This plan includes campaign information, repurposing guidelines across social media channels and who’s in the social media team.

Content Marketing Plan

A content marketing plan outlines all the content pillars for the brand and what content types need to be created for each pillar. Any content marketing strategies planned out for the brand’s content are detailed in the plan, along with a roadmap and goals.

New Product Launch Plan

In a new product launch plan, the pages lay out all the steps toward a successful launch. Separated into pre-launch, launch and post-launch, the different teams will know what they need to do to complete the plan’s objectives.

Growth Marketing Plan

Growth marketing plans are specifically geared toward brand growth. This plan document lays out all the strategies to undertake in order to grow the brand name online, locally or some other way.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing plans concentrate on outlining all steps to implement an influencer strategy. Sections include the list of potential or chosen influencers and what will be asked and expected of them to reach the plan’s goals.

Market Penetration Marketing Plan

A market penetration marketing plan highlights all the activities involved in marketing existing products to existing customers.

This marketing strategy is considered the most popular in business models. Some examples include discounts on favorite products or new features and updates.

Market Development Marketing Plan

In market development plans, existing products are marketed to new customers and niches. These strategies focus on business objectives like developing distribution channels and increasing brand awareness.

Product/Service Development Marketing Plan

Product development plans outline the activities dealing with marketing new products to existing customers. These marketing plans include examples such as product launches and market insertion plans.

Diversification Marketing Plan

In diversification, marketing plans focus on strategies to launch and promote new products or services to new markets and customers. These marketing plans are on the ambitious side.

Need help putting together a full marketing plan?

Here is our handpicked collection of 10 marketing plan templates for various types of businesses.

Pick the one that best fits your industry and start customizing it in the Visme editor right away. Replace the colors, fonts, text, images, icons and more with a few clicks. Use the dynamic fields option to edit repeating content across slides and create more efficient templates for your team with custom dynamic fields.

You can also tap into a free library of stock photos and add animated characters, illustrations and gestures for advanced customization.

If you’re still on the fence about using Visme for your marketing plans, look at what one of our users has to say:

“I feel that for anyone who wants to improve efficiency and effectiveness at the workplace, VISME gives you the extra edge to take things forward.

It's an apt tool for quickly converting your thought process into a unique communication.” - Autumn | Finance Manager

1. Real Estate Marketing Plan Template

This tailored marketing plan template is perfect for all kinds of real estate and property businesses, complete with a professional “About” section and SWOT analysis.

It has a modern feel to it with a clean layout and corporate color scheme. You can easily switch it out for your own brand colors if you want.

2. Social Media Marketing Plan Template

A good social media strategy needs a marketing plan of its own, which is why this template is a must-have for any business trying to win at this game.

Customize this social media marketing plan template to lay out your goals for the next year or quarter, and outline the key points of your strategy for each social channel.

Add a dose of interactivity by creating a clickable menu or building an interactive table of contents. Interactive plans make a positive impression on team members and stakeholders, improving work satisfaction and productivity.

3. Digital Marketing Plan Template

Create your Marketing Plan with this easy-to-edit template. Edit and Download

Create an actionable marketing plan covering your digital channels with this detailed template.

This digital marketing plan has a classy design and layout, and features key headings like an executive summary, a SWOT analysis, key performance indicators and even a nice table of contents.

4. Product Marketing Plan Template

Creating an effective product marketing plan requires in-depth research of your target market, company strengths and weaknesses, as well as an effective marketing plan design.

This product marketing plan template covers all those basics, along with a detailed budget planner that you can edit with your own financial data.

5. Personal Marketing Plan Template

Hiring someone to help build a powerful personal brand?

This personal marketing plan example is perfect for that purpose. It’s a simple, three-page document with a professional resume detailing skills and experience, followed by a goals page.

6. Marketing Plan Presentation Template

This marketing plan presentation template is a great way to share your marketing goals, SWOT, strategy, timeline, deliverables and more with your team and the management.

You can easily get the slides printed later and share the copies with your team. Edit this marketing plan presentation online in Visme and create a slideshow that's powerful and effective.

7. Retail Marketing Plan Presentation Template

Here is another marketing plan presentation template you can use. This presentation template is especially relevant and useful if you're in the retail business.

Customize this marketing plan template online and download it in PDF or PowerPoint format, or save the slides separately in image format. You can also present this presentation online using a link — no downloads needed!

8. Restaurant Marketing Plan Template

Designing a marketing plan doesn’t have to be daunting. With this template, you can create a comprehensive marketing plan for your food business, whether it’s a small cafe, a big fancy restaurant or a fast food joint.

This marketing plan example features stock photos of food that you can replace with your own. Additionally, you can edit any images with the AI Edit Tools to remove backgrounds or unwanted objects or upscale/unblur less than perfect photos.

This template also has a versatile design that can be tailored to your own brand style and even an entirely different industry.

9. Content Marketing Plan Template

Content is a key element of inbound marketing. This content marketing plan template is carefully designed to match the needs of SaaS and other businesses that want to focus on taking their content strategy to the next level.

If your marketing goals are to drive traffic, generate leads and grow sales through publishing insightful content , this marketing plan will help you organize your editorial calendar.

Take advantage of the fact that you’re already logged in to Visme, and use the resources at your disposal to execute a content marketing plan.

Design blog graphics, infographic visuals, social media content and videos right inside your Visme editor. Share and schedule posts to social media directly from the integrated social media calendar .

10. Marketing Plan Infographic Template

If you're not looking to create a detailed or formal document with several pages, this to-the-point marketing plan infographic template is a great pick.

It's a quick way to share the marketing plan for a one-off project and contains all the necessary details.

I’ve already mentioned how a marketing plan can help you better understand your company’s marketing goals and how to achieve them, but that’s not where the benefits end.

A well-researched marketing plan can help you:

• Understand your business. Conducting thorough research on current market conditions and where your company stands can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business, as well as new opportunities.
• Align marketing goals with business goals. Without a plan, it can be easy to lose your sense of direction. A marketing plan helps you ensure that your marketing goals are aligned with the vision, mission statement and goals of your business.
• Ensure everyone is on the same page. Having a working document of your marketing makes it easier for not just your team, but also the entire company to work together towards a common goal.
• Stay focused on what’s important. A marketing plan is a constant reminder of your goals and strategies, which keeps you from getting sidetracked.
• Make better decisions. Planning ahead of time can prevent you from making hasty decisions when difficult situations arise.

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There’s no one way of creating a marketing plan, but there are some key components that should go inside a winning one. Follow the steps below to create an effective marketing plan.

1. Start with an executive summary.

The executive summary usually goes at the beginning of your marketing plan. It’s basically a short summary or brief overview of your company and the key takeaways from the entire marketing plan.

Here’s an executive summary template you can edit and use for your own business.

The template above is a great example of an executive summary that highlights the key function of a business and the purpose of its marketing plan.

You can also include company achievements and future plans for your business in your summary.

Remember, your executive summary should be concise and to the point. Instead of boring your readers to sleep, it should grab their attention and get them excited about the rest of the plan.

2. State your company’s mission, vision and values.

Before you dive into all the marketing stuff, it’s a good idea to revisit your company’s values, vision and mission. This helps put all the information inside your marketing plan into perspective.

It answers the question of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Here’s a neat mission, vision and values template to edit and use.

For anyone who reads your marketing plan, this section is important to educate them about the ultimate aim of your business so they can make better sense of your marketing goals, activities and future plans.

3. Identify the market and competition.

The next step is to build a marketing plan is back it up with solid research.

This is often achieved by analyzing your current market situation with a market analysis , by studying your competition and most importantly, looking into your own company’s strengths and weaknesses.

Here’s a market share template that can help you visualize that information and share it with your colleagues and stakeholders.

You can customize this template according to your own brand colors and input your own information. Use it on its own as part of a marketing plan or in a report or presentation .

Here’s another cool design to help you present your market research. Use this SWOT analysis template to highlight your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Instead of adding a boring table that no one wants to read, use a well-designed SWOT like the one above to draw attention to your research.

Here's another worksheet-style SWOT analysis template that you can print out and fill, or edit using Visme before adding to your marketing plan document or presentation.

You can also conduct a SWOT analysis of your competitors, which takes us to another key component of your market research — the competitor analysis .

Studying your competition is crucial to the success of your business. You need to know what they’re doing, what’s working for them and how you can do it better.

Here are a few things to research about your competitors:

• Their marketing and leadership team
• Their growth and financials
• Their best-selling products or services
• Their top-performing blog posts (use a tool like Ahrefs or SiteChecker to do this)
• Their video marketing strategy
• Their social media marketing strategy

Here's a competitive analysis template you can use and add to your marketing plan.

A template like the one above can help you organize and visualize important information about your competitors. In turn, this can help you identify opportunities and set goals.

4. Define your target customer.

Differentiating the target audience and the target market will help you better understand the position of your business within the market. Therefore, it’s important to identify who your buyer or ideal customer is so you can create more informed and tailored marketing strategies.

Naturally, the target customer for every business is different. But the goal is the same — to increase customer awareness.

You may also have more than one kind of customer. For example, a clothing store could be making products for both teens and older women at the same time.

Check out this target audience template to visualize your various customer segments. Use it to better understand your potential customers' attitudes and habits.

You can edit this template and use it as part of your marketing plan layout or presentation. It’s a great way to present the different types of your audience in a way that’s easy to understand.

The pie chart helps identify which chunk makes the bigger part of your customer base so you can focus most of your marketing efforts in that area.

If you’re looking for a more creative approach, take a look at the buyer persona template below.

This infographic template is a fun way to visualize your buyer’s demographic details, habits and goals, i.e.,  whether they're interested in online learning options like digital marketing courses or if they prefer in-person.

Another cool way to create a customer persona is to design it like a resume . This is useful for adding more information in one page without cluttering up the design.

Here’s a resume-style customer persona template you can edit.

This type of buyer persona design makes use of icons and data widgets , like progress bars.

In the end, the goal of creating a buyer persona is to better organize and understand key information about your customer. Use the template that works best for your business.

5. Outline your marketing goals.

In this part of the marketing plan, you need to specify what you aim to achieve.

Outline your marketing goals and objectives, and make sure you use actual numbers instead of writing vague statements.

For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic , mention the exact target so you can track to see if you achieved it or not.

Here’s a marketing goals template you can use as part of your marketing plan.

Remember to create SMART goals for your marketing plan and strategy. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

In the template above, notice how the target is defined as a percentage. You can also add a deadline to your marketing goal to make it time-bound.

If you want to share your marketing goals in an infographic format, here’s another template you can edit and use for your own company.

The template above is a more detailed goals infographic with three different phases, which makes it ideal for SaaS companies and mobile apps.

6. Present your marketing strategy.

Now comes the good stuff. In this step, write down one or more marketing strategies and the tactics to execute for each one. Make sure you include:

• How to do it
• The channels to use

This is best presented visually so the entire team can understand each step. You can divide your activities into stages, and present them using a marketing strategy template like the one below.

Another way to present your marketing strategy is by attaching deadlines to it. This can be easily done using a timeline or a Gantt chart .

Another way to present your marketing strategy is with the help of a roadmap. A roadmap outlines the tactics involved in your overall marketing strategy, and can be designed to look similar to a Gantt chart.

Here's a marketing roadmap template you can use for your own business.

If you want to do things differently, you can also use an infographic to visualize your marketing strategy.

An infographic is eye-catching and can be added to any of your presentations and reports. You can even share it on its own with your marketing team or other colleagues.

Here’s a marketing infographic template that divides your execution strategy into four phases.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

Another way to visualize your marketing strategy is with the help of a mind map. Mind maps are great for providing your team with an overview of the different elements that are involved in your marketing strategy.

Here's a mind map template that shows how this can be done for a Twitter content marketing strategy.

You can easily build mind maps using our mind map maker .

Keep in mind that your marketing strategy should be actionable and detailed. Explain each step clearly and don’t leave out any information just for the sake of design.

7. Define your marketing budget.

Last but not least, detail your marketing budget considerations in your marketing plan.

This is important so you don’t lose sight of the financial aspect of things during execution and implementation. After all, marketing is costly and there are tons of hidden expenses involved.  You need a budget template to lay out your financial projections.

Here’s an editable marketing budget template you can use.

Including a detailed marketing budget also helps in hiring the right staff and choosing between paid resources so you don’t exceed a certain amount.

You’re probably wondering: What does a marketing plan look like? In this section, we’ll share 5 real-life examples of marketing plans from companies.

1. Visit Baton Rouge

Image Source

This marketing plan is an example of how to create a well-structured and eye-catching marketing plan. The plan has a sophisticated design adorned with captivating images and a rich blend of bright colors.

The proposed marketing plan starts with a situational analysis and review of the previous year. The following pages take a deep dive into key sections, like

• SWOT analysis
• Target Audience
• Overall goals
• Different marketing strategies

Each of the different marketing strategies has individual goals, strategies and detailed plans of action. Additionally, the plan features a comprehensive event calendar and evaluation criteria. This makes it easier for the marketing team to stay organized, implement and track progress.

