example of 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 .

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

9 marketing plan examples to inspire your growth strategy

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 the performance of the strategy

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 or simply focus on a specific channel like SEO, social media marketing, content marketing and more, like in this example:

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.

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 content 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:

Marketing plan v.s 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.

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

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:

1. Free marketing plan template

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. Pastel social media marketing campaign template

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 strategy template

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 fact sheet template

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.

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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Featured Reads

• Marketing |
• 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 streamlines strategic planning with work management

Write better AI prompts: A 4-sentence framework

What is content marketing? A complete guide

Smooth product launches are simpler than you think

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7 Inspiring Marketing Plan Examples

Struggling with your marketing plan? We’ve got you covered. Here are the essential elements, plus seven examples that get it right.

Navigating uncharted territories without a compass is impossible. The same is true for companies that try to overcome market challenges without a marketing plan. And yet: 50% of small and medium business owners don’t have one, according to Search Engine Journal . 

We get it—creating a marketing plan can be a real challenge, especially if you’re starting from scratch. What needs to be in there? What doesn’t matter? 

We took real-world and hypothetical examples to show how to write your marketing plan.

Free marketing plan template

Calibrate your strategy and create a content roadmap for paid and organic channels to earn new customers and keep the ones you've got with our marketing strategy template.

How to approach marketing plan creation

What your marketing plan looks like will depend on the size and type of your business. Looking at examples from companies in the same industry or same size and status should be your North Star. 

That said, you can always find great frameworks that you can apply to your marketing plan, no matter the industry. You need to adjust the approach to fit your business and continue building from there.

Decide on the complexity based on your purpose

A marketing plan can vary from a few pages to a detailed roadmap that covers every aspect of the business. To decide on the scope, you need to ask yourself: What is the purpose of my marketing plan? 

For some businesses, it’s outlining a specific marketing strategy with concrete actions. For others, it’s setting up benchmarks to assess results. There are also businesses trying to attract investors, so they need a comprehensive marketing plan to depict the company’s future.

Having the purpose in mind is the best way to determine what should be included in your marketing plan.

Use examples as pointers, not rigid rules

The marketing plan you create should give answers to the questions: Who are my target customers? How do I reach them? How do I retain them? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Each business is unique, so consider what resonates with your goals and your target customers instead of following some template blindly. 

Remember: use marketing plan examples as a map rather than GPS coordinates.

Examples for every element in a marketing plan

Executive summary, mission statement, marketing objectives, swot analysis, market research, market strategy.

To help you include the essential aspects, we’ve dissected the core elements of a marketing plan, highlighting the key takeaways and best practices with plenty of examples. Think of these elements as stepping stones toward your goal.

First things first: you should start with a synopsis of the marketing plan. This section includes the basic business information and an overview of what you have done, what you plan to do, and how you plan to get there. 

The purpose of an executive summary is not to provide detailed information but to set the stage and pique readers’ interest. All the sections in the executive summary are a top-level view of the information you will elaborate on in your marketing plan later. Although this is the first section in a marketing plan, it is usually written last.

Here’s a great example from  Palo Alto Software . The executive summary in this sample marketing plan for an organic bakery is short and straightforward. At this point, you want to give readers context and set expectations.

Image source: Palo Alto Software

A mission statement is a sentence describing your business goals and philosophies. This action-oriented statement lets customers know your company’s purpose. 

The modern customer values more than price alone. According to Stackla , 86% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support. 

The outdoor clothing and gear brand Patagonia is committed to protecting the environment. And it’s more than words. Aside from the durable products that can be recycled, the brand donates 1% of sales to the preservation and restoration of the environment.

Patagonia's mission statement reflects its commitment: “We’re in business to save our home planet.” 

When writing a mission statement, spotlight your business’ ethos. This is not an illusory sentence. It’s the core belief of your company. The best way to approach it is to ask yourself, why are you in business, and what problems are you solving?

Image source: Patagonia

You can’t have an effective marketing plan without clear objectives. They show the direction in which your business is moving. When deciding on your marketing objectives, you should follow the SMART framework—define specific , measurable, attainable , relevant , and time-based objectives. 

Setting marketing objectives involves specifying expected results so you can measure performance and take action if needed. By defining the objectives, you should answer the following questions: 

• Where will you focus the efforts?
• What results do you expect?
• Why are the objectives important?
• When should you achieve the objectives?
• Who is responsible for attaining the objectives?
• How do you plan to achieve the results? 

In this example from MPlans , the event planning company sets SMART objectives that can be easily measured and tracked.

Image source: MPlans

Understanding the full potential of your business requires having a clear picture of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats you may encounter. Using SWOT analysis , you can identify all internal and external factors that affect the success of your business. 

The strengths and weaknesses are internal factors that you can control to some extent, while the opportunities and threats are external factors that come from the environment surrounding your business. 

However, being aware of the conditions in which your business operates gives you insights to make informed decisions about your marketing plan and your business in general. 

Here’s a SWOT analysis example for a perennial farm that grows a variety of botanical medicinal plants. While it produces high-quality plants and has business development and horticultural experience, it is faced with a lack of funding and threats from similar-sized farms. However, the opportunity lies in the growing market and customers’ need for a long-term relationship with one botanical vendor. 

Based on the information from the SWOT matrix, you can identify the next steps and the best way to reach your goals.

Image source: Bplans

The next step is thorough market research. This section should give an overview of the industry, define your buyer persona, prepare a competitive analysis, and conduct customer surveys and interviews. 

Start by analyzing your market. Keeping a finger on the industry's pulse will help you understand the needs and the potential. 

Answer the following questions: 

• What is your market size?
• What is the growth potential?
• What are the latest market trends?
• How is the business environment?
• How are customers segmented?

Next, you should decide on the target audience . If your product is good for everyone, it means that it’s good for no one. Having a target audience leads to focused marketing effort and higher conversion. 

Even though every customer is unique, you can create buyer persona profiles with characteristics common to your target audience. Here, you should define information such as demographics, location, interests, purchase intent, and everything else relevant for your target audience. 

In this example from  Cyberclick , you can see all the essential information, goals, pain points, research methods, and tools used during research, but also how the company can address customers’ needs.

Image source: Cyberclick

Competitive analysis is an important part of market research. Keeping an eye on your competitors gives you an overview of their strategy and lets you prepare accordingly. 

Not sure what  competitive analysis  looks like? Here’s an example of the elements you should include and differentiate from your competitors.

Another important market research segment is mapping out your customers’ journey from the first contact to making a purchase. The best way to gather information is by conducting customer surveys or interviews.

Explore the sources and channels your target audience uses during research, analyze their steps at each stage of the buyer journey, and understand what motivates them to make a purchase.

