Marketing plan

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan helps to outline how your company should act in relation to your marketing. The marketing plan plays an important role for your business as it is an essential element for your business as it helps to show the direction your business should take and the resources needed to achieve results with your marketing.

Learning how to write a marketing plan forces you to think about all the important things that contribute to an effective marketing strategy.

A well-defined marketing plan helps you stay focused on your marketing goals. A marketing plan typically includes the following items:

• An overview of your company's marketing and advertising goals.
• A description of your company's current marketing position.
• A timeline of when tasks within your marketing strategy will be completed.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to track on.
• A description of your company's target audience and customer needs.

Whether you're a team trying to set smarter marketing goals or a consultant trying to send your customer in the right direction, a sound marketing plan is always backed by good research and data.

How to create a marketing plan

The scope of your marketing plan varies depending on its purpose or the type of organization it is intended for. For example, you can create a marketing plan that provides an overview of a company's entire marketing strategy or simply focus on a specific channel such as SEO, social media marketing or content marketing.

Let's look at how to create a good marketing plan

• Write a simple summary
• Data-driven marketing goals
• Outline your persona
• Research all your competitors
• Set accurate key bases and measurement standard.
• Create an action plan for your marketing strategy
• Set guidelines for tracking or reporting

1. Simple summary

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

We recommend having the following points included in a summary:

• Simple marketing goals
• Key company milestones
• Facts about your brand
• Employee anecdotes
• Future goals and plans

In addition, we recommend that you keep your summary fairly short. You're not writing a novel, so try to keep it under three to four paragraphs.

2. Data-driven marketing goals

This is one of the most important parts of the entire marketing plan, so make sure you take your time. Be as specific as possible. You need to set goals that affect your website's traffic, conversions and customer success - and always use real numbers.

Avoid outlining vague goals like:

• Get more Facebook followers.
• Write more blog posts
• Increase the number of returning customers
• Lower the bounce rate

Instead, identify key performance metrics you want to influence and the percentage you want to increase them by.

• Get 500 new Facebook followers per month.
• Write 10 blog posts a month
• Increase the number of returning customers with 20% by the end of 2021.
• Lower the bounce rate by 2% by the end of Q4.

3. Outline your persona

Outlining your persona is an important part of a marketing plan that should not be overlooked. You shouldn't just ask 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 their problems?

Answering these questions will require a lot of research, but it's important information to get. Here are a few examples of how you can collect your data.

• Interview with your customers
• Use focus groups
• Survey other companies in the same industry
• Research your audience

Competitor analysis

This section helps you identify who your competitors are, what they are doing and how you can squeeze in next to them, or ideally surpass them.

Your competitor analysis should typically include:

• Who their marketing team is
• Who is in management
• What is your marketing strategy
• What their sales strategy
• Social media strategy
• Their market value / economy
• Their annual growth

You may also want to investigate the strategies they use across theirs:

• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• SEO
• Video marketing

Try our online SEO competitor analysis here.

5. Key foundations

It's quite difficult to plan for the future if you don't know where your business is right now.

Setting baselines allows you to more accurately track your progress. You'll also be able to better analyze what worked and what didn't so you can build a stronger strategy. It will definitely help others understand your goals and strategy too.

6. Action plan for your marketing strategy

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

Mindmaps are an effective way to show how a strategy with many moving parts ties together. No matter how you choose to visualize your strategy, your team should know exactly what to do.

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

7. guidelines for tracking results

Finish your marketing plan with a brief explanation of how you plan to track and measure your results.

Just like the other sections of your marketing plan, you can choose how specific you want to be. But there should be some clear guidelines on how you measure the progress and results of your marketing plan.

At a minimum, your performance tracking guidelines should state:

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

Good luck with your marketing plan!

Read also our post about B2B marketing planwhere we provide some more concrete tips for B2B companies.

Frequently asked questions about marketing plan