2. Safe Haven Family Shelter

If you're looking for a template for a marketing plan that will be presented to internal stakeholders at all levels of your organization, this is a perfect example. Although created by a non-profit, it can be adapted for startups and growing businesses.

This comprehensive plan includes everything you need to get started, from SMART marketing goals and deadlines to action steps, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages and metrics.

This marketing plan example follows a simple format. The content is mostly presented in a list and tabular format, making it well-organized and easy to scan. Readers quickly grasp the organization's strategic direction for its upcoming marketing initiatives.

3. University of Illinois

This detailed marketing plan example is encased in a document format with a bold, eye-catching design. The stunning image and energetic orange color on the cover page immediately grab attention and communicate the brand's dynamic personality. This comprehensive market plan example from the University of Illinois has three key sections.

• Section I provides context on population definitions, admissions funnel stages and core knowledge of the students informing their strategy.
• Section II captures upcoming market research efforts that will inform future strategy.
• Section III takes a deep dive into their strategic plan. This includes objectives, detailed marketing programs to achieve those objectives, and success metrics.

We love that the plan effectively dissects the high-level components of its overall strategy and pairs them with concrete, actionable marketing tactics. Another standout feature is that the pages are filled with compelling visuals, engaging copy and informative graphs and maps that convey their strategic vision and roadmap for marketing efforts.

4. Wright County Economic Development

One of the standout features of the plan is its ease of readability. The sections are clearly organized, allowing readers to quickly scan and identify the most relevant information. It contains key sections, including partners, goals and marketing initiatives—attraction, retention and community relations.

Additionally, the plan offers a thorough breakdown of projected costs per marketing initiative, a crucial detail for upper-level management and stakeholders. This feature makes it easier for decision-makers to understand the financial implications of the proposed plan and allocate resources accordingly.

Overall, Wright County Economic Development's plan serves as a valuable example for marketers looking to develop a practical and effective marketing plan.

5. Visit Oxnard

Being a leisure and lifestyle business, Visit Oxnard infuses captivating designs and vibrant photos that showcase the beauty and excitement of landscapes, landmarks, adventure and resorts. Their innovative plan puts a spin on traditional tourism marketing by focusing on the business side of travel.

This marketing plan example begins with a marketing plan overview, company overview, mission, and goals. Then it dives deeper into the framework and approach the company will take to continue on a positive path forward to economic recovery and growth. Other key sections highlighted in the plan include

• Market Research and Findings
• Customer Personas
• Diverse Offerings
• Earned Media
• Owned Media
• Industry Relations and more

This approach by Visit Oxnard demonstrates how creating actionable marketing plans can help forward-thinking companies capitalize on untapped opportunities.

Still not convinced about the use of marketing plans for your business? Here are some frequently asked questions that can help you make a final decision.

Q. What Is a Marketing Plan Template?

A marketing plan template is a customizable document with placeholder content that can help you get started quickly. Creating a marketing plan from scratch takes too much time. Using a template not only sets up you for faster designing but it also inspires creativity.

Beautiful internal communications inspire delight in coworkers, making it more enjoyable to check off lists and follow processes. Marketing plans on plain white documents just get lost in email threads. Visme marketing plan templates are the solution.

Q. What Is an Executive Summary in a Marketing Plan?

The executive summary in a marketing plan is a superpowered table of contents. In an executive summary page or slide, you share the notable points to be discussed in the subsequent content of the plan in question. An executive summary is comparable to the Quick Read section at the top of our articles.

Q. What Is a Top-Down Marketing Strategy?

A top-down marketing strategy is a traditional strategy with a broad target and brand messaging. Think of the marketing funnel and how at the top it’s wide open. Top down marketing strategies work up there, catching as many people as possible with a message that appeals to a wide audience.

Q. What Is a Bottom-Up Marketing Strategy?

A bottom-up marketing strategy is a targeted strategy for a product or service that meets the needs of a specific audience. Bottom-up marketing strategies are more common in small businesses and startups that don’t yet have large audiences.

Q. What Are the 4 C’s of a Marketing Plan?

The 4C’s of marketing are:

• Customer: The most important factor in a marketing strategy. It’s essential to know what the customer needs and wants.
• Cost: Includes all expenses related to marketing and selling products and services for the company.
• Convenience: The customer shopping experience must be as simple as possible for the client.
• Communication: Includes all interactions between the brand and the consumer. Brand touchpoints are excellent communication opportunities.

These four are called the "marketing mix. Another marketing mix you should know is the 4 Ps or the Four Principles of Marketing .

Q. What Makes a Good Marketing Plan?

For a marketing plan to be good, it doesn’t take much. But for a marketing plan to be great, make sure you check off this checklist:

• Develop targeting and positioning assessments for the strategy and give clear guidance in the marketing plan as to how the messaging will be targeted in marketing copy.
• Share clear promotional tactics per channel, touchpoint or activity. Explain how to repurpose marketing content with intent and tailor promotions to their destination.
• Include a scope assessment and a simple scope management plan for the marketing strategies in the marketing plan.
• Keep the marketing plan document alive by updating and referencing it during the strategy’s lifecycle. Be ready for pivots and changes in the scope.
• Turn your marketing plan into an online digital experience that no one needs to download, print or keep in storage. Visme has an endless array of features to help you create the most engaging business communication.

Q. What Is the Most Important Part of a Marketing Plan?

The most important part of a marketing plan is the targeted consumer, specifically their needs and wants. The entirety of your marketing plan serves the purpose of how your company will use marketing strategies to sell solutions to the customer.

Q. How Can I Make a Marketing Plan With My Team?

With Visme, you can create marketing plans collaboratively in a number of ways. Brainstorm and strategize the plan together in the infinite whiteboard and then design together in the editor. The Visme whiteboard can have multiple pages to control brainstorming iterations and organize meeting results.

Invite members to the whiteboard or workspace by clicking the person+ icon on the top right. They’ll need to have their own Visme account to access the editor or whiteboard you’re inviting them to.

You can also use the workflow feature to assign entire projects or specific tasks to different team members and work on a project together. Keep track of what’s being worked on, leave feedback comments and support each other through the process.

Q. Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan: What’s the Difference?

A marketing strategy is a document or plan that outlines how your organization will deal with market positioning, ICPs and other strategic aspects of a marketing scheme. They can be long- or short-term strategies that form the foundation of all marketing activities.

Marketing plans, on the other hand, are detailed roadmaps that organize how to execute and track a marketing strategy. They provide a guide to achieving the outlined objectives. Marketing plans turn your strategy into an actionable, step-by-step timeline and a foundation for measuring success.

Create a Winning Marketing Plan for Your Business

For most businesses, operating without a solid marketing plan results in ineffective campaigns, reduced ROI and unexpected costs. And nobody wants that.

A custom marketing plan helps you align your marketing objectives and activities with your overall business goals and brings entire teams together on the same page.

Ready to create a professional marketing plan of your own? Get started from scratch or choose one of our marketing plan templates today.

Create effective marketing plans that makes you stand out using Visme

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About the Author

Mahnoor Sheikh is the content marketing manager at Visme. She has years of experience in content strategy and execution, SEO copywriting and graphic design. She is also the founder of MASH Content and is passionate about tea, kittens and traveling with her husband. Get in touch with her on LinkedIn .

Create a Detailed Marketing Plan With 6 Effective Templates

Want to make costly marketing errors and waste time and resources? Start without a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is not only an essential part of your business plan, but it is the roadmap that will provide your team focus and direction in all their marketing efforts.

A good marketing plan is backed by research and facts. Below, we’ve covered the steps you need to follow when creating a marketing plan that will help you attract potential customers to your product and services and convince them to buy.

Understand Your Current Market and Market Position

Set your smart marketing goals, outline your marketing processes, set a budget for your marketing activities.

• Marketing Strategies and Tactics

Advanced Strategies for Experienced Marketers

Ready to create your own marketing plan.

Pricing, promoting and creating brand messages , all depend on your current market and your position in it.

When understanding your current market position, there are a few things that you need to look into;

Understand Your Product

This is where you look into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with your product.

With your team and a SWOT analysis , this will take only a few hours. Once you understand your product in terms of these four areas, it’ll be easier to understand your market position.

To create a SWOT analysis template for Marketing Plan:

• Define your objective.
• Gather relevant information.
• Use a SWOT analysis template.
• Analyze strengths (internal factors).
• Evaluate weaknesses (internal factors).
• Identify opportunities (external factors).
• Assess threats (external factors).
• Analyze results and look for insights.
• Develop strategies based on findings.

Understand Your Customer

Everything – from what words you use to communicate your message to what marketing channels you use to promote your product – depends on who your customer is.

How old are they? Are they employed? What are their interests? While you need both quantitative and qualitative data on your customers, you can collect them via email surveys, direct interviews, questionnaires, and research.

Using the data you collect, create several user personas based on user segments. You can refer to these whenever you are developing a marketing strategy.

To create a buyer persona template for Marketing Plan:

• Research your target audience.
• Define key characteristics.
• Give the persona a name and image.
• Describe background and demographics.
• Detail goals and motivations.
• Outline challenges and pain points.
• Document preferred channels and information sources.
• Capture buying behavior and decision-making process.
• Add additional relevant details.
• Create a visual template for easy reference.
• Validate and update regularly.

Understand Your Competitors

This is where you identify your top competition, assess their strengths and weaknesses and analyze their marketing strategies in the market. The information you collect can be used to build effective strategies to improve your competitive advantage.

Once you conduct research, gather and analyze data on your competitors, you’d be able to understand whether you are a leader or a follower in the market.

To create a competitor analysis template for Marketing Plan:

• Identify key competitors.
• Determine evaluation criteria.
• Gather information.
• Create a table or spreadsheet.
• Analyze each competitor.
• Compare and contrast.
• Identify competitive advantages.
• Make strategic decisions.
• Update regularly.

Understand Your Brand Positioning

Your brand position is how you want your customers to perceive your brand. In order to determine this, you need to

• Know what your customer wants. The target market research you did earlier will help you with this.
• Understand what your brand’s capabilities are. Again refer to the SWOT analysis you did of your product.
• Understand how your competitors are positioning their brands in the market. You can figure this out with the help of the competitor analysis you did earlier.

Hence, your brand positioning should resonate with your consumers, can be delivered by you and should be different from that of your competitors. Keep these in mind when you are setting your marketing goals.

The Brand Asset Scorecard

Compare your brand with the average brands in the market by scoring each of the following five brand asset categories using a 20-point scale with a maximum possible score of 100. This way you can derive a score that indicates the relative strength of your brand against your competitors.

To create a brand asset scorecard template for Marketing Plan:

• Identify brand assets.
• Define evaluation criteria.
• Determine rating scales.
• Evaluate brand assets.
• Calculate scores and summarize.
• Identify improvement areas.
• Set action plans.
• Regularly review and update.

Now that you know where you stand in the market, it’s time to define your marketing goals. They are the only way to measure the success of the effort your marketing team is putting in.

Based on your current performance and your marketing objectives, your goals might change, but make sure that they align with the SMART goal criteria .

To create a SMART marketing goal template for Marketing Plan:

• Start with a specific objective.
• Make it measurable with clear metrics.
• Ensure it’s achievable with the allocated resources.
• Check if it’s relevant to business goals.
• Set a time-bound deadline.
• Document in a template.
• Review and track progress regularly

Once you know the goals you want to achieve, you can easily outline the steps that you need to take to accomplish them.

With a process map or flowchart , you can map the tasks you need to complete in order to achieve each of your goals. Once you’ve diagrammed your strategy, you can share it with your team and analyze whether the process needs to be improved or not.

Whether it is to run a social media campaign or to get an ad published in a newspaper, you need to spend money.

Now that you have identified the tasks/ steps you need to take, figure out how much money you’ll have to spend on each activity and where you’d take the money from. Having planned how you spend money earlier will help you keep track of your finances.

Before winding up, let’s also take a look at popular marketing strategies and tactics you can use and implement along with a marketing plan.

Different marketing strategies and tactics may be more effective depending on your industry, target market, and business goals. It’s important to regularly assess the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives, make any necessary adjustments, and monitor results. Here are some examples of marketing strategies and tactics commonly used by businesses.

• Target Market Segmentation

Based on demographics, psychographics, or other relevant factors, divide your overall market into smaller, more manageable categories. Customize your marketing messaging and strategies to engage and effectively reach each category.

Content Marketing

To attract and engage your target audience, produce and distribute relevant material, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, or whitepapers. Focus on delivering helpful information, resolving issues, and building your reputation as an industry expert.