Now that you’ve set the foundation, it’s time to dive deeper into defining the strategy. If you’re selling products, you should specify the marketing mix through the 4Ps: product, price, place, and promotion.

Service-oriented businesses should define the 8Ps of marketing: product, price, place, promotion, people, process, physical evidence, and performance. 

Let’s take a look at Warby Parker’s marketing strategy. The direct-to-consumer eyewear company started with a simple goal in mind: to solve the problem of expensive glasses. 

From custom-designed cellulose acetate to ultra-lightweight titanium, Warby Parker uses premium materials for its frames. The glasses and lenses range from about $95 to $295, which is generally lower than the competition. 

While it started as an online-first business in 2010, Warby Parker opened its first store in 2013. Today, it has more than one hundred brick-and-mortar stores. 

Its strategy heavily relies on PR, user-generated content, and a mobile app packed with user-friendly features, such as virtually trying on frames using augmented reality.

Image source: Warby Parker

Preparing a marketing budget can seem challenging—especially for small businesses. However, to execute the projects outlined in your marketing plan, you need to allocate enough resources. 

The marketing budget should encompass all different facets of marketing—from brand and creative to product marketing, digital, content, events, and much more. 

While you can have separate plans for each segment, using this Master Marketing Budget template from HubSpot , you can compile individual budgets and determine the overall marketing cost. 

Image source: HubSpot

To give you an idea of how a complete marketing plan looks, we’re sharing seven more examples and templates that give you a step-by-step explanation of the essential elements of an effective marketing plan.

7 marketing plan examples and templates

1.  visit baton rouge.

Baton Rouge positions itself as “An Authentic Louisiana Experience” by fostering a rebirth of local passion and enthusiasm. From a detailed SWOT analysis to a well-defined target audience, there are plenty of takeaways you can apply to your marketing plan.

2. University of Illinois

In this high-level overview of the marketing strategy for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and its 2021 recruitment cycle, the University of Illinois maps out a detailed marketing plan. One thing that stands out in this marketing plan is the approach of defining objectives, tactics, and success metrics for every segment. 

 HubSpot’s template includes sections for business summary, business initiatives, target market, market strategy, budget, marketing channels, and every other important aspect of a marketing plan.

4.  Monday.com

If you want to put together a plan that already lives in a project management tool, this one from Monday.com can come in handy. Using this template, you can track all of your marketing initiatives, strategies, business goals, budgets, and marketing campaigns. The best part is you can transform data with a variety of data visualizations, including kanban, calendar, timeline, gantt, map, form, workload, and more.

5. Evernote

Evernote is another great example that can help you outline your marketing plan and keep track of your progress. The template is broken down into seven main sections: Details, Research, Goals & Objectives, Buyer Persona, Calendar, Evaluation, and Sign Off. For each section there is an explanation to lead your next step.

This guide from G2 takes you step by step through creating a marketing plan, with well-defined sections and examples to ease the process. It covers every critical aspect of a marketing plan, and you can easily edit and customize it for your business.

7. Smartsheet

With this pre-built marketing plan template from Smartsheet, you can outline the purpose of your business, its strategic goals, its target market, and its standards of performance, ensuring you have a thorough plan of action. If you want a detailed marketing plan, this editable PDF will guide you through the process.

Get started with your marketing plan today

There you have it—examples for the core elements of a marketing plan, plus seven complete examples and templates to help you create your own. 

By taking a page from some of these examples and relying on the best practices, we’ve mentioned in this article, you’re one step closer to creating an effective marketing plan that will pave the way to accomplishing your business goals.

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What is a Marketing Plan FAQ

What do you mean by marketing plan, what are examples of marketing plans.

• Traditional Advertising Plan: This plan involves the use of traditional media such as television, radio, print, and outdoor advertising to promote a product or service.
• Social Media Plan: This plan involves the use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to engage with potential customers and promote a product or service.
• Content Marketing Plan: This plan involves the use of content such as blog posts, white papers, ebooks, and videos to educate and inform potential customers about a product or service.
• Partnership Marketing Plan: This plan involves the use of partnerships with other companies to increase brand visibility, create joint marketing campaigns, and drive sales.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plan: This plan involves the use of SEO techniques to improve a website’s ranking in search engine results pages and drive more organic traffic.

What are the 7 elements of a marketing plan?

• Situational Analysis
• Goals and Objectives
• Target Market
• Metrics and Evaluation

What are the 4 types of marketing plans?

• Strategic Marketing Plan: A strategic marketing plan is an overarching plan that outlines your company’s overall vision and objectives. It includes the strategies and tactics you will use to achieve those objectives.
• Tactical Marketing Plan: A tactical marketing plan is a more detailed plan that breaks down your strategies into smaller, more actionable steps. This plan outlines the specific actions and tactics you will use to achieve your strategic goals.
• Operational Marketing Plan: An operational marketing plan focuses on the day-to-day activities required to implement your strategies. It includes budgeting, staffing, and other resources needed to carry out the tactics in your tactical plan.
• Evaluation Marketing Plan: An evaluation marketing plan is used to measure the success of your marketing efforts. This plan outlines the metrics and data you will use to assess your progress and adjust your strategies accordingly.

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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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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.

You. Are. Welcome.

• First Name *
• Last Name *
• Website (Optional)
• Number of employees * Please Select 1 2-5 6-10 11-25 26-50 51-200 201-1,000 1,001-10,000 10,000+
• What is your role? * Please Select Agency Professional (PR/COMM/Web) Business Owner/Partner CEO/Executive Management Dean/Administrator IT/CTO VP of Marketing / Marketing Director Marketing Coordinator Sales Student/Professor (for classwork) Other
• What is your biggest marketing challenge? * Please Select Getting More Leads Increasing My Website’s Keyword Rankings on Google Increasing My Website's Overall Traffic Aligning Sales and Marketing Content Creation (Writing Blogs, Ebooks, Whitepapers) Using Social Media Effectively Using Marketing Automation Effectively Targeting Buyers Effectively Educating Prospects/Buyers Converting Leads to Buyers Increasing, Reporting and Proving Marketing's ROI Planning a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy Staying Organized and Productive Keeping Up With Latest Trends Generating Brand Awareness
• Industry * Please Select Automotive Communications Education Education Technology Energy Financial Services Financial Technology Government Healthcare Healthcare Technology High Tech Higher Education Hospitality Legal Life Sciences Logistics & Supply Chain Manufacturing Media Non-Profit Real Estate Retail & Consumer Goods Technology Other
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Chris is well-known as a leader in cross-disciplinary digital marketing strategy and execution, with over a decade of expertise in content marketing, SEO, and online lead generation. As Vital’s Director of Digital Marketing, he sets the direction for the company’s culture and operations, in addition to driving client success for some of the fastest-growing B2B and higher education brands in the world. He has been a featured speaker at marketing conferences such as the UNH Digital Marketing Conference and New Hampshire UXPA , and he has shared his insights as a guest writer on some of the top marketing websites around, including HubSpot and Convince & Convert . He also writes about agency life on his highly-regarded blog, The Agency Arsenal .

