Marketing plan

What is a marketing plan?

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

Learning 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 points:

• 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 client in the right direction, a sound marketing plan always backed up by good research and data.

How to make a marketing plan

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

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

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

1. Simple summary

One of the best ways to get people to read your marketing plan is with a well-written summary. A 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 an executive summary:

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

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

2. Data-driven marketing objectives

This is one of the most important parts of the whole 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 such as:

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

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

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

3. Sketch 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 company solve their problems?

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

• Interview your customers
• Use focus groups
• Survey other companies in the same sector
• Study your audience

Competitor analysis

This section helps you identify who your competitors are, what they do and how you can mingle with them, or ideally surpass them.

Your competitor analysis should typically include:

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

Also usefully examine the strategies they use across their:

• content marketing
• Marketing on social media
• SEO
• Video marketing

Try our online SEO competitor analysis here.

5. Key facts

It's pretty hard 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 analyse what worked and what didn't, so you can build a stronger strategy. This will certainly help others understand your goals and strategy as well.

6. Action plan for your marketing strategy

After pulling all the 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. However you choose to visualise your strategy, your team needs to know exactly what they need to do.

Breaking down your strategy into tasks will make it easier to go about the task. Another important way to visualize your marketing strategy is to create a roadmap for a project. A roadmap for a project visualizes the timeline of your product with individual tasks.

7. Guidelines for tracking results

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

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 on B2B marketing plan, where we give some more concrete tips for B2B companies.

Frequently asked questions about marketing plan