Social Media Marketing

Use well-known social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn to promote your goods or services, build brand awareness, and interact with your audience. To achieve your marketing objectives, combine organic posts with sponsored adverts, influencer partnerships, and community engagement.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Increase the visibility of your website and online content by optimizing it. To increase your website’s visibility and organic traffic, conduct keyword research, provide high-quality content, optimize meta tags and descriptions, and develop quality backlinks.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Run targeted internet advertising where you only pay when someone clicks on them on search engines (like Google advertising) or social media platforms (like Facebook Ads). For your campaigns to be as effective as possible, set specified budgets, target keywords, demographics, or interests, and keep an eye on them.

Email Marketing

Create an email list of prospective or current clients and send them targeted, customized emails. To cultivate leads, promote conversions, and increase customer loyalty, use email newsletters, promotional offers, product updates, or automated drip campaigns.

Influencer Marketing

To promote your business or products, collaborate with influential individuals or popular social media personalities in your industry. These influencers can create content, share reviews, or endorse your offerings, helping you reach their dedicated audience and increase brand awareness.

Referral Programs

You can encourage your current clients to recommend your company to their friends, relatives, or coworkers by providing rewards or incentives. Create referral programs that give discounts, exclusive access, or loyalty points to both the referrer and the new consumer.

Event Marketing

Participate in or organize trade exhibitions, conferences, events, or webinars that are relevant to your field. These events provide opportunities to network, showcase your products, share knowledge, and generate leads.

Personalization and Customer Segmentation

Tailor your marketing messages and offers to individual customers or specific customer segments based on their preferences, behavior, or purchase history. Deliver personalized experiences across numerous channels by utilizing customer data, analytics, and marketing automation tools.

Advanced strategies require a deep understanding of your target audience, extensive data analysis, and ongoing experimentation. To ensure optimal performance and maintain an edge over the competition, it’s critical to regularly assess the outcomes, iterate, and change your methods.

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Tailor personalized marketing campaigns to specific high-value accounts, using personalized content, targeted advertising, and outreach to engage and convert them.
• Marketing Automation: Streamline marketing processes with automation tools, automating tasks, nurturing leads through personalized workflows, and leveraging data and analytics to deliver targeted content and offers.
• Predictive Analytics: Use large datasets and machine learning to gain insights into future customer behavior, enabling data-driven decisions, anticipating needs, and personalizing marketing efforts effectively.
• Retention Marketing: Focus on retaining existing customers through personalized communication, loyalty programs, exclusive offers, proactive customer support, and targeted upselling or cross-selling campaigns.
• Omnichannel Marketing: Create a seamless customer experience across multiple channels, integrating online and offline marketing efforts for consistent messaging and customer interactions.
• Data-driven Personalization: Utilize customer data and advanced segmentation to deliver highly personalized experiences, tailoring marketing messages, recommendations, and offers based on individual behavior and demographics.
• Influencer Relationship Management: Build long-term relationships with influencers and thought leaders, collaborating beyond one-off campaigns for continuous brand exposure and audience engagement.
• Customer Advocacy Programs: Encourage satisfied customers to become brand advocates through incentives for sharing positive reviews, referrals, or user-generated content, leveraging their influence and social proof.
• Account-Based Retargeting: Combine ABM principles with retargeting strategies, using personalized ads and email campaigns to engage key accounts that have shown interest but have not converted.
• Experimental Marketing: Take calculated risks and experiment with innovative tactics, channels, or technologies to discover unique growth opportunities, such as virtual reality experiences, chatbots, voice search optimization, or emerging social media platforms.

A marketing plan doesn’t necessarily need to contain hundreds of pages. What is important is that it provides your marketing team the roadmap to get started.

Make use of the visualization techniques we looked at when discussing each step to make things clearer to your team.

And don’t forget to share your ideas on how to create a marketing plan with us.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

FAQs About Marketing Plans

What is a marketing plan, why is a marketing plan important for a business.

• Provides direction: It helps align marketing activities with business goals, ensuring all efforts work cohesively towards achieving desired outcomes.
• Increases efficiency: By defining objectives, strategies, and tactics in advance, it helps prioritize tasks, allocate resources effectively, and minimize wasted efforts.
• Facilitates decision-making: A marketing plan provides a framework for evaluating different marketing opportunities, making informed decisions, and adjusting strategies based on market conditions.
• Enhances focus and accountability: It sets clear targets, timelines, and responsibilities, allowing team members to stay focused and accountable for executing the marketing plan.

What are the key components of a marketing plan?

While the components of a marketing plan can vary, here are some common key elements:

• Executive Summary
• Market Research and Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Marketing Objectives
• Implementation Timeline
• Budget Allocation
• Measurement and Tracking Metrics
• Risk Assessment and Contingency Plans

How do I measure and track the effectiveness of my marketing plan?

To measure and track the effectiveness of a marketing plan, consider the following approaches,

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define relevant KPIs such as sales revenue, website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, social media engagement, or email open rates.
• Analytics and Tracking Tools: Utilize web analytics tools, CRM systems, social media analytics, or email marketing software to gather data and insights on customer behavior, campaign performance, and ROI.
• Regular Reporting and Analysis: Review and analyze the collected data regularly to evaluate the success of marketing activities, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions for adjustments or optimizations.

What are some common challenges in implementing a marketing plan?

• Limited Resources: Insufficient budgets, time, or manpower can hinder the execution of planned marketing activities.
• Competitive Landscape: Competitors' actions or market dynamics may require adjustments to the planned strategies.
• Changing Consumer Behavior: Shifts in consumer preferences, trends, or technologies may demand adaptability and flexibility in marketing approaches.
• Measurement and Analysis: Difficulties in accurately measuring and attributing the impact of marketing activities to business outcomes.
• Internal Alignment: Ensuring that the marketing plan is well-communicated and aligned with other departments within the organization.

Addressing these challenges requires flexibility, ongoing monitoring, agility, and effective communication within the marketing team and across the organization.

More Related Articles

Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

18 of My Favorite Sample Business Plans & Examples For Your Inspiration

Published: July 01, 2024

I believe that reading sample business plans is essential when writing your own.

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As you explore business plan examples from real companies and brands, it’s easier for you to learn how to write a good one.

So what does a good business plan look like? And how do you write one that’s both viable and convincing? I’ll walk you through the ideal business plan format along with some examples to help you get started.

Table of Contents

Business Plan Types

Business plan format, sample business plan: section by section, sample business plan templates, top business plan examples.

Ultimately, the format of your business plan will vary based on your goals for that plan. I’ve added this quick review of different business plan types that achieve differing goals.

For a more detailed exploration of business plan types, you can check out this post .

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1. Startups

Startup business plans are for proposing new business ideas. If you’re planning to start a small business, preparing a business plan is crucial. The plan should include all the major factors of your business.

You can check out this guide for more detailed business plan inspiration .

2. Feasibility Studies

Feasibility business plans focus on that business's product or service. Feasibility plans are sometimes added to startup business plans. They can also be a new business plan for an already thriving organization.

3. Internal Use

You can use internal business plans to share goals, strategies, or performance updates with stakeholders. In my opinion, internal business plans are useful for alignment and building support for ambitious goals.

4. Strategic Initiatives

A strategic business plan is another business plan that's often shared internally. This plan covers long-term business objectives that might not have been included in the startup business plan.

5. Business Acquisition or Repositioning

When a business is moving forward with an acquisition or repositioning, it may need extra structure and support. These types of business plans expand on a company's acquisition or repositioning strategy.

Growth sometimes just happens as a business continues operations. But more often, a business needs to create a structure with specific targets to meet set goals for expansion. This business plan type can help a business focus on short-term growth goals and align resources with those goals.

I’m going to focus on a startup business plan that needs to be detailed and research-backed as well as compelling enough to convince investors to offer funding. In my experience, the most comprehensive and convincing business plans contain the following sections.

Executive Summary

This all-important introduction to your business plan sets the tone and includes the company description as well as what you will be exchanging for money — whether that’s product lines, services, or product-service hybrids.

Market Opportunity

Information about gaps in your industry’s market and how you plan to fill them, focused on demand and potential for growth.

Competitive Landscape Analysis

An overview of your competitors that includes consideration of their strengths and how you’ll manage them, their weaknesses and how you’ll capitalize on them, and how you can differentiate your offerings in the industry.

Target Audience

Descriptions of your ideal customers, their various problems that you can solve, and your customer acquisition strategy.

Marketing Strategy

This section details how you will market your brand to achieve specific goals, the channels and tactics you’ll utilize to reach those goals, and the metrics you’ll be using to measure your progress.

Key Features and Benefits

This is where you’ll use plain language to emphasize the value of your product/service, how it solves the problems of your target audiences, and how you’ll scale up over time.

Pricing and Revenue

This section describes your pricing strategy and plans for building revenue streams that fit your audiences while achieving your business goals.

This is the final section, communicating with investors that your business idea is worth investing in via profit/loss statements, cash flow statements, and balance sheets to prove viability.

Okay, so now that we have a format established, I’ll give you more specific details about each section along with examples. Truthfully, I wish I’d had this resource to help me flesh out those first business plans long ago.

1. Executive Summary

I’d say the executive summary is the most important section of the entire business plan. It is essentially an overview of and introduction to your entire project.

Write this in such a way that it grabs your readers' attention and guides them through the rest of the business plan. This is important because a business plan can be dozens or hundreds of pages long.

There are two main elements I’d recommend including in your executive summary: your company description and your products and services.

Company Description

This is the perfect space to highlight your company’s mission statement and goals, a brief overview of your history and leadership, and your top accomplishments as a business.

Tell potential investors who you are and why what you do matters. Naturally, they’re going to want to know who they’re getting into business with up front. This is a great opportunity to showcase your impact.

Need some extra help firming up your business goals? I’d recommend HubSpot Academy’s free course to help you set meaningful goals that matter most for your business.

Products and Services

Here, you will incorporate an overview of your offerings. This doesn’t have to be extensive, as it is just a chance to introduce your industry and overall purpose as a business. I recommend including snippets of information about your financial projections and competitive advantage here as well.

Keep in mind that you'll cover many of these topics in more detail later on in the business plan. The executive summary should be clear and brief, only including the most important takeaways.

Executive Summary Business Plan Examples

This example was created with HubSpot’s business plan template . What makes this executive summary good is that it tells potential investors a short story while still covering all of the most important details.

Our Mission

Maria’s Gluten Free Bagels offers gluten-free bagels, along with various toppings, other gluten-free breakfast sandwich items, and coffee. The facility is entirely gluten free. Our team expects to catch the interest of gluten-free, celiac, or health-conscious community members who are seeking an enjoyable cafe to socialize. Due to a lack of gluten-free bagel products in the food industry currently, we expect mild competition and are confident we will be able to build a strong market position.

The Company and Management

Maria’s Gluten Free Bagels was founded in 2010 by Maria Jones, who first began selling her gluten-free bagels online from her home, using social media to spread the word. In 2012 she bought a retail location in Hamilton, MA, which now employs four full-time employees and six part-time employees. Prior to her bagel shop, Maria was a chef in New York and has extensive experience in the food industry.

Along with Maria Jones, Gluten Free Bagel Shop has a board of advisors. The advisors are:

• Jeni King, partner at Winding Communications, Ltd.
• Henry Wilson, president of Blue Robin, LLP.

Our Product

We offer gluten-free products ranging from bagels and cream cheese to blueberry muffins, coffee, and pastries. Our customers are health-conscious, community-oriented people who enjoy gluten-free products. We will create a welcoming, warm environment with opportunities for open mic nights, poetry readings, and other community functions. We will focus on creating an environment in which someone feels comfortable meeting a friend for lunch, or working remotely.

Our Competitive Advantages

While there are other coffee shops and cafes in the North Shore region, there are none that offer purely gluten-free options. This restricts those suffering from gluten-free illnesses or simply those with a gluten-free preference. This will be our primary selling point. Additionally, our market research [see Section 3] has shown a demand for a community-oriented coffee and bagel shop in the town of Hamilton, MA.

Financial Considerations

Our sales projections for the first year are $400,000. We project a 15% growth rate over the next two years. By year three, we project 61% gross margins.

We will have four full-time employees. The salary for each employee will be $50,000.

Start-up Financing Requirements

We are seeking to raise $125,000 in startup to finance year one. The owner has invested $50,000 to meet working capital requirements, and will use a loan of $100,000 to supplement the rest.

Example 2 :

Marianne and Keith Bean have been involved with the food industry for several years. They opened their first restaurant in Antlers, Oklahoma in 1981, and their second in Hugo in 1988. Although praised for the quality of many of the items on their menu, they have attained a special notoriety for their desserts. After years of requests for their flavored whipped cream toppings, they have decided to pursue marketing these products separately from the restaurants.

Marianne and Keith Bean have developed several recipes for flavored whipped cream topping. They include chocolate, raspberry, cinnamon almond, and strawberry. These flavored dessert toppings have been used in the setting of their two restaurants over the past 18 years, and have been produced in large quantities. The estimated shelf life of the product is 21 days at refrigeration temperatures and up to six months when frozen. The Beans intend to market this product in its frozen state in 8 and 12-ounce plastic tubs. They also intend to have the products available in six ounce pressurized cans. Special attention has been given to developing an attractive label that will stress the gourmet/specialty nature of the products.