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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?

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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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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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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 presentation that your boss will approve

This article is written by Graham Robertson, the founder of Beloved Brands

Brand Toolkit

Are you in the middle of writing a marketing plan presentation? Then, you are in the right place. In this post, you’ll find a detailed marketing plan template and numerous marketing plan examples to follow, making the writing process much easier. This marketing plan guide is based on my experience as a former VP of Marketing at J&J and my extensive marketing experience at Coke and General Mills. I’m willing to share every secret on how to write a marketing plan that your boss will approve.

As someone who’s climbed the corporate ladder and created and critiqued numerous marketing plans, I understand what your management team wants and what will get approved.

Table of Contents - How to write a Marketing Plan

Step-by-step process for how to write a marketing plan presentation.

Essentially, the marketing plan acts as a roadmap, guiding your marketing efforts and ensuring that every action you take aligns with your business goals. Furthermore, a marketing plan checklist is a handy tool that keeps you organized, focused, and accountable.

How to write a marketing plan - start with the basics by using our marketing plan checklist

A good plan starts with the vision, purpose, values and goals .

• Vision. “Where could we be?” Put a stake in the ground that describes an ideal state for your future. It should last for five to 10 years to give everyone clear direction. Write your vision in a way that scares you a little and excites you a lot.
• Purpose.  “Why does your brand exist?” It’s the underlying personal motivation for why you do what you do. The purpose is a powerful way to connect with employees   and consumers, giving your brand a soul. 
• Values. “What do you stand for?” Your values should guide you and shape the organization’s standards, beliefs, behaviors, expectations, and motivations. A brand must consistently deliver each value.
• Goals.  “What will you achieve?” Specific measures include consumer behavioral changes, program metrics, in-market performance targets, financial results, or milestones on the pathway to the vision. Use goals to set up a brand dashboard or scoreboard.

Then, transform your analysis to key issues, strategies, and tactics.

• Situation Analysis. “Where are we?” Summarize the drivers and inhibitors you currently face, as well as the threats and untapped opportunities in the future.
• Key Issues. “Why are we here?” Look at what is getting in your way of achieving your vision. Set up the issues as questions, using strategies to answer each issue.
• Strategies. “How can we get there?” Look for market opportunities you see with consumers, competitors, or situations. Strategies provide clear marching orders that define your investment in strategic program, the focused opportunity you see, the desired market impact and performance result that benefits your business.  
• Tactics. “What do we need to do?” Framed entirely by strategy, tactics turn into action plans with clear marching orders to your teams. Decide which activities to invest in to stay on track with your vision while delivering the highest return on investment (ROI) and highest return on effort (ROE) for your business.

Marketing Plan checklist

Having a checklist aids in fostering collaboration and communication within your team. It provides a clear framework for writing a marketing plan for everyone involved, ensuring everyone is on the same page and working towards the same objectives.

To illustrate  how to write a marketing plan , click on our Marketing Plan Checklist . 

Video - Marketing Plan in 60 seconds

Our “Marketing in about 60 seconds video” goes through the best-in-class process of using our five questions to come up with a rough draft of your plan. Our video gives a good overview of how to write a marketing plan. Any details you can find in the rest of this post. 

Brand Vision - what you want to achieve in the future

When learning how to write a marketing plan, you need to make sure you start with a vision for a better future.

A strategy starts with a vision that sets aspirational stretch goals for the future that should be linked to a clear result or purpose. The vision should steer everyone who works on the brand to focus on finding ways to create a bond with your consumers that will lead to power and profit beyond what the product alone could achieve. Imagine it is five or ten years from now, and you wake up in the most fantastic mood.

Visualize a perfect future and write down the most critical milestones you must achieve. Consider words that will inspire, lead, and steer your team toward your vision. If the vision is too close to your current situation, it will have no impact. If the vision is impossible, it will fail to connect with the team.

You can use your imagination to see a qualitative definition that you have in your mind and a quantitative stake in the ground. As you look at those two statements, back up that definition with the three elements that must be true for those goals to happen.

In alignment with our strategic vision of broadening access to essential healthcare solutions, we are pleased to introduce an online platform for purchasing medications , including clonidine, directly from our website. This new service represents a significant milestone in our commitment to providing comprehensive health management solutions alongside our core offerings. By integrating the convenience of online pharmaceutical purchases into our strategy, we aim to enhance the well-being of our consumers, making essential treatments like clonidine easily accessible. This initiative is a key step towards achieving our vision of a healthier future where everyone can obtain the care they need with ease and confidence.

The iPhone launch

Use conceptual words that frame and define the future (Qualitative): Let’s use the 2007 iPhone launch as an example. Steve Jobs wanted to build a phone that could do everything for the consumer—and become part of their life. He wanted to combine a phone, a computer, and an iPod. The iPhone would become the ‘everything phone’ with text, email, phone, watch, calendar, browser, music, buy, and who knows what else.

Put a stake in the ground as to the potential size (Quantitative): Continuing with the iPhone, they needed to enter consumer and B2B to drive $25 Billion in sales within ten years. That was an extremely ambitious stretch goal, given Blackberry had yet to crack the $1 Billion mark. 

What must be true to achieve that future? 

• Triangulate down to three: Apple knew they had to reach the masses to reach such a stretch goal. While Blackberry mainly used its products for business executives, Apple’s iPod and Mac work taught them how to reach the masses. Here are the three elements that must be true for the iPhone to reach its vision:
• Simple user experience: Every interface and interaction with the iPhone must be intuitive and effortless, allowing consumers to navigate and utilize features without a learning curve.
• Integrated solution: They wanted the iPhone to work like the Mac, with an integrated ecosystem of services and applications, providing an all-in-one solution with a phone, internet, music, and video for everything in your life, personal or business. They created Apps to serve as mini-software.
• Stylish Functionality: To meet consumers’ expectations of an Apple product, the iPhone must embody a cutting-edge design that appeals to consumers aesthetically, sets the trend in the market, and makes the device’s ownership a statement of sophistication and modernity. 

Putting everything together to create a vision statement

Write your vision statement by putting everything together, using the defined future, stake in the ground, and three that must be true. The brand vision statement for the iPhone launch of 2007 was:

“The iPhone will reach $25 Billion by 2017 by creating the ‘everything phone’ that enhances everything in our consumers’ daily lives, with integrated solutions, simple user experiences, and stylish functionality.”

Video: marketing in about 60 seconds -how to write the brand vision.

Key Issues - what is in the way of achieving your vision

Strategic thinkers see questions before they look for answers..

Ever hear someone say, “That’s a good question.” It usually means someone has just asked an interruptive question designed to slow everyone’s thinking so they reflect and plan before they act. The strategic thinking side of marketing is logical and has to map out a range of decision trees that intersect by imagining how events will play out in the future. The risk of being only strategic is that if you think too long, you may spiral around, unable to decide. Moreover, you may miss an opportunity window.

Our Strategic ThinkBox triggers deeper thinking.

As I created the Strategic ThinkBox, I made it so that each of the four questions uses a forced choice to make decisions, where you must focus on only one possible answer for each question. 

• What is the core strength that will help your brand win?
• How tightly connected is your consumer to your brand?
• What is your current competitive position?
• What is the current business situation your brand faces?

Your brand’s core strength

• Think of your core strength as your brand’s superpower or secret sauce that separates you from other brands. Is it your product, brand story, consumer experience, or price? Your core strength steers your entire strategy, including the brand messages and the focus of your investment.  

Consumer strategy

• Start by determining where your brand currently sits on the brand love curve, whether your brand is unknown, indifferent, like it, love it, or at the beloved stage. The goal is to tighten the bond with your consumer and move them from one stage to the next.  

Competitive Strategy

• Regarding the competitive strategy, you must choose from one of four competitive situations in which your brand operates.  The dominant leader in the category is the power players, who take a competitive defensive stance. The challenger brands have gained enough power to battle the market leader head-to-head. The disruptor brands have found a space so different they can pull consumers away from the significant category players. Craft brands aggressively go against the category with a niche target market and a niche consumer benefit. They are small and stay far away from the market leaders. 

Situational strategy

• Understanding your brand health starts with looking at internal and external factors. Choose one of four potential situations: whether you keep the momentum going, face a business turnaround situation, realign everyone behind a strategy, or your brand is a start-up. Each situation leads to distinct strategies and leadership styles to deploy. 

Marketing Plan Template - the presentation that will impress your boss

Our marketing plan template is available in a powerpoint presentation.

Introducing our marketing plan template that includes everything you need to effectively communicate your brand vision, goals, analytics, key issues, strategies, and execution plans. 

For those learning how to write a marketing plan, using our template as a step-by-step guide will save you a ton of time, and certainly help you impress your boss. 

Marketing Strategy Statements - what you will invest in

Strategy = programs + accelerator + results.

One of the biggest flaws with strategy is the failure to cascade strategies down throughout the organization. The people who clap at the town hall meeting walk back to their desks in a state of confusion, wondering how the new strategies on the presentation slides impact their jobs. 

I find it frustrating watching everyone overcomplicate strategy. They mistakenly think strategy requires more intellect, so they use big, vague words when smaller, specific words work better. 

Let’s simplify strategy. In terms of how to write a marketing plan, explain what program you will invest in. Then, outline who you will focus on, backed by an underlying accelerator for why you think it will work. To simplify it, with each strategic program, you will do something that gets the consumer to do something that turns into an explainable result of what you get.

Build programs to deliver the vision

The investment in programs to deliver the strategy whether you are building the brand promise, brand story, purchase moment, product innovation, and consumer experience. These crystal-clear marching orders to the team leave no room for doubt, confusion, or hesitation. In this Gray’s Cookies example, the strategic capability is to “Communicate Gray’s new ‘Guilt Free’ positioning.”

Focused Accelerator

A trend accelerator already happening in the market that can accelerate your strategy. In this Gray’s Cookies example, the focused accelerator is “to a growing proactive preventer target who live a low-carb keto life.” 

Performance Result

Drive a specific performance result linked to the market impact, making the brand more powerful or profitable. in this example, the result is “to attract and tempt them to try gray’s and drive higher market share.”.

To illustrate, click on our Brand Strategy Statement exercise , which is part of our Marketing Plan template. 

Do a brand strategy slide for each strategy

In terms of how to write a marketing plan, once you have crafted your marketing strategies, create a slide for each strategy in your presentation:

• First, include the strategic objective statement.
• Then, list the goals to measure the desired result of this strategy.
• Next, outline three tactical programs where resources will be invested.
• Finally, insert a “watch out statement” to address potential issues that could derail the strategy.

By following these guidelines, you can effectively develop and present a comprehensive brand strategy that drives your marketing plan and sets your brand on a path to success.

Marketing Execution Plans - communication, innovation, in-store

When you are learning how to write a marketing plan, make sure that for each significant investment, you create a separate execution plan to ensure everyone has specific instructions for their function, eliminating any room for misinterpretation. Each strategic investment should have an execution plan, with most plans covering:

• Brand Communication

Your execution plans should combine strategic thinking and brand positioning:

• First, start each execution plan with your marketing strategy statement from one of your strategies.
• Then, in the next four sections, refer to your brand positioning work to lay out the target, brand idea, main benefit, and support points.
• Finally, tailor the final two sections to the type of execution.

Brand Communication Plan

Essentially, the brand communications plan  should answer seven questions that guide and inspire the creation of the brand story, establishing your brand positioning and motivating consumers. Our marketing plan template includes a Brand Communications Plan

Using the marketing plan template, answer the following questions:

• First, what do we need our advertising to do? (Marketing strategy statement)
• Next, who is our desired consumer target? (Most motivated people to buy what we do)
• Third, what are we selling? (Our main consumer benefit we stand behind)
• Fourth, why should they believe us? (Support points to back up the main benefit)
• Then ask, what is our organizing brand idea? (Brand soul, essence, or DNA for the brand)
• What do we want people to see, think, feel, do, or influence? (Desired consumer response)
• Finally, where will our consumer be most receptive to see and act upon our message? (Media plan)

Lastly, consider this marketing plan example of an Brand Communications Plan for Gray’s Cookies:

To illustrate, click our marketing plan example of a  Brand Communications Plan . 

Innovation Plan

Firstly, your brand idea should direct the product development team in managing innovation ideas at various stages:

• Exploratory stage (beyond five years),
• Pipeline ideas (two to five years), and
• Go-to-market launch plans (within the next two years).

Secondly, utilize the marketing plan template to influence, manage, and direct your product development team, ensuring a focus on brand strategy.

Lastly, consider this marketing plan example of an Innovation Plan for Gray’s Cookies:

To illustrate, click on our marketing plan example of an  Innovation Plan . 

Marketing Plan examples

Examples of marketing plan slides we use in our template.