Distribution of Fancy's Foods Whipped Dream product will begin in the local southeastern Oklahoma area. The Beans have an established name and reputation in this area, and product introduction should encounter little resistance.

Financial analyses show that the company will have both a positive cash flow and profit in the first year. The expected return on equity in the first year is 10.88%

Tips for Writing Your Executive Summary

• Start with a strong introduction of your company that showcases your mission and impact, then outline the products and services you provide.
• Clearly define a problem, explain how your product solves that problem, and show why the market needs your business.
• Be sure to highlight your value proposition, market opportunity, and growth potential.
• Keep it concise and support ideas with data.
• Customize your summary to your audience. For example, you might emphasize finances and return on investment for venture capitalists, whereas you might emphasize community benefits and minimal environmental impact for progressive nonprofits.

For more guidance, check out our tips for writing an effective executive summary .

2. Market Opportunity

This is where you'll detail the opportunity in the market. Ask and answer: Where is the gap in the current industry, and how will my product fill that gap?

To get a thorough understanding of the market opportunity, you'll want to conduct a TAM, SAM, SOM analysis , a SWOT analysis , and perform market research on your industry to get some insights for this section. More specifically, here’s what I’d include.

• The size of the market
• Current or potential market share
• Trends in the industry and consumer behavior
• Where the gap is
• What caused the gap
• How you intend to fill it

Market Opportunity Business Plan Example

I like this example because it uses critical data to underline the size of the potential market and what part of that market this service hopes to capture.

Example: The market for Doggie Pause is all of the dog owners in the metropolitan area and surrounding areas of the city. We believe that this is going to be 2/3 of the population, and we have a goal of gaining a 50% market share. We have a target of a 20% yearly profit increase as the business continues.

Tips for Writing Your Market Opportunity Section

• Focus on demand and potential for growth.
• Use market research, surveys, and industry trend data to support your market forecast and projections.
• Add a review of regulation shifts, tech advances, and consumer behavior changes.
• Refer to reliable sources.
• Showcase how your business can make the most of this opportunity.

3. Competitive Landscape Analysis

Since we’re already speaking of market share, you‘ll also need to create a section that shares details on who the top competitors are. After all, your customers likely have more than one brand to choose from, and you’ll want to understand exactly why they might choose one over another.

My favorite part of performing a competitive analysis is that it can help you uncover the following:

• Industry trends that other brands may not be utilizing.
• Strengths in your competition that may be obstacles to handle.
• Weaknesses in your competition that may help you develop selling points.
• The unique proposition you bring to the market that may resonate with customers.

Competitive Landscape Business Plan Example

I like how the competitive landscape section of this business plan shows a clear outline of who the top competitors are. It also highlights specific industry knowledge and the importance of location. This demonstrates useful experience in the industry, helping to build trust in your ability to execute your business plan.

Competitive Environment

Currently, there are four primary competitors in the Greater Omaha Area: Pinot’s Palette Lakeside (franchise partner), Village Canvas and Cabernet, The Corky Canvas, and Twisted Vine Collective. The first three competitors are in Omaha and the fourth is located in Papillion.

Despite the competition, all locations have both public and private events. Each location has a few sold-out painting events each month. The Omaha locations are in new, popular retail locations, while the existing Papillion location is in a downtown business district.

There is an opportunity to take advantage of the environment and open a studio in a well-traveled or growing area. Pinot’s Palette La Vista will differentiate itself from its competitors by offering a premium experience in a high-growth, influential location.

Tips for Writing Your Competitive Landscape

• Complete in-depth research, then emphasize your most important findings.
• Compare your unique selling proposition (USP) to your direct and indirect competitors.
• Show a clear and realistic plan for product and brand differentiation.
• Look for specific advantages and barriers in the competitive landscape. Then, highlight how that information could impact your business.
• Outline growth opportunities from a competitive perspective.
• Add customer feedback and insights to support your competitive analysis.

4. Target Audience

Use this section to describe who your customer segments are in detail. What is the demographic and psychographic information of your audience? I’d recommend building a buyer persona to get in the mindset of your ideal customers and be clear about why you're targeting them. Here are some questions I’d ask myself:

• What demographics will most likely need/buy your product or service?
• What are the psychographics of this audience? (Desires, triggering events, etc.)
• Why are your offerings valuable to them?

Target Audience Business Plan Example

I like the example below because it uses in-depth research to draw conclusions about audience priorities. It also analyzes how to create the right content for this audience.

The Audience

Recognize that audiences are often already aware of important issues. Outreach materials should:

• Emphasize a pollution-prevention practice
• Tell audience a little about how to prevent pollution
• Tell audience where they can obtain information about prevention.

Message Content

• Focus the content for outreach materials on cost savings, such as when and where pollution prevention is as cheap as or cheaper than traditional techniques. Include facts and figures.
• Emphasize how easy it is to do the right thing and the impacts of not engaging in pollution prevention.
• Stress benefits such as efficiency or better relations with government, for businesses not primarily concerned with public image.

Tips for Writing Your Target Audience Section

• Include details on the size and growth potential of your target audience.
• Figure out and refine the pain points for your target audience , then show why your product is a useful solution.
• Describe your targeted customer acquisition strategy in detail.
• Share anticipated challenges your business may face in acquiring customers and how you plan to address them.
• Add case studies, testimonials, and other data to support your target audience ideas.
• Remember to consider niche audiences and segments of your target audience in your business plan.

5. Marketing Strategy

Here, you‘ll discuss how you’ll acquire new customers with your marketing strategy. I think it’s helpful to have a marketing plan built out in advance to make this part of your business plan easier. I’d suggest including these details:

• Your brand positioning vision and how you'll cultivate it.
• The goal targets you aim to achieve.
• The metrics you'll use to measure success.
• The channels and distribution tactics you'll use.

Marketing Strategy Business Plan Example

This business plan example includes the marketing strategy for the town of Gawler. In my opinion, it works because it offers a comprehensive picture of how they plan to use digital marketing to promote the community.

You’ll also learn the financial benefits investors can reap from putting money into your venture rather than trying to sell them on how great your product or service is.

This business plan guide focuses less on the individual parts of a business plan, and more on the overarching goal of writing one. For that reason, it’s one of my favorites to supplement any template you choose to use. Harvard Business Review’s guide is instrumental for both new and seasoned business owners.

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MARKETING INSIGHTS

Marketing plan template: step-by-step guide plus examples

• Merav Kanat
• Feb 21, 2021
• 12 min read

If you have a business you want to promote, there are so many directions you can go with your marketing efforts - build your own website , post on social media, send out email blasts and more. With a plethora of both free and paid options for promoting your business online, marketing has become easy and accessible for everyone.

Still, it’s no secret that marketing requires time and money. You’ll need to use your resources wisely if you want to scale efficiently and have a high return on investment. For that reason, it’s wise to avoid haphazard promotional efforts, and come up with a marketing plan: a cohesive operation that aligns all your marketing efforts and directly ties back to your business’s goals.

Here’s everything you need to know about how to create a marketing plan - including a template you can use to write your own. By outlining your objectives as a company, defining your KPIs , and then unifying your marketing strategies accordingly, this type of plan streamlines your promotional efforts and yields results.

Start building your online presence with Wix .

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a roadmap that helps you manage, implement and track your various marketing efforts. In other words, it’s a structured framework that links together all your marketing activities into a single, cohesive operation.

Typically, a marketing plan takes the form of a report that gives an overview of your marketing strategy for the upcoming year, quarter or month. The report defines your company’s goals over a given period of time, and clearly outlines the steps you’ll need to take to achieve them. It's an essential part of any SMBs marketing efforts.

Here’s just a taste of what a marketing plan includes:

An analysis of your competitors and your stance in the market

A description of your target audience and their needs

Your company’s unique selling proposition

An overview of your marketing and advertising goals

A timeline of the various tasks that need to be completed

The key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll be tracking to measure success

Creating a marketing plan is the most efficient way to generate demand for your product. Whether you’re running an online T-shirt store, working as a business consultant, or launching a blog for moms, mapping out your strategy in advance will help you drive people through the marketing funnel and get customers.

Types of marketing plans

Before we dive into the specific elements of a marketing plan template, let’s briefly touch on the different types of marketing plans, which can vary depending on your company. They include:

Annual, quarterly or monthly marketing plan: Marketing plans are typically annual, but they can be quarterly or monthly depending on your business’s goals. This type of plan will highlight all your promotional activities within the specified period of time.

New product launch marketing plan: This is a specific type of marketing plan that focuses on the strategies and tactics you’ll use to promote a particular product.

Social media marketing plan: This kind of marketing plan provides a comprehensive outline of your goals, channels, and tactics for promoting your business on social media.

Content marketing plan: Similarly, this type of plan provides a comprehensive outline of your various content marketing strategies and goals.

Media marketing plan: This focuses on building a strategy using all media types: owned media (your own website, app or email marketing tools), paid media (advertising campaigns), and earned media ( word of mouth marketing , organic traffic, viral content) to support an integrated marketing approach.

In this article, we’ll talk about the broadest type of marketing plan. This will outline all of your small business marketing efforts and help you map out a clear strategy.

Using this marketing plan as a guide, you can then create more specific plans - such as a content marketing or social media marketing plan - based on the areas you want to focus on.

How to create a marketing plan in 7 steps

Analyze your market and competition

Research your target audience

Set goals and KPIs

Write a unique selling proposition

Choose strategic marketing channels

Brief your team

Monitor your analytics

01. Analyze your market and competition

The first step in writing a marketing plan is to identify your competitors. This is important so that you know who you’ll be marketing against, and how you can outshine them with your promotional strategy.

Take into account that different competitors will be stronger in different areas. Your biggest competitor on social media, for instance, might be different from your competitor with the best SEO.

With that in mind, do a SWOT analysis of your competition. Using this acronym - which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats - gives you a systematic way to identify your competitors’ performance in your field:

Strengths: What are the competitors’ advantages in the industry? What are they excelling in?

Weaknesses: What could this company be doing better? What processes of theirs could be improved?

Opportunities: Are there any new trends or upcoming events that are relevant to your industry? Identify them, and seize the marketing opportunity before your competition does.

Threats: Are there external factors such as new government regulations, declining customer interest, or industry shifts that are threats to your competitors’ success? If so, find a way to navigate these threats and avoid making the same mistakes as your competition.

Even if you’ve already done a SWOT analysis in the past, it’s important to reassess the playing field as you write your marketing plan. In particular, anticipate whether anything new is about to happen in the coming year or quarter, such as a change in government policy or the emergence of a new competitor in your market.

And, of course, keep an eye out for niches your competitors haven’t gotten to yet. For instance, if you’re selling products to new moms, a SWOT analysis might reveal that none of your competitors are creating products for new dads. In this case, that would be an opportunity for you to expand your audience, attract new customers, and grow your revenue.

As you create your SWOT analysis, use this free SWOT analysis template to guide you, and make it a part of your marketing plan:

02. Research your target audience

Just as you research your competitors, you’ll need to look into your target audience . This is the specific group of people at which your product or service is aimed - and, as such, they’re the primary audience of your marketing strategy.

If you’re unsure of who your target audience is, there are a few different ways to gather this information. First, think about which needs your product fulfills and which types of people it caters to. You can also use your SWOT analysis to point you in the right direction. Look at competitors’ websites, blogs and social media channels to determine the types of people they’re marketing to.

To hone in on your audience even further, analyze your existing customers to understand which kinds of people you’ve attracted in the past. Talk to your current and potential customers as much as you can. Get their feedback, use focus groups, and analyze the data to figure out their shared behaviors and characteristics:

Age: Does your product seek to address the needs of people of a certain age - for example, older adults or millennials?

Location: Are your target customers within a specific country or region? Where are they, and what languages do they speak?

Spending power: How much money are your target customers able to spend? Are they seeking out luxury, or could money be an issue when deciding whether to purchase?

Stage of life: Can you identify your target customers based on their stage of life, such as new parents, college students or retirees?

Hobbies and career: Can you group them based on certain hobbies, career paths, or other lifestyle interests?

Track this information in an orderly way by creating buyer personas , or detailed descriptions of specific types of customers. Each buyer persona should reflect both existing or potential customers, based on the factors above: demographics, location, job title and more.

Be sure to include this information at the beginning of your marketing plan, side-by-side your SWOT analysis, to provide a thorough assessment of the market in which your company is operating. Ultimately, these various audience types will represent customer segments - groups of people you can target with different marketing materials depending on their interests.

03. Set your goals and KPIs

Next, set your business’s goals. What do you want to achieve next quarter? How about by the end of this year? 5 years from now?

The more ambitious the goal, the more time, effort and money you should dedicate to it. Determine each goal, and break it down into small steps, either by month, quarter or year, depending on your time frame. Not only will this help you build a clear timeline, but it will also help you allocate your budget.