Importantly, we provide marketing plan examples of execution slides you can use in your marketing plan. For instance, you will find PowerPoint slides you can use for advertising, social media, and search, event sampling. You can also find slides for new product launches, new product pipelines, competitive defence plans, merchandising and in-store sampling, customer marketing, and promotions. To view, click on any of the marketing plan example slides below.

Consumer Healthcare

Consumer Healthcare marketing plan example.

Quit Smoking

Pharma marketing plan example.

B2B Stage Lighting

Our B2B brand marketing plan example.

B2B Industrial tools

B2B industrial marketing plan example.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Marketing Plan

What is needed in a marketing plan how to write a marketing plan..

First, every plan must have a vision that acts as the guiding line to chase. I like to have a main sales goal tied to that vision. Second, conduct a business review to focus on what’s driving growth and holding the brand back. 

Third, use our Strategic ThinkBox to come up with key issue questions that are facing the brand. Then, dig in and build out the strategies that answer the issues. 

Next, brainstorm tactics with your team. And build tactics, including brand communication, innovation, and sales or retail. 

Last but not least, create goals and measure performance. A main sales goal can be tied to the vision and can drive parts of the plan, but they can also be used at the end to ensure you measure the strategies and tactics. 

Why is a marketing plan important?

The main role of a plan is to gain the approval of your senior management team. Importantly, explain how you will use your resources to drive the growth of your brand. And the plan becomes the roadmap that everyone on your team will follow and help achieve your brand goals. An effective marketing plan will create the brand vision, purpose, key issues, strategies, and tactics.

What are common marketing plan mistakes?

First, the most common mistake I see in plans is when they present a messy story. That’s the reason you should have a good marketing plan template. It won’t go well if you are standing at the front of the room and the boss is confused.

Second, the other common mistake I see in marketing plans is trying to do too many things. Importantly, when you spread the limited resources across too many ideas, none of them will have enough resources to make a difference. You will always be disappointed in the results. 

Third, another mistake I see is when parts of the team do not agree with. The brand leader must work to involve the other teams to ensure the team is aligned. Ensure you involve sales, operations, R&D, and your ad agency. And include all those who deliver on behalf of the brand. 

Fourth, I have seen plan presentations get out of control. One year, a small brand had 127 slides. Crazy. You should have no more than 20 slides. 

What is in a marketing plan?

If you are looking for an ideal outline for a marketing plan template, include a vision, purpose, goals, SWOT analysis, key issues, strategy statements, marketing communications plan, sales plan, new products plan, forecast, and financials. If you want training on how to write a marketing plan, explore our Marketing Training programs: Beloved Brands Marketing Training programs.

Graham Robertson

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Call 416 885 3911, follow us on linkedin, beloved brands book.

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Find the template that fits your brand. Each of our templates is available for consumer, B2B, healthcare, or retailer brands. 

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Marketing Plan Example – Sample Marketing Plan Template

Use this marketing plan example to generate sales for your small business. This document is a sample marketing plan template that will help you create your own strategy quickly. It contains text, charts and graphs to help you model your own plan. You can also download this marketing plan example in Microsoft Word or Google Docs format to edit it and create your own marketing plan.

Table of Contents

How to Use This Marketing Plan Example

Here’s how to use this sample marketing plan template to generate leads and sales:

• Download this Marketing Plan Example free for easy editing in Microsoft Word, Google Docs or Apple Pages to edit it and create your own marketing plan
• Use a spreadsheet to create financial and sales charts to embed in this marketing plan template.
• Recommended: Drive more sales faster using our online SEO Coaching (includes free SEO training videos).

Sample Marketing Plan

1.0 executive summary.

Mobile News Games LLC (MNG) develops mobile games relating to current news events. This marketing plan example illustrates our market segments. It also discusses the strategies we are employing to get customers and create a solid revenue stream. We are not just any mobile game developer. Our unique focus on creating games with a new twist gives us an advantage over our competitors by giving customers a new outlet to enjoy mobile games. This fills a real need for traditional gamers. It also expands our reach to people who would normally not play mobile games yet are amused by the comical angle we use.

We will fund development of our own games by providing consulting services to create similar games for corporations who are looking to create mobile games for promotional purposes. These consulting assignments will come from advertising sponsorship relationships. We will market to companies who are interested in embedding their brand and offers inside our games. We will also target those who would like something more custom to offer as their own game. In the first 3 years of the business, we expect consulting to constitute a large portion of our revenue stream. We will attract clients using the top SEO ranking factors and SEO strategies.

Our vision is to provide people with a brief escape of fun over the course of their normal day. We do this by providing them with timely interactive games that they can access on their mobile devices. We make games that are easy to play and have some connection with current pop culture news.

MNG leverages our team’s software development experience to create timely games quickly. As highlighted in this marketing plan example, our primary challenge is to attract visibility quickly. We intend to accomplish this by leveraging a multi-pronged approach that involves social media, email marketing and search engine optimization strategies to gain market share. As we gain traction in the marketplace, word of mouth will lift our game downloads significantly.

1.2 Objectives

• Generate over $400,000 in sales by the end of year 1.
• Increase sales by 100% by the end of year 2.
• Land 4 custom consulting game development projects within 12 months.

2.0 Target Markets

Our ideal customer is between the ages of 13 and 25 who enjoys playing video games and has a mobile Android or Apple smartphone. They often have an Xbox, Wii, Playstation or other TV-based video game unit at home. They may also have a portable gaming unit such as the DS/DSi and other portable gadgets such as an iPod.

Customers are typically single and male and own or have access to a home computer, PC or Mac. They have a wide range of disposable income. Some are teenagers living at home. Others are college students or those who have joined the workforce in the last 5 years.

Our ideal game design consulting customer is the VP of marketing or equivalent position of a medium to large organization. They are looking for creative promotional methods for their products and services.

2.1 Market Definition and Segmentation

We target two segments in this sample marketing plan: mobile game users and organizations that want to reach them. In both of these segments, customers are computer and mobile phone savvy and enjoy creative experiences.

1. Mobile Game Users

There are two types of customers that define the demographics of mobile gamers: teens (including pre-teens) and young adults. For the purposes of this marketing plan example, we include teenagers age 18 and above as young adults. The primary difference between the two demographic segments is who provides the money for game purchases.

Free mobile games:

• We offer trimmed back versions of our games for free. This way, users can get a taste of the full game without committing any money up front.
• Some features of free versions are disabled. We display advertising in strategic locations within the game so users are not bothered or distracted by the ads. For example, a soda company may pay for a sponsorship to embed their name as a clickable (tappable) billboard that appears as if it is part of the game itself.

Paid mobile games:

• Our paid mobile games contain a broader set of features. The price range is between $1.99 and $4.99 in order to create very low price resistance for customers.
• Paid games are also monetized via clickable (tappable) ad sponsorships embedded within the games.

Games are available via instant download on their appropriate mobile platform (i.e., Apple’s Appstore for the iPhone).

2. Organizations That Want to Reach Youth and Young Adults

There is one type of customer who purchases custom mobile game development services: VP of Marketing or Chief Marketing Officer.

Their intent is to promote their brand and products to the demographic that overlaps with mobile game users.

2.2 Target Market Segment Strategy

Our strategy in this marketing plan example focuses on developing an initial set of libraries containing game attributes that are combined to create new games. Once we launch our first set of games, we will stay in touch with our customers via social media and email marketing. After creating these libraries and games, we will be able to market fast-turnaround consulting services to organizations who would like their own promotional games.

2.3 Target Market: Mobile Game Users

Our mobile games have a timely connection to current news events. We release new games within two weeks of major news stories. For example, if a politician is involved in a scandal, we can leverage one of our current game architectures and customize it with the names of people involved in the scandal.

We can even make a comical interactive spoof out of events. If a celebrity makes a foolish comment, we can quickly create a game that pokes fun at the celebrity. The mobile game user market enjoys interacting with games that give them a sense of power and excitement, allowing them to live vicariously through the game.

2.3.1 Needs and Requirements

Mobile game users get tired of games quickly and are constantly looking for new games to play. With the plethora of news events always in circulation, we will target the news media. For the purposes of this marketing plan example, the goal here is to get the media to discuss games related to the stories they are covering. Our games relate to stories covered by media outlets who target the same demographic as we do.

The users in this segment also have limited financial capacity. Teens typically get their money to make game purchases from their parents. This money comes from gifts or allowances, or from low paying jobs. Older teens and young adults also have limited financial capacity. Yet they choose to spend part of their disposable income on games as one of their sources of entertainment.

Very frequently, these customers talk to each other about which games they enjoy. These dialogs include strategies for playing and winning. They also participate in online forums and discussion groups to gather tips and other information to help them play or to find new challenges.

Additionally, they enjoy being listed as the “high score” when there is a public setting available for players. We intend to offer this public setting so customers can upload their score to our website for each game. The highest scores will be posted, giving the player worldwide “bragging rights”. As a result, the word of mouth potential for timely games is explosive.

2.3.2 Distribution Channels

iPhone games are distributed through the Appstore which is controlled by Apple. One of the obstacles we have to overcome, as part of our analysis in this marketing plan example, is the speed with which Apple approves applications for downloading. This is important since our games have a time-sensitive nature to them. They will be popular only as long as a news story is in circulation.

Google’s Android offers an open source model. We expect Android usage to surpass the iPhone in the number of applications downloaded. This also eliminates the need for review and allows us to post new applications quickly. As more applications come out for this device, it will gain market share. We want to be positioned so that we provide excellent games for this community.

2.3.3 Competitive Forces

There are many mobile game developers. However, few are actual companies. Most games are developed by one person who does not have the marketing savvy to integrate advertising sponsorships into their games as we have outlined in this sample marketing plan. Our unique twist on the types of games is also an advantage. This means that we will not have to spend as much time and energy thinking of the game themes. The news of the day will provide that fodder so our efforts can be concentrated on developing that real-life story into a game.

2.3.4 Communication Through Social Media

There is a growing body of evidence that indicates that dark social is having a dramatic impact on sales. Dark social refers to the influence on sales from social media posts, whether published by us or by customers who write reviews or participate in online discussions. These activities are difficult to trace, leading attribution tools to be less effective than they were once believed to be.

This marketing plan example will emphasize the use of dark social to attain greater visibility. We will leverage social media and word of mouth for the vast majority of our marketing using platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram. These platforms are widely used by the customers in our demographic market. We will make announcements via regular posts and updates to our pages on these social platforms.

The newsworthy component of our mobile games also makes it enticing for traditional media to publicize a game that is related to a trending news story.

We will use our email marketing list to send alerts when we release new games. We have segmented our email list so that we can send appropriate emails to media and different ones to actual gamers, our customers.

2.3.5 Keys to Success

There are many benefits of using social media to market our small business. Each of our postings to social media sites will include a trackable link. We need to know how many people click on each post. Using online tools like link redirectors (i.e., bit.ly, tr.im and others), we can also see how many of readers and followers repost or forward such links. We will also include trackable links within our email marketing messages.

Those who click to find more information about a game will be directed to landing pages. These are web pages containing more information about a specific game, including details and links to download the games.

We will optimize these landing pages for search engines (we have SEO, search engine optimization, expertise) so that when Internet users search on various keywords, our pages will rank highly in their search results. Our preferred SEO tool is SEMrush (affiliate link), which provides in-depth keyword discovery , search volume and ranking analysis.

Using online analytics tools, we will be able to see how many people click on various links in our media campaigns to go to the landing pages and how many click to download each game. However, online clicks cannot track users who use their mobile phone to download the apps directly, which may comprise the bulk of our downloads. For those, tracking of downloads is provided by the platform such as Appstore.

2.4 Target Market: Organizations Who Want to Reach Youth and Young Adults

Mobile game users consist of young people. Since the youth and young adult demographic is so large, it is also very lucrative. There are countless products targeting this demographic, from soda manufacturers to clothing designers to hair product companies. This segment can also consist of recruiters, which can be for military service or other jobs. Companies who already spend millions of dollars on marketing to this group are regularly looking for newer, more creative ways to reach this market to reinforce their brand and sell products.

2.4.1 Needs and Requirements

Organizations who want to reach males (and females, though it is a smaller proportion of our defined customer base) between 13 and 25 realize that this group has a lot of spending power. This age group is not yet used to saving money so they typically spend a lot of what they earn. Vice Presidents and Chief Marketing Officers of these organizations want to reach this market early and need to do so in catchy, creative ways. They will understand quickly the value of the educational sales content we intend to create in this marketing plan example.

Much to the dismay of an older generation, teens and young adults are reading less and spending more time in front of a screen, whether it be television, a computer or a mobile phone with a variety of applications. The VP or CMO needs to reach their target market where they hang out. They typically have large budgets to spend on marketing and are not afraid to try new things, as long as they show results.

The typical tenure of a VP or CMO is about 3 years so there is a good deal of industry churn. This is a good thing for us in the sense that when a senior executive like this leaves to go to another company and they have had a good experience with our products and services, they are likely to hire us to create similar results for them in their new position.

Our job is to make them look good to their superiors by getting them more entrenched with the demographic they are trying to reach.

2.4.2 Distribution Channels

Reaching senior marketing executives is typically done through a variety of means. Since we have limited resources and need to manage our finances very effectively, we will focus on two: advertising and networking. The advertising will primarily be online via search engine. This way, we can see the results within days instead of not knowing whether a print ad has any effect.