Once you divide up your big goals into small goals, consider how to measure them. In other words, how will you know whether you’re meeting your goals, or falling short?

This is where KPIs - key performance indicators - come into play. Essentially, KPIs are the specific metrics used to monitor your progress in achieving your goals.

For instance, if you want to create an active online forum for pop music creators, then your KPIs should be site visits, your number of active visitors, and your number of returning visitors. Your position in Google search results for niche keywords, such as “pop music creator” or “music production software,” would also be a relevant KPI.

Whichever KPIs you choose, include them in your marketing plan alongside your goals and write down the metrics you’ll use to measure your success. For example, if your KPI is to make more sales, you might want to track metrics like lead generation and conversion rate .

By checking your achievements every quarter compared to your KPIs, you’ll learn about the pace and abilities of your businesses. If you achieve your KPIs relatively easily, you can set more ambitious goals. On the other hand, if you’re falling short of your KPIs, you might consider recruiting more people to help you get there.

04. Write a unique selling proposition

If you were to give a 30-second marketing spiel to a potential customer, what would you say? Come up with a statement that would appeal to your target audience’s interests and increase demand for your business.

If you’re already a market leader that offers high-quality products, you can claim that you’re “the best solution for” a particular need. On the other hand, if you’re still a relatively small player in the market, you can position yourself as being innovative and groundbreaking - the brand that offers fresh, modern solutions. Many smaller businesses tend to find that creative, funny, or even unorthodox branding gives them the attention boost they need from their audience.

When targeting multiple audiences, you may find it challenging to create a single message that resonates with everyone. One tip for attracting many types of customers at the same time is to create slightly different messages for each buyer persona. Going back to the product lines for new moms and dads, you may find that you need to split your messaging between a few different customer types:

New moms: Target them with the message that they need high-quality products for their babies.

New moms who want their spouse to be involved in childcare: Target them with a new message that they’d have more time to relax if their spouse also used the product.

New dads: Target them with a different message that these products can help them become good fathers and supportive partners.

Be sure to record this messaging in your marketing plan so that you can use it throughout your various promotional efforts.

05. Choose strategic marketing channels

Once you come up with your core messages, decide which marketing strategies you’ll use to spread the word. There’s an abundance of options here, both paid and free. Some popular paid channels include:

Social media ads (Facebook, Instagram and more)

Online ads on other sites

Press releases

Partnerships with other companies

Outreach marketing

Guerilla marketing

Email campaigns

Offline media such as magazine, billboard and radio ads

Facebook ads are a particularly effective option because they reach almost every type of audience and can be targeted based on demographics and interests. They’re fairly simple to make, especially if you already have a Facebook business page. And, depending on your website platform, you can even create Facebook ads directly through your site .

Paid channels are a reliable choice, but it’s also worthwhile to couple these efforts with free promotional options as well. These take a little more time to develop, but they’re also a valuable way to get more exposure and build a loyal audience. They include popular inbound marketing tactics such as:

Website SEO

Creating company social media pages

Being active in online forums and Facebook groups

When choosing what channels to use, it’s important to think about which ones will actually reach your target audience. If you’re marketing to elderly folks, for instance, then Instagram ads may not be the way to go.

Similarly, build a strategy for the timeline of your campaigns. Take into account any holidays and other special events, such as elections or the Super Bowl, that you can use to your advantage when crafting marketing content.

And remember - not all your campaigns will be planned in advance. You’ll need to set aside budget for on-the-fly campaigns, also known as real-time marketing (RTM). This involves taking advantage of precious opportunities like global events and new internet trends. For instance, the January 2021 Bernie Sanders meme was a great chance for companies to get easy attention, earn free media coverage, and go viral. Ikea even used the meme to promote its folding chair and oven mitts.

Pro tip: Once you’ve established the right channels and timeline, you may be eager to launch your campaigns right away - especially if unexpected marketing opportunities arise. Resist the temptation until you’re absolutely sure your product is ready, with at least 85% positive feedback from users. Asking for a second chance will cost you much more than nailing a great impression the first time around.

06. Brief your team

One of the main reasons to create a marketing plan is to develop a unified operation that your whole marketing department can participate in. For this reason, it’s critical that you keep everyone in the loop.

Update your marketing team, as well as the suppliers that create the marketing materials for you. The best way to ensure everyone is aligned is to create a marketing brief - a one-page document that summarizes the market research, company goals, messaging, and action items established in your plan.

You can use the marketing brief template below to create a quick, efficient overview of your plan. It includes guiding questions to help you analyze your competitors, determine your target audience, identify your KPIs, and craft a compelling company message. Fill out this document, and share it with anyone who works with you so that they’re on the same page about your strategy and goals:

07. Monitor your analytics

Once you start implementing your marketing campaigns, you’ll need to closely monitor the results. To ensure your strategy is effective, continuously track your KPIs and see how the numbers stack up against your goals. That will allow you to adapt the marketing plan based on the goals you’re achieving and those you aren’t. Customer analytics can help you in this process.

There are two places to monitor analytics: Google Analytics and your website.

Google Analytics can easily be connected to your company website, and it’s a helpful way to track your site visitors and evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns.

Wix Analytics is another useful tool that provides a comprehensive analysis of your performance, and it’s conveniently located within the Wix website dashboard. This tool allows you to create custom audiences based on their demographics, geographic location, or other defining features, and you can access it directly from your website.

Using these two tools, look at the data. If the numbers indicate that you aren’t meeting your objectives, brainstorm action items for how to improve. If, for instance, you notice that some of your website visitors are located in Europe, try creating a multilingual website; it may just help convert them into customers. Likewise, if you’re getting traffic to your website or blog but are lacking in conversions, try creating content campaigns around specific products.

Don’t be discouraged if, after two quarters, you aren’t reaching your goals. This happens to the best of us, and it’s simply an indicator that you’ll need to refine your marketing plan and go back to Step 1.

Marketing plan template

Now that you know how to create a marketing plan, use this marketing plan template to walk you through the process. It’s free for download and use, and can easily be adapted for any business.

Marketing plan examples

While the marketing plan template above provides you with everything you need, it may also be helpful to look at other examples for inspiration. If you’re seeking additional resources, use these marketing plan examples to guide you:

01. Marketing Plan Template from SBA

The Small Business Administration provides a highly detailed marketing plan template that can be downloaded as a PDF and easily adapted to suit your company. The plan covers all the must-haves, like an explanation of your products and an analysis of your target market, but it supplements those with finer details like location analysis and product packaging.

02. Marketing Plan Template Generator from HubSpot

Unlike most marketing plan examples, this isn’t a file that you print out and fill in. Instead, it’s an online generator - a fill-in-the-blank template that walks you through the creation process page-by-page. The generator feels almost like an AI bot, asking you to fill in your name and then replying “Awesome! It’s great to meet you, [Name]!” This is a great way to make the marketing plan process more dynamic and fun.

03. Marketing Plan Microsoft Word Template from More Business

The advantage of More Business’s marketing plan template is that it’s downloadable for Microsoft Word, allowing you to fill in each section directly on the document. The document not only contains different strategies that you can use to inspire your own marketing efforts, but it also comes with examples of tables and charts for your marketing plan.

04. One-Page Marketing Plan Template from SmartSheet

This template is available for download on Microsoft Word, Google Docs and SmartSheet, but we particularly like that it’s available as an Excel version. As a one-pager, it’s short and sweet - ideal for getting your marketing plan started without getting lost in too much detail from the beginning. It’s a helpful sheet for brainstorming, or for summarizing your marketing plan once it’s complete.

05. Marketing Plan Slide Deck Template from Slidesgo

This marketing plan template comes in yet another format - an attractive slide deck that’s downloadable for both PowerPoint and Google Slides. This includes all the essentials, but in a more visual format, making it a useful asset for turning your marketing plan into a presentation.

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Your Guide to Creating a Small Business Marketing Plan

Follow these templates and guidelines to get started on your business's marketing plan.

Table of Contents

To have a successful business, you need a well-thought-out marketing plan to promote your products or services. Although making a few social media posts or blasting a few promotional emails may seem simple enough, disjointed marketing efforts not only confuse your target audience, but can ultimately harm your business. 

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic road map for how you communicate (online and offline) with your target audience to successfully promote your products or services. Depending on your goal, marketing plans can be extremely basic or highly detailed.

According to Molly Maple Bryant, vice president of marketing at Vibrent Health, 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 complicated, but they make a major difference in keeping you on track and avoiding diversions, also called 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 us.

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:

• Advertising plan
• Branding plan
• Content marketing plan
• Customer acquisition plan
• Direct marketing plan
• Email marketing plan
• Public relation plan
• Print marketing plan
• Reputation management plan
• Retention plan
• Search engine optimization plan
• Social media marketing plan

Why is it important to have a marketing plan for your business?

A marketing plan is a crucial resource for any small business because 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 significant 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 percent from lead to closed deal. Now you have a metric to start with — to get to 10 sales, we need 100 leads. 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 strategies that are relevant to your marketing plan. A marketing plan helps you think realistically about your strategies, 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. Your plan should also serve as an easy guide for future marketing managers and team members to understand and implement.

What are the key 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 essential 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

The 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, your marketing expenses will be wasted. Think of it like this: Some people need your service or product but 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 on which your specific target audience is active. One distribution channel that works great for one organization may be useless to another. For example, one company may host their website for free on a site like HubSpot and solely rely on that as their sales channel, while another company may have a whole team of people using Pinterest to drive sales. [Learn how CRM systems can help track your marketing leads based on various distribution channels.]

Examples of sales channels include the following:

• Mobile text message marketing
• Social media
• 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 competitors. Finding your USP is 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

Consider pricing when drafting your marketing plan. Developing the right pricing strategy helps you better market your product. Think about 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 production costs?
• 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 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 your marketing plan 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

What is a template 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 or a benchmarking tool to evaluate your current strategies, several great resources are 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.”

Here are some tools and templates to get you started:

• 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.
• 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.

What mistakes should you avoid when creating your marketing plan?

When creating an effective marketing plan, you need to avoid falling for common missteps and mistakes. For starters, failing to identify any of the 10 actionable categories above is an obvious mistake.

Here are some other key mistakes to avoid:

• Setting unrealistic budgets: Underestimating the costs of marketing activities or setting an unrealistic budget can limit your ability to execute your plan effectively. Marketing can be expensive, so it’s important to fully understand the estimated cost and budget before building a marketing strategy that you can’t afford.
• Focusing on quantity over quality: “More” doesn’t always mean “better” if you are posting on irrelevant marketing channels or your efforts are bringing in unqualified leads. Prioritizing the quantity of marketing activities over their quality can lead to superficial engagement and a lack of meaningful results.
• Not testing campaigns: Launching large campaigns without testing can lead to wasted resources if the messaging or tactics don’t resonate as expected. Test out your new campaigns to ensure they achieve your intended goal.
• Ignoring customer feedback: You may be tempted to ignore negative feedback, but disregarding customer comments and failing to address their concerns can lead to negative perceptions of your brand. Instead, use customer feedback to your advantage to improve your product and marketing efforts.
• Overpromising and underdelivering: Setting unrealistic expectations in your marketing messages that your products or services can’t fulfill can damage your brand’s reputation.
• Ignoring seasonality and trends: Failing to account for seasonal trends and market changes can result in missed opportunities for timely marketing efforts.
• Not reviewing and updating your plan: A rigid marketing plan that doesn’t allow for adjustments in response to market feedback and changing conditions can hinder your success. A marketing plan should be a living document that is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect changes in the market and your business’s goals.

Avoiding these mistakes and missteps can help you create a more effective and successful marketing plan that drives results for your business.

How can you take action with your new marketing plan?

Before you dive into marketing plan templates, it’s important to understand how to think about a marketing plan.

A good marketing plan targets who your buyers are, establishes the service or product you are offering, and 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 because it allows you to prepare for the unexpected and establish a connection between your brand and your audience.

Matt D’Angelo contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.

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How to write a marketing plan.

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President of the  Bradford Dalton Group , Jeff is a former journalist with 30+ years of experience as a public relations professional.

Ready to reinvigorate your marketing? First, you need a plan. In this article, I’ll outline how to create a marketing plan for your business.

It is important to know what other people besides you think about your company, so spend some time before writing your marketing plan talking to employees, customers, shareholders and community members — anyone who is touched by your company. Probe to find out what they truly think and how they feel about the company. This cache of valuable information will form the basis for the SWOT analysis portion of your marketing plan.

Competitive Analysis

During your research, be sure to ask people who they think your competitors are, and how your company stacks up against them. Then, to learn more, conduct secondary research by carefully reviewing competitors’ websites and reviewing any news coverage about them. Then, use a website like Semrush or Ahrefs to find out how well their websites perform: how many keywords they rank for, how many visitors they attract per month, what their authority score is, etc. Throughout this research, look for ways in which your company is similar to and different from competitors. Rank them from most to least competitive.