We have identified 4 trade shows and 3 conferences that these executives typically attend over the course of a year. Part of our marketing plan is to attend these events to network with these potential buyers. We also will submit responses to calls for papers to be speakers at some of the events when possible.

2.4.3 Competitive Forces

As with the mobile game user segment, there are a lot of software developers targeting organizations to build custom games. Some are developing games overseas at lower costs. Even some of the larger domestic companies outsource portions of their game development. In order to keep up with pricing pressures, we have established ties with two overseas organizations to help us with game development. That will enable our domestic staff to focus on marketing and project management. As a result, we can release new games and component libraries faster.

2.4.4 Customer Communications

In order to get these high-level executives, we will develop an online ad campaign with landing pages containing lead generation forms that visitors can fill out to get guides on using mobile gaming to attract customers. These guides explain how we can embed advertising within the games and examples of custom games we develop.

We also will network at major trade shows and conferences. We will get speaking engagements where we can discuss case studies to expose our concepts and strategies to the right level of buyer.

Additionally, we are creating a customer advisory board so that we can hear directly from clients about their experience with our service. This board will consist of 10 customers who will meet confidentially every quarter via Zoom. Our goal is to share our roadmap and solicit candid feedback about their experiences with us. We will also ask for input on new products and services they would like to see, which will help us refine our strategy in this marketing plan example.

2.4.5 Keys to Success

The primary key to success is showcasing studies in which other companies leveraged the power of mobile games to reach their market. We track this using metrics such as the number of times a gamer clicks on an ad embedded into a game, the number of custom game downloads or an increase in sales of a promoted product. We can also track success  by industry buzz.

For example, several years ago fast food chain Burger King created a Facebook application that allowed users to earn points for “unfriending” one of their friends. The application would show the image of the friend burning. Upon burning 10 friends, the user would be entitled to a free burger. Word of this application spread very quickly and quite a few Facebook users enjoyed participating.

This marketing campaign did two things: generated traffic into restaurants and generated a tremendous amount of media buzz. It cost significantly less than a paid advertising campaign involving television time purchases.

3.0 Marketing Plan Strategy

Gamers like to share notes with other gamers. On our website, we will create a forum where people can post and respond to comments freely. We will also encourage them to provide suggestions for new games.

Forums will require registration and users who post more frequently will be rewarded with a special tag, a gold star, next to their avatar to show other users that they are a “super contributor” to the forums. For our demographic, this is a badge of honor that they try to attain proudly.

3.1 Emphasize Creativity, Service and Speed to Market

Since our games will be tied to current news events, we will emphasize our focus on creativity along with spectacular service and speed of development for our consulting clients. It is important for us to get to market quickly in order to capitalize on the news event that is associated with the game. An important note in this marketing plan example is that the longer the delay between game conception and game release, the less the penetration of that game.

3.2 Emphasize Fun

Our goal is to establish a reputation for games that poke fun at what many would consider humorous or ridiculous actions by well-known people. In order to cross-promote our games, each game will contain a link to our website. It will also offer an option to view the same information within the app itself. This allows users can find out about more games and subscribe to our email list and follow us on social media.

Additionally, to help promote games via word of mouth, each game has the option to notify a friend. So, a user can send a text message to a friend instantly to share their excitement or recommendation about the game.

4.0 Expense Budget Summary

Marketing expenses are mostly for staff required to do the marketing activities listed. Most of the tools we need, like analytics and landing page creation, are inexpensive. The exceptions to this are for specific tools like email marketing and forums.

4.1 Expense Budget by Month – Year 1

We do not expect an increase in marketing staff requirements during the first year. One person can actually do a lot of these activities. Once they have put marketing plan processes in place, the marketing activities upkeep becomes easier. Junior staff can then handle it. Below is a breakdown of marketing expenses by month for year 1.

4.2 Expense Budget by Year

We anticipate second and third year marketing expenses to increase. This is mostly for covering the cost of additional staff for marketing activities. We expect sales and marketing expenses to be around 15% of total sales.

Table: Marketing Expense Budget

5.0 Marketing Plan Example – Sales Forecast

In this marketing plan example, our sales will come from three sources:

• Game downloads – this includes free and paid downloads. We monetize the free downloads from embedded advertising sponsorships
• Embedded Advertising Sponsorships – ads embedded in both free and paid games
• Custom games developed for companies – this would be consulting projects to develop iPhone, Blackberry and Android promotional games

Sales costs relate to the fees charged by our channel partners for carrying the games, such as Appstore. This marketing plan example also includes our estimated costs for staff to sell ad sponsorships or develop custom games.

5.1 Sales Forecast by Month – Year 1

Below is our first year’s sales forecast broken down by product type, estimated unit pricing and costs:

6.0 Progress Measurement and Monitoring

In order to make sure that we are on track, we have created a variety of key metrics for this marketing plan example. These may require adjustments and fine tuning as we progress. They are our best estimates based on currently available market research.

6.1 Key Marketing Metrics

We estimate that 1 of every 10 people who visit the landing page will download a game. Other metrics include the average sale price. In this marketing plan example, we estimate these numbers based on paid downloads as well as sales of advertising sponsorships and custom game development.

Table: Key Marketing Metrics

Below is a breakdown of key marketing metrics measured by month for year 1:

6.2 Other Marketing Plan Example Success Metrics

Other key metrics we will measure to monitor our success are as follows:

• Number of speaking engagements
• Five star game reviews
• Number of games developed
• Industry awards
• Number of game feature libraries created
• Number of deals with channel partners
• Email list size

In order to monitor our growth, we will track the number of followers on our social media accounts. Below is a breakdown of other success metrics by month for year 1:

7.0 Marketing Plan Organization

Even though Mobile News Games is a small company, we have high aspirations as this marketing plan example shows. Our management team is two unique individuals who have a solid background in mobile communications and marketing. Our team of local and international software development staff can launch many unique mobile games quickly.

Bill Philips, President, oversees the general management, including game development, of MNG. Prior to forming the company, he was Vice President of Products at a major wireless telecommunications provider for 5 years. He is also a member of the Mobile Marketing Association.

Donna Paster, VP Marketing, is responsible for all areas of marketing. She co-founded MNG with Bill Philips. Donna’s prior experience includes developing the key marketing plan that launched several mobile versions of games for a large video game producer. Donna will be assisted by 2 marketing interns hired from local universities as co-op students throughout the year. While Donna focuses on the key strategic relationships, these students will handle the more routine aspects of the marketing efforts.