SWOT Analysis

You can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. That’s why you want to start writing your marketing plan with an analysis of your internal situation (your company’s strengths and weaknesses) and the external situation in which you operate (the opportunities and threats in the marketplace). Mine the research you conducted, as well as your own insights, for this information. Be brutally honest. This is the basis for your entire marketing plan, so if you lie to yourself here, your marketing plan will likely be ineffective.

The goals section of your marketing plan clearly lays out how you want your business to be different after the marketing plan has been carried out. And make sure they are SMART goals — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound — so you’ll be able to clearly know whether or not they were met. For example, a SMART goal would be: “Increase annual sales by 10% by the end of the year.”

Objectives are the milestones you must hit in order to achieve your goals. Unlike goals, which are strategic — meaning that they bear directly on the success of your company — objectives are more tactical and generally pertain to the implementation of marketing tactics. For example, an objective might be: “To reach 5,000 sales prospects with an email campaign that has an open rate of at least 30% and a click-through rate of 5%.”

Target Markets

In this section of the plan, specify whom you intend to reach through your marketing efforts. Generally, this is your customers and prospective customers, but it could also be employees and prospective employees, if the goal is to find qualified job candidates, or community and government leaders, if you are seeking to deal with burdensome regulations or disgruntled factions of the community.

The message is what you want members of the target markets to know about your company in order to cause the behavior you are seeking, such as buying your product or service. Generally, the message is some form of 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.

Tactics are the heart of a marketing plan — these are what you will actually do and how you will do it. The key is selecting the tactics that are most appropriate for your business and the goals you want to achieve. Selecting the best tactics generally requires the assistance of an experienced marketing professional.

Here’s a fairly exhaustive list of marketing tactics: awards and professional recognition; blogging; case studies and white papers; collateral such as brochures, flyers, sales sheets, etc.; digital advertising such as pay per click, banner ads, affiliate marketing, websites and remarketing; direct mail; email marketing; events including parties, seminars and panel discussions, and product and service announcements; inbound marketing; infographics; your logo and branding; native advertising and advertorials; promotions and contests; publicity; search engine optimization; speaking engagements; specialty advertising and swag; strategic partnerships; surveys; telemarketing; trade shows; traditional television and print advertising; videos; webinars; and word-of-mouth marketing.

Generally a month-by-month schedule of what will happen, a timeline lays out when each tactic will be deployed and for how long, and which tactics will run simultaneously in order to enhance their overall effectiveness.

In the budget section of your marketing plan, delineate how much money you will allocate for each marketing tactic.

It is possible, of course, to market without a plan — your marketing is just not likely to be effective without one. Unfortunately, the marketing efforts of many small businesses seem to largely be the result of sales efforts by advertising salespeople — that is, many business owners buy whatever they think is the best deal proffered by the local newspaper, radio station, television station or digital advertising agency. These totally unplanned, uncoordinated efforts can produce sporadic results, but usually not sustained growth. To get the most out of your marketing dollars, create a plan and stick to it.

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How to create a marketing plan in 2024

7 steps to creating an effective marketing plan for businesses of all sizes

A marketing plan is a bit like a job description for your company. Everyone should have one, but they’re often not fit for purpose, out of date, and reviewed infrequently...

Research has shown that businesses with plans succeed, outperform competitors, and retain staff, more than those with no plan.

Without a plan there’s no direction for the company or its employees, decisions can be uninformed, opportunities can be missed and threats can damage or destroy the business.

Whether you are looking at creating a traditional marketing plan or a multichannel digital marketing plan, we've got resources to help you.

Free marketing plan template aimed at small businesses

In this article, Annmarie Hanlon recommends 7 simple steps for structuring a classic marketing plan. But for an SME or SMB, you need a little more detail about prioritizing your investment of time and money in your communications channels as we've mentioned.

Our Free marketing plan template download , by our co-founder Dr. Dave Chaffey who developed the RACE Planning Framework, provides a little more detail needed for a 'real-world' plan to grow a business.

Free marketing plan template download

Use our simple three-page Microsoft Word template if you work for a small business who needs to create a simple, practical marketing plan quickly. It's structured in three sections of steps using the acclaimed RACE Growth System for improving marketing results

Access the Free marketing plan template

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is your place to document the process of defining and implementing your marketing strategy and creating a roadmap for future growth and business development. A marketing plan should be customer-centred, focused on your target audience and the value propositions you will deliver to them.

The key element of marketing strategy within the plan that you need to compete effectively is the Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning strategy for your brand, known as STP for short. These stages in target marketing strategy development that should be central in your marketing plan are summarized in Figure 4.10 in Digital Marketing: Strategy, Development and Planning created by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights.

Your plan must reference Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning as essential sections you must cover in a classic marketing plan for a large business. However, for smaller businesses, you also need more practical strategies for how you will reach and engage your audiences using the key digital marketing channels today including search, social media and email marketing and then how you will persuade and convert your audience on a website or on your social pages. So, for a small or medium business (SME or SMB depending on where you are reading) your marketing plan must also include communications strategies to help you achieve your goals. That's why Smart Insights created the RACE planning framework to give guidance on how to best plan and action best practices for these channels.

How to create and structure a marketing plan

To structure your marketing plan, we recommend utilizing the Smart Insights RACE Growth System, an easy-to-use strategic marketing framework that helps you identify opportunities, strategies, and actions to help you drive growth, at each stage of your marketing funnel.

As the visual shows, our OSA process, of which you can see examples in different sectors in our editable Word plan templates, is structured in three parts:

• Opportunity : Situation review including marketplace analysis (customers, competitors and channel partners), performance analysis and Vision and SMART Objective setting based on forecasting (spreadsheet tools available in our templates)
• Strategy : Segmentation, Targeting and Positoning (STP) and the tactics forming the 7Ps of the marketing mix.
• Action : Budget, resourcing including team and tools and marketing technology (Martech) and 90-day action plans.

As a marketer, every activity will fall into either an opportunity, strategy, or action. With a strong marketing plan in place, you will be able to measure each of these elements, and more importantly, ensure all marketing activities remain integrated.

Some marketing plans, such as this Chartered Institute of Marketing recommendation on How to write a marketing plan define more stages, but particularly for smaller businesses we believe the simpler  Opportunity > Strategy > Action enables you to communicate your plan better!

Identify marketing opportunities

Let's now look at what you need to include in your plan, starting with your opportunities. A marketing plan is not just a list of activities to work on! To identify the opportunities to prioritize and challenges to overcome. You need to start with internal audits, external analysis, and goal setting - to give your marketing a purpose. We recommend summarizing your key issues based on a TOWs analysis which is a powerful form of SWOT analysis explained in our post giving SWOT analysis template examples .

Through our RACE Planning Framework, you can access tools and templates designed to help you optimize across 25 opportunities, integrated across each stage of RACE, which you can see in the infographic below:

Starting with these holistic approaches, you will quickly identify opportunities for growth and can plan strategies and actions that help you achieve your vision for your business. That's why opportunities are the first step in our OSA cycle.

Identify marketing strategies

Now you know what you want to do, strategy is working out how to achieve your goals in an efficient and effective manner. To do so, you'll likely lean on guides, templates, and models to inform your strategy.

Making good business decisions to inform your budgets, investment priorities, and key metrics are all elements of a successful marketing strategy.

Marketing plan actions

Of course, the final stage of any marketing strategy is putting it all into place!

To help you manage your time and marketing outputs, our RACE Growth System is structured around short 90-day planning cycles. This means you will see quarterly growth, as well as setting longer-term annual goals.

Quarterly measurement and reporting allow marketers and business owners to spot trends and make optimizations in a shorter timeframe too, to keep cycling customers through your dedicated marketing funnel experience.

Example marketing plan structure

It can be daunting to develop a marketing plan for the first time, so let's walk through the basics together. If you're looking for a practical, simple, data-driven marketing plan, these 7 factors will help you create and action your plan with success.

Step 1. Customer analysis (Opportunity)

A good plan starts by asking 'Where are we now?'. Gain an overview via your customers, but don’t forget to ask the right questions. One of my pet hates is the ‘hypothetical question’ e.g. A hotel asking “if you would stay here again?” It’s possible you would stay there again, but if it’s been a one-off visit it’s very unlikely it will actually happen. Removing hypothetical questions ensures you capture facts, not fiction.

If you’ve got a start-up business or are looking at a marketing plan for a totally new area, many other research resources are available including online reports, insights via trends and conferences. This informs your business decision and ensures the plan is fundamentally sound.

Step 2. Marketing audit (Opportunity)

After you’ve captured customer insights, the next step is a comprehensive review or audit of the business. Most countries publish statistical data on businesses in their region. This can tell you the number of businesses in specific sectors, average numbers of employees, average earnings, average income per household and more. This valuable information highlights market values, market potential and opportunities. This enables you to understand where your business sits in its market sector and the market share available.

A key element of the audit is the SWOT and whilst you and many marketers are familiar with the SWOT analysis, you may be less familiar with the McKinsey 7S framework of business. Taking a holistic look at the business, thinking about Strategy, Structure, Systems, Staff, Style, Skills and Shared values forms a base for your SWOT. Business members can access a 7S and SWOT template in the smart insigths Business marketing plan guide .

Part of a marketing audit is competitor benchmarking. Really understanding what the competitors offer. The more you understand how they work, the more likely you are to be able to predict their next move. You won’t be one of these companies that says “we never saw it coming”. Tools such as Google Alerts help you embed this as an automatic ongoing process.

One of my clients ensured they always got the early news on their key competitor by buying some of their shares! It meant they had access to latest reports, and newsletters and could attend annual meetings to hear what other shareholders thought. This was all for an investment of £150.

Step 3. Create sustainable objectives: Where do we want to go? (Opportunity)

It’s easy to create general objectives; it’s harder to develop SMART objectives.

Taking this one stage further, businesses that use numbers alone often miss key values inside the business. It’s easy to become numbers-driven; it’s harder to create ‘softer’ objectives. In Emarketing Excellence (2022), Dave Chaffey and PR Smith developed the 5s model, initially as a mechanism for reviewing websites. I’ve used this for many years to develop business objectives. It tends to challenge the thinking within a business and gets the owners and managers considering the business as a whole, rather than sales alone.

Look at your business. Do you have SMART objectives for:

• The sales forecast; sales figures, number of new clients wanted?
• Customer service; how can you improve the service to customers?
• Communication (speak) providing information to clients?
• Saving time, increasing your business efficiency and reducing costs?
• The wow factor! Adding sizzle to make your business stand out from the crowd?

Step 4. Segment your customer base (Strategy)

Key strategic initiatives for your business will include one or more of these options:

• Enter new markets
• Develop new products
• Improve the competitive position of the business
• Maintain the competitive position
• Harvest part of the business
• Exit the business

When you know the strategic initiatives the business is taking, it’s easier to segment your customer base, whether you’re B2B, B2C or a blend of both. You can use the mnemonic SUPERB to identify your customer segments:

• Size – Is the market large enough to justify segmenting?
• Unique – Do measurable differences exist between segments?
• Profits – Do anticipated profits exceed the costs of additional marketing plans and other changes?
• Easy Access – Is each segment easily accessible to your team?
• Reaction – Is the market able to react to your communications?
• Benefits – Will the different segments need different benefits?

Step 5. Target new customers and position your business (Strategy)

Growing a business always involves finding new customers, this may be different segments or markets and may encourage your business to look at product development.

What opportunities are there in your business to:

• Sell more of your existing products or services to your existing customer base? (Market Penetration Strategy)
• Introduce your existing product range to a new customer group? (Market Development Strategy)
• Augment or improve the existing product offer? (Product Development Strategy)
• Move into a new market with a new product offer using the skills within the business? (Diversification Strategies)

Pricing is a critical area in any business. Kotler (1988) described nine marketing mix strategies on price quality, which we look at in detail in the Business marketing plan guide for Business members, to support your pricing strategy development.

A pricing matrix is a really useful tool for product marketers or managers because it helps you identify opportunities within your product and pricing strategies. Don't forget to research which of these strategies are your main competitors using too and make sure to use key messages to help differentiate yourself.

Step 6. Create your marketing action plan (Action)

The key to making it happen is to create a detailed marketing action plan. If you don’t have time to conduct each step yourself, you can explore other options and contract out specific tasks to an external consultant or agency.

I have found that an Action Plan that includes more detail, nominates someone to do the work and sets dates by when it should be completed, is more likely to get done than a loose set of instructions. A good action plan becomes ’work instructions’ for different people.

Busy marketing managers may enlist support from the admin team who often relish the opportunity to carry out new tasks, as long as they have a detailed brief. Or for more specialized work, marketing managers may wish to enlist an Agency.

Step 7. Monitor, manage and improve (Action)

The final step is about monitoring action, managing the process and measuring results. The 7 steps to make your plan happen are:

• It is essential to maintain the impetus, start the plan today, not tomorrow.
• Appoint one person to monitor the entire plan and give them the authority to do so.
• Regular meetings should be held to review the plan. These could be 20-minute meetings at the start of the week.
• If you don’t do it today, your competitors will start tomorrow.
• If one item is difficult to start, move on to the next area.
• At the end of each quarter, review what has taken place and where more help is needed.
• The most successful businesses stick to the plan and make it happen – whilst still getting on with the day job.

Other types of marketing plan

As the world of digital marketing continues to develop, many find that particular functions within marketing require their own planning document. See examples of where this may be useful below:

• New product marketing plan: Launching a new product requires its own planning, this process can be make or break for your product. Find out about the product launch plan that generated $1 billion in 60 days .
• Content strategy: 98% of marketers believe 'having or following' a content strategy is 'important for marketing success'.
• Nich marketing strategy: Niche marketing considers the narrow category into which your business falls and targets specific subsets of customers accordingly.

But, remember, it is recommended to define one flagship plan for the whole team, for governance and accountability, before branching out into secondary planning.

One final tip; set a start and an end date for creating and launching the marketing plan , if not, the audit stage could continue indefinitely! Download your free guide and get started today.

Use our simple three-page Microsoft Word template if you work for a small business who needs to quickly create a simple, practical marketing plan quickly. It's structured in three sections of steps using the acclaimed RACE Growth System for improving marketing results

By Annmarie Hanlon

Annmarie Hanlon PhD is an academic and practitioner in strategic digital marketing and the application of social media for business. Dr Hanlon has expertise in the strategic application of social media for business and the move from digitization, to digitalization and digital transformation for business. Her expertise spans consumer touch points, online customer service, the use of reviews, the role of influencers, online engagement and digital content. You can follow her update on Twitter https://twitter.com/annmariehanlon

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Unleash Your Potential With A Sample Real Estate Business Plan

Embarking on a journey in the real estate industry requires careful planning and a strategic approach. A robust business plan serves not only as a blueprint for your operations but also as a crucial tool for attracting investors, securing funding, and guiding your decisions. When developing a sample real estate business plan, it is vital to incorporate comprehensive research, clear objectives, and actionable strategies. This document ultimately reflects your vision and commitment, which can inspire confidence among stakeholders and partners. Understanding the key components of a successful business plan will empower you to navigate the complexities of the real estate market with greater assurance.

Creating a well-defined roadmap for your real estate venture can significantly impact your chances of success. A well-crafted sample real estate business plan encompasses various elements, from market analysis to operational strategies, ensuring that every aspect of the business is meticulously planned. By outlining your goals and the means to achieve them, you establish a solid foundation for growth and adaptation in a competitive industry. This article will guide you through the essential sections that need to be included in your business plan, helping you to articulate your objectives and strategies effectively. Whether you are just starting or seeking to refine an existing plan, understanding these foundational elements will be invaluable.

Crafting an Effective Sample Real Estate Business Plan

When starting a real estate business, having a solid business plan is essential. A well-crafted sample real estate business plan can act as your roadmap, guiding you through the challenges of building a successful company. It should clearly outline your goals, strategies, and how you plan to operate your business.

Your business plan must start with an executive summary. This part gives a brief overview of what your real estate business is about. It should highlight your mission, your vision, and the specific goals you want to achieve. Think of this as the elevator pitch for your business. Keep it concise but impactful to grab the reader’s attention.

Understanding the Market

Next, focus on your market analysis. This section dives into the real estate market you’re entering. You need to show that you’ve done your homework. Ask yourself questions like:

• What are the current trends in the real estate market?
• Who are your main competitors?
• What demographic are you targeting?
• What unique services will you offer?

Addressing these questions can provide valuable insights, helping you understand how to position your business effectively within the market.

Business Structure

The next part of your real estate business plan should explain your business’s structure. Will you operate as a sole proprietor, partnership, or LLC? This decision impacts your tax obligations and potential liabilities. Clearly outline this information to guide readers through your operational framework.

After the structure, detail your marketing strategies. Your marketing approach is key to attracting clients and closing deals. Consider a mix of both traditional and digital marketing tactics. Here are some strategies you might include:

• Creating a professional website with listings and resources.
• Using social media to engage with potential buyers and sellers.
• Networking with local businesses and community organizations.
• Investing in targeted online ads to reach your demographics.

Each strategy should align with your overarching goals and budget , giving a clear picture of how you intend to promote your services.

Financial Projections

An effective sample real estate business plan must also include financial projections. This is where you estimate your expected revenue, expenses, and profitability. Break down your costs into categories such as:

• Startup Costs (licenses, office space, marketing)
• Operational Costs (staff salaries, maintenance, utilities)
• Projected Sales (based on market research)

Graphics or tables showing your projected growth can make this section more engaging. This data not only shows your potential but also helps in securing funding if needed.

Setting Goals

Goals are critical for success. Establishing both short-term and long-term goals will keep you on track. Short-term goals might include:

• Closing your first five deals within the first year.
• Building a client base of at least 100 contacts.
• Generating a revenue of $100,000 in the first year.

Long-term goals could be:

• Expanding into new markets within five years.
• Establishing a brand recognized in your local community.
• Creating a sustainable business model with repeat clients.

These goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). They serve as guideposts as you navigate the complexities of the real estate world.

Execution Timing and Accountability

Discuss how you will implement your strategies and who will be responsible for each task. Assigning roles ensures accountability and helps keep the business organized. Setting timelines for your goals and milestones will also keep the team motivated and focused on results.

Crafting a robust sample real estate business plan can set the foundation for a successful venture. Ensure your plan is comprehensive, precise, and tailored to your business goals. Remember, a great plan not only helps you secure funding but also provides clarity and direction for the growth of your business.

Key Components of a Real Estate Business Plan

Creating a real estate business plan is essential for anyone looking to thrive in the competitive property market. A well-structured plan serves as a roadmap, guiding your decisions and helping you stay focused on your goals. Here are some key components to consider when drafting your plan.

Executive Summary

The executive summary is a concise overview of your entire business plan. It should cover your objectives, target market, and competitive advantages in a few paragraphs. This section sets the tone for your plan, highlighting why your real estate business is unique.

Business Description

In this section, delve into the specifics of your business. Describe the type of real estate services you plan to offer, whether it’s residential, commercial, or industrial. Explain your mission statement, values, and vision for the future of your business.

Market Analysis

Conducting a thorough market analysis is crucial for understanding the landscape in which you will operate. Include the following in this section:

• Target Market: Identify your ideal clients and demographics, such as age, income level, and buying preferences.
• Market Trends: Explore current trends affecting the real estate market, including pricing, buyer behavior, and economic indicators.
• Competitor Analysis: Identify your competitors and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Understand their marketing strategies and how you can differentiate yourself.

Organization and Management

Outlining your organization’s structure is essential in showcasing how your business will operate. Include details about your team’s roles, responsibilities, and qualifications. If you have a legal structure in mind, such as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or LLC, mention this here as well.

Marketing Strategies

Effective marketing strategies will help you reach your target audience and grow your business. Highlight various methods you plan to employ, including:

• Online Marketing: Utilize social media, content marketing, and real estate listing platforms to attract clients.
• Networking: Attend industry events and leverage personal connections to build relationships.
• Traditional Advertising: Consider flyers, direct mail, and advertising in local publications to broaden your reach.

To secure funding or investment, provide detailed financial projections, including:

• Start-Up Costs: Outline the initial costs involved in launching your business, such as licensing, marketing, and office expenses.
• Revenue Streams: Identify how you plan to generate income, whether through commission, property management fees, or other services.
• Cash Flow: Create a cash flow statement to project your incoming and outgoing funds over a specific period.

Funding Request

If you seek funding, clearly state the amount needed and how you plan to utilize it. Assign percentages to various expenses like marketing, operational costs, or technology investments. Being transparent about your needs can help potential investors understand your vision.

The appendix serves as a supplementary section that includes additional materials, such as resumes, legal documents, and references. This section allows you to provide deeper insights without cluttering the core sections of your business plan.

Creating a comprehensive real estate business plan is not just about preparing for the future. It’s a powerful tool to help you visualize your business’s potential, make informed decisions, and navigate the challenges of the real estate market. By including these key components, you position yourself for success in your real estate endeavors.

Understanding Market Analysis for Real Estate Ventures

When diving into the world of real estate ventures, understanding market analysis becomes essential. Market analysis helps investors and real estate professionals identify opportunities, assess risks, and make informed decisions.

One of the first steps in market analysis is defining the target market. This involves identifying specific demographics such as age, income level, and lifestyle of potential buyers or renters. Knowing who your target audience is plays a vital role in shaping your investment strategies.

Gathering Data

Data is the backbone of any successful market analysis. The following sources can provide valuable information:

• Government Reports: Local and national statistics give insights into housing trends and economic conditions.
• Real Estate Websites: Websites like Zillow and Realtor.com offer data on property prices, sales trends, and rental rates.
• Local Real Estate Agents: Agents have firsthand knowledge of the market dynamics and can offer valuable insights.
• Local Economic Reports: These can highlight job growth, investment in infrastructure, and other factors that can affect property values.

Analyzing Supply and Demand

Understanding supply and demand is crucial. When demand exceeds supply, property values typically rise. On the other hand, a surplus of properties can lead to lower prices. Consider the following:

• Current Sales Trends: Monitor how quickly homes sell. Quick sales often indicate high demand.
• New Developments: Take note of any new constructions. An overabundance of new homes can signify a potential market slow down.
• Vacancy Rates: High vacancy rates can indicate a lack of demand, while low rates can signify robust interest.

Location Matters

The location of your investment is a critical factor in market analysis. Here are a few elements to evaluate:

• Neighborhood Characteristics: Investigate amenities like schools, parks, and shopping areas. These can significantly influence property values.
• Future Developments: Research planned infrastructure improvements, as they can enhance location desirability and property values.
• Crime Rates: Safety is a priority for most buyers and renters. Areas with lower crime rates tend to attract more interest.

Understanding Competition

Identifying competitors within the target market allows you to position your venture correctly. Analyze:

• Types of Properties: Know what types of homes or rentals are most prevalent in your area.
• Pricing Strategies: Understand how similar properties are priced. Competitive pricing can make your offering more attractive.
• Marketing Approaches: Studying successful marketing strategies can help you reach and attract your target audience more effectively.

Evaluating Financial Metrics

Financial analysis is necessary for any real estate venture. Examine the following metrics to gauge potential profitability:

• Return on Investment (ROI): Calculate this by comparing the net profit with the total investment. A higher ROI signifies a more favorable investment.
• Cap Rate: This metric helps assess the property’s potential return relative to its price. A cap rate indicates how quickly the investment can pay off.
• Cash Flow: Positive cash flow means your rental income exceeds expenses, which is a good sign for investors.

Having a clear market analysis allows real estate investors to capitalize on trends, making strategic decisions that enhance their chances for success. By following these steps, anyone can better understand the complexities of the real estate market and position themselves positively for growth and profitability.

Effective market analysis is a powerful tool in the real estate business. It lays the groundwork for successful investments, guiding decisions and helping investors navigate the ever-evolving landscape of real estate opportunities.

Strategies for Marketing Your Real Estate Business

Marketing your real estate business effectively is crucial to stand out in a competitive market. By employing a variety of strategies, you can attract potential clients and build a solid brand presence. Here are some key strategies that can help you elevate your real estate marketing game.

Leverage Social Media

Social media platforms offer a fantastic opportunity to connect with potential buyers and sellers. Here are a few tactics to consider:

• Create engaging content: Share property photos, virtual tours, client testimonials, and market insights to keep your audience engaged.
• Use targeted ads: Platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to create targeted ad campaigns that reach specific demographics.
• Engage with your audience: Respond to comments and messages promptly to build relationships and trust.

Optimize Your Website

Your website is often the first point of contact for potential clients. To ensure it functions effectively:

• Use SEO best practices: Incorporate relevant keywords, such as “buy homes,” “real estate listings,” and “real estate services,” in your website content.
• Make it mobile-friendly: Ensure your website looks good and operates smoothly on mobile devices, as many users browse on their phones.
• Provide valuable resources: Include a blog that offers market tips, neighborhood highlights, and even DIY home improvement advice to attract visitors.

Develop a Strong Brand Identity

Creating a unique brand identity helps people remember your business. Here’s how to craft a memorable brand:

• Define your niche: Identify what sets you apart from other real estate agents and emphasize that in your marketing.
• Design a professional logo: Your logo should reflect your brand and be consistent across all platforms, including your website and social media profiles.
• Utilize consistent messaging: Your communication should align with your brand’s voice, whether it’s friendly, professional, or approachable.

Network in Your Community

Building a strong local presence can significantly aid your marketing efforts. Consider these actions:

• Attend local events: Join community gatherings, real estate expos, or home shows to connect with potential clients and other professionals.
• Partner with local businesses: Collaborate with other businesses to reach a larger audience. For example, a local coffee shop could showcase your business card or flyers.
• Join professional organizations: Groups like the Chamber of Commerce can help you network with influential community members and grow your professional presence.

Utilize Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective communication strategies. To maximize its impact:

• Build a quality email list: Offer something valuable in exchange for email addresses, like a free market report or eBook.
• Create valuable content: Your emails should provide insightful market updates, property listings, and tips that engage your audience.
• Use segmentation: Divide your list based on client interests, such as buyers, sellers, or renters, to send tailored messages.

Invest in Virtual Tours and Videos

Using virtual tours and videos can turn casual browsers into serious buyers. Here’s how:

• Create property videos: Showcase your listings through dynamic video walk-throughs to create an immersive experience.
• Host live virtual open houses: Use platforms like Zoom or Facebook Live to engage with your audience in real-time.
• Share testimonials: Record client success stories to build credibility and help potential clients see the value in your services.

By diversifying your marketing strategies and focusing on building relationships, you can create a real estate business that stands out. Your approach should be engaging, authentic, and consistent to foster long-term success in the ever-evolving real estate market.

Navigating Legal Considerations in Real Estate Planning

Navigating the world of real estate involves understanding a variety of legal considerations. Whether you are buying, selling, leasing, or developing property, grasping these legalities is crucial for success. Knowing the laws can protect your investment and ensure a smooth process. Below are key areas to focus on when addressing legal considerations in real estate planning.

Understanding Property Rights

Property rights are fundamental in real estate. It’s essential to distinguish between different types of ownership:

• Freehold Estate: This type grants full ownership of the property, including the land and any structures on it.
• Leasehold Estate: Here, you lease the property for a specific period but do not own it.
• Condominiums: You own a unit within a complex but share ownership of common areas.

Understanding these distinctions can help you protect your rights as a property owner or tenant.

Zoning and Land Use Regulations

Zoning laws dictate how land can be used in different areas. These regulations can affect development and investment opportunities. Before proceeding with a project, consider the following:

• Check local zoning codes to confirm what is permissible on the property.
• Understand any restrictions related to commercial, residential, or industrial uses.
• Be aware of any future developments in the area that could impact your property’s value.

Ignoring zoning laws can lead to fines or legal complications, so always do your research.

Real Estate Contracts

Contracts play a significant role in real estate transactions. Here are crucial components to ensure your contracts are sound:

• Offers and Counteroffers: Clearly define terms, including price, deadlines, and contingencies.
• Earnest Money: This deposit shows your commitment and outlines conditions for refund.
• Disclosures: Sellers must disclose known issues with the property to buyers to avoid future disputes.

Having ironclad contracts can mitigate risks and clarify expectations for all parties involved.

Environmental Considerations

Environmental laws are critical in real estate planning as they influence land use. Key considerations include:

• Environmental Impact Assessments: Required for developments that might affect the environment.
• Hazardous Materials: Be aware of any toxic substances on the property that could lead to liability issues.
• Protected Areas: Understand regulations around wetlands, endangered species, and historical sites.

Understanding these factors can help you steer clear of legal pitfalls and potential fines.

Property Taxes and Assessments

Keeping track of property taxes is essential for property ownership. Here’s what you need to know:

• Property taxes are based on assessed value; ensure property assessments are accurate.
• Explore potential tax deductions available for property owners, such as mortgage interest.
• Stay informed about local tax laws as they can change and directly impact your investment.

Always budget for property taxes to avoid financial complications.

Financing and Mortgages

Securing financing is often the backbone of real estate transactions. Factors to consider include:

• Types of Loans: Understand the differences between conventional, FHA, and VA loans.
• Interest Rates: Shop around for the best rates and terms.
• Loan Terms: Know the implications of fixed-rate versus adjustable-rate mortgages.

Comprehending financing options can impact your long-term financial health.

With these considerations in mind, navigating the legal aspects of real estate planning becomes more manageable. Keeping informed and seeking professional advice when needed is essential for protecting your interests and ensuring a successful outcome in all real estate endeavors.

Tips for Presenting Your Real Estate Business Plan to Investors

When you’re ready to present your real estate business plan to investors, it’s crucial to make a strong impression. Your presentation can make the difference between gaining funding or leaving empty-handed. Here are some practical tips to help you effectively communicate your vision and secure the investments you need.

Know Your Audience

Understanding the investors you’re presenting to is essential. Consider the following:

• Background: Research their investment history and preferences.
• Expectations: Know what they typically look for in a proposal.
• Concerns: Be prepared to address any potential questions or objections.

Focus on Your Unique Selling Proposition

Every successful real estate business plan highlights what sets it apart from competitors. Investors want to know why they should choose your project over others. Be clear and concise about your unique approach. Here’s how:

• Identify Your Niche: Are you focusing on luxury properties, affordable housing, or something else?
• Highlight Innovations: Discuss any new methods or technologies you plan to employ.
• Showcase Your Team: Talk about the experience and skills of your team members.

Present Clear Financial Projections

Investors want to see realistic financial projections that demonstrate the potential for return on their investment. Include:

• Start-up Costs: Provide a detailed breakdown of initial funding needs.
• Revenue Streams: Outline how you plan to generate income.
• Exit Strategy: Explain how investors can expect to recoup their investment.

Use Visual aids Effectively

Visuals can significantly enhance your presentation. They help simplify complex information and keep your audience engaged. Consider using:

• PowerPoint Slides: Create slides that summarize key points and use bullet points for clarity.
• Charts and Graphs: Use these to present financial data and projections visually.
• Property Images: Include high-quality photos or renderings of the properties you plan to focus on.

Practice Your Presentation

The delivery of your presentation is as crucial as the content itself. Practice will help you gain confidence and smooth out any rough edges. Here are some tips:

• Rehearse Aloud: Go through your presentation out loud multiple times.
• Seek Feedback: Present to friends or colleagues beforehand and gather constructive criticism.
• Time Your Presentation: Ensure you stay within any given time limits while covering all essential points.

Anticipate Questions

Investors will likely have questions following your presentation. Anticipating these questions will demonstrate your thorough preparation. Common concerns might include:

• Market Risk: Be ready to discuss your market research and analysis.
• Competition: Explain how you plan to tackle your competitors.
• Property Management: Clarify your strategies for ongoing management and maintenance.

Follow Up After the Presentation

After your presentation, it’s essential to follow up with your investors. This shows your professionalism and maintains their interest. Consider sending:

• Thank You Emails: Express appreciation for their time and consideration.
• Additional Information: Provide any additional documents or answers to questions that may have arisen during the meeting.
• Meeting Requests: Suggest further meetings to discuss potential partnerships.

Presenting your real estate business plan effectively can create lasting impressions. By knowing your audience, focusing on your unique offerings, and preparing diligently, you can communicate your vision in a way that excites investors. Good luck, and may your real estate ventures be successful!

Creating a sample real estate business plan is not just about filling a template with numbers and jargon; it’s about shaping a vision that clearly communicates your goals and strategies. As we discussed, each component of the plan plays a vital role in presenting a holistic view of your real estate business. When crafting your business plan, you want to focus on clarity and thoroughness to ensure potential investors or partners grasp your intentions.

The key components, such as executive summaries, descriptions of your services, and marketing strategies, must cohesively align with your overall business objectives. Special attention should be given to market analysis, as understanding your local market trends can help identify opportunities and risks that may be ahead. Investors appreciate a well-researched analysis that highlights your knowledge of the industry, demographics, competition, and properties in demand.

Financial projections are the backbone of your real estate business plan. Accurate estimations not only demonstrate your professionalism but also provide investors with a clear picture of your anticipated revenue and expenses. Showing a solid understanding of financing options and investment returns can significantly boost the plan’s credibility.

When it comes to marketing strategies, your approach should reflect an innovative mindset tailored to reach your target audience. Whether through online platforms, networking events, or traditional advertising, showcasing your strategy energizes your plan and piques investor interest.

Legal considerations are equally crucial to address. Real estate ventures come with various regulations, and outlining how you navigate these laws can set you apart from competitors. remember that an engaging presentation can turn your written business plan into a compelling narrative. Practice your pitch, anticipate questions, and invite feedback to ensure you make a positive impression on potential investors.

Ultimately, a well-rounded real estate business plan not only guides your business toward success but also assures investors that you are a credible and prepared partner. Prioritize transparency, research, and clear communication, and you’re more likely to secure the necessary support to make your real estate visions a reality.

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• Student Loans and Code Section 127 Educational Assistance Programs: A Reminder from the IRS, FAQs, and a Sample Plan Document
• They can be used to help reimburse the costs of or pay for employees’ student loans through December 31, 2025;
• They must be established in writing and cannot discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees;
• In most cases, benefits under such programs are excluded from federal income tax withholding, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, and federal unemployment (FUTA) tax; and
• Tax-free educational benefits are limited to $5,250 per employee per year.

Earlier this summer, the IRS also issued Fact Sheet 2024-22 with FAQs regarding educational assistance programs. Of note, the FAQs include a sample plan document that employers can modify to establish an educational assistance program, and they provide protection from penalties based on reasonable, good faith reliance on the FAQs. This post focuses on the student loan aspects of the FAQs and provides actionable steps for employers who offer, or intend to offer, an educational assistance program.

For many years, employers have offered educational assistance programs to assist employees with the cost of tuition, fees, books, equipment, and supplies on a tax-free basis. In 2020, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act amended Code Section 127 to add certain student loan payments to the types of eligible educational assistance available.

The FAQs restate the IRS’s prior guidance on educational assistance programs and, for the first time, provide guidance regarding the treatment of student loans. With respect to student loans, the FAQs state that:

• the loans must be incurred by the employee for the education of the employee only, not a spouse or a child of the employee;
• when the loan was incurred does not matter;
• only loans for education at an “eligible educational institution” qualify, and “eligible educational institutions” include:
• any college, university, vocational school, or other postsecondary educational institution as defined in Code Sections 221(d)(2) and 25A(f)(2); [1]
• an institution conducting an internship or residency program leading to a degree or certificate awarded by an institution of higher education, a hospital, or a health care facility that offers postgraduate training; [2]
• only student loan debt incurred for tuition, fees, books, equipment, and supplies qualifies;
• loan payments paid or reimbursed by the employer must be made during the period beginning March 28, 2020 and ending December 31, 2025 (unless extended by future legislation) and may be paid directly to a third party such as an educational provider or a loan servicer, or directly to the employee;
• if an employee seeks reimbursement for student loan payments, the payments must be paid by the employee while an employee and in the same calendar year for which reimbursement is made by the employer;
• the total amount that the employee can exclude from gross income for payments of principal or interest on student loans and other educational assistance under Code Section 127 is $5,250 per calendar year; and
• “unused” amounts of the $5,250 annual limit cannot be carried forward to subsequent years.

For example, an employer may reimburse an employee in 2025 for the payments made in 2025 on student debt incurred by the employee in 2015 prior to employment if the other requirements described above are satisfied, but an employer cannot reimburse the employee after 2025 for any student loan payments.

Reliance on FAQs

The IRS expressly states in Fact Sheet 2024-22 that:

• taxpayers who rely in good faith on the FAQs will satisfy the reasonable cause standard for penalty relief, and
• if an FAQ turns out to be an inaccurate statement of the law as applied to a particular taxpayer’s case, the law will control the taxpayer’s tax liability, not the FAQs.

What should employers do?

Employers who offer, or intend to offer, an educational assistance program should:

• maintain a written plan and provide reasonable notice of the availability of the program to employees;
• if providing student loan assistance as part of the program, ensure the terms of the plan reflect that; and
• review the IRS sample plan , which includes: (1) optional provisions that allow the employer to choose whether or not to include student loans as an educational assistance benefit under the plan; and (2) mandatory provisions describing non-discrimination and substantiation requirements.

As a design matter, employers may also want to consider limiting eligibility for the program to employees who are not highly compensated as defined by Code Section 414(q). [3] This will dramatically simplify administration of the program because the program would automatically pass required non-discrimination testing. [4]

Overall, the reminder, the FAQs, and the sample plan document are valuable tools for employers that have established, or are looking to establish, educational assistance programs.

Anything else about student loans?

For plan years beginning after December 31, 2024, SECURE 2.0 allows employers to make matching contributions to certain retirement plans based on qualified student loan payments by employees. Our August post describes in detail the IRS guidance on this change in the law.

[1] The Department of Education determines whether an organization is an eligible education institution. A loan, however, does not have to be issued or guaranteed under a Federal postsecondary education loan program to be a qualified education loan.

[2] Code Section 221(d)(2)(B).

[3] Generally, an employee who: (1) during the current plan year or the preceding plan year was at any time a more than 5% owner of the employer; or (2) received compensation from the employer for the preceding plan year in excess of $150,000 (for 2024) is a highly compensated employee for the current plan year.

[4] Note, there is an additional limit relating to more than 5% owners of the employer: not more than 5% of the amounts paid or incurred by the employer for educational assistance during the year may be provided for such individuals (or their spouses or dependents), considered together as a group.

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