Additional Marketing Plan Examples

• SaaS Marketing Plan Template to Create a Multi-Million Dollar Business
• MSP Marketing Plan – Includes MSP Sales Plan and Marketing Strategy

Advice for Sample Marketing Plan Template

This marketing plan example provides a solid structure for you to generate your own marketing plan template. If you haven’t yet downloaded a copy of this free marketing plan example, get it now:

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• View a sample business plan from our free business plan library.
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• MoreBusiness.com’s marketing coaching and training

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A marketing plan example to guide your strategy

Key takeaways

• Get your team on the same page by defining your mission statement , audience, and objectives
• Perform a SWOT analysis to understand where you stand in your market and what opportunities lie ahead
• Set a budget to prevent overspending as you execute your strategies and tactics

With an effective marketing strategy in place, you can achieve your business goals faster than you expect. But marketing teams aren’t pulling their strategies out of thin air. Great marketing campaigns are the result of prior planning. With this marketing plan example , as well as tips for filling it out, you can make the most of your marketing efforts and build a strong customer base . 

1. Executive summary

Marketing plans , like business plans , start with an executive summary . This is a short overview that outlines some key takeaways from your completed plan. Write this last, after you’ve completed the rest of your plan, to ensure you’re hitting the most important points.

Keeping this section brief is essential. For marketing plans , executive summaries are ideally no more than three paragraphs and never more than a page. When members of your marketing team look at this first section, they should be able to get the gist of what’s to come in the document.

2. Mission statement

Marketing plays a big role in defining your small business branding. To ensure your marketing team is on the same page with how you want your brand to be perceived, it’s crucial to include this key element of your branding: your mission statement .

A mission statement is a brief phrase or sentence that defines what you uniquely do for your customers. For example, if you’re writing a real estate marketing plan , your mission statement could be:

• To help families find their dream homes
• To make homeownership accessible to people of all backgrounds
• To help buyers and sellers navigate the real estate market

3. Marketing objectives

To make your marketing plan template actionable, include a section for your marketing objectives , which are well-defined marketing goals . Instead of listing out broad goals, you’ll want to get into the specifics. Each objective should be highly measurable and with a deadline. For example:

Too broad: “Achieve a higher email click-through rate” More specific: “Increase our average email click-through rate by 20% by the end of the first quarter”

Too broad: “Increase conversion rates” More specific: “Increase conversion rates from all marketing activities by 50% by the end of the year”

4. SWOT analysis

Understanding your position in your market is key for selecting strategies that set you apart. Marketers commonly use SWOT analyses to get a strong sense of where they stand.

“SWOT” is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Great marketing plan examples usually include robust summaries of each of these four elements based on thorough research.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to complete each section.

• What is our unique selling proposition ?
• What makes our business stand out from competitors?
• What does our company do best?
• Why do our customers love us?
• What resources or connections do we have exclusive access to?
• What do our competitors do better than us?
• What does our company struggle with?
• What causes our customers to leave?
• What resources or connections do we not have access to?

Opportunities

• What are none of our competitors offering that we can?
• How can we improve upon our competitors’ weaknesses?
• What niche or underserved market can we start to target?
• What resources can we easily gain access to?
• How might marketing trends or industry trends help us?
• What companies could cause our market share to decrease?
• Are we actively preventing reputational pitfalls (cyberattacks, poor customer service, etc.)?
• Do we have a strategy in place in case of marketing emergencies?
• Are we at risk for losing any key resources (marketing employees, budget, etc.)?
• How might marketing trends or industry trends hurt us?

5. Target audience

Once you’ve analyzed your company’s position in your industry, you need to define who your target customers are. Realistically, what types of people are most likely to become new customers ? You can use the niche markets you identified when you outlined opportunities to guide you in this section.

Creating a few buyer personas can help you get the clearest picture of your potential customers . A buyer persona is a detailed profile that represents a specific segment of your target market . It usually outlines details like:

• Demographics : If relevant, include details like age, gender, income level, education level, marital status, religion, and more
• Interests: Include any hobbies your audience member may have
• Goals: Outline what your buyer wants to achieve
• Pain points : Include anything your buyer is currently struggling with
• Objections: Explain why your potential customer hesitates to buy your products or services

With this section, your marketing team will be able to identify the marketing channels , tactics, messaging, and more that are most likely to reach and resonate with the right people.

6. Marketing strategies and tactics

No marketing plan example is complete without strategies and tactics. This is the actionable part of your plan that acts as a roadmap to your goals.

So what’s the difference between these two terms? Strategies are broad directions that you plan to follow to achieve your goals. For example, if your marketing goal is to increase website traffic by 50% within two months, one of your strategies may be to increase website clicks from your social media marketing channels .

Tactics, on the other hand, are the day-to-day actions you’ll take to bring those strategies to life. They’re specific tasks that your team members can own. Think of tactics like a to-do list. Here are some examples of marketing tactics :

• Host giveaways at local trade shows
• Create videos to include in email marketing campaigns
• Connect with business owners who can help promote your new product on LinkedIn

7. Marketing budget

It’s easy to overspend when you’re trying to achieve your objectives. To avoid this, your plan should include a clear marketing budget that breaks down your expected costs. If you plan to spend money on digital advertising , define how much will go to social media ads, search engine ads, Yelp Ads , and/or influencers .

Even if you’re only planning to use free marketing tactics , make sure to consider the cost of content production and execution. For example, your social media strategy still may require the help of freelance video creators or marketing tools like Photoshop.

Err on the side of overestimation. It’s better to make room for unexpected costs than to be surprised by them in the future.

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Strategize better with this marketing plan example

Completing this marketing plan example step-by-step will help you build a strong, measurable strategy for your business. Your marketing team will have a clear picture of who you’re targeting, how your brand should be perceived, and where the business currently stands in the market. 

By the time you finish your plan, you’ll have a number of tactics that you can turn into action steps for each of your team members. Plus, you’ll have a marketing budget to realistically guide your ad spend.

If you’re on a tight marketing budget , consider these free online advertising opportunities to promote your business.

The information above is provided for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice and may not be suitable for your circumstances. Unless stated otherwise, references to third-party links, services, or products do not constitute endorsement by Yelp.

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How to Write a Business Plan: Your Step-by-Step Guide

So, you’ve got an idea and you want to start a business —great! Before you do anything else, like seek funding or build out a team, you'll need to know how to write a business plan. This plan will serve as the foundation of your company while also giving investors and future employees a clear idea of your purpose.

Below, Lauren Cobello, Founder and CEO of Leverage with Media PR , gives her best advice on how to make a business plan for your company.

Build your dream business with the help of a high-paying job—browse open jobs on The Muse »

What is a business plan, and when do you need one?

According to Cobello, a business plan is a document that contains the mission of the business and a brief overview of it, as well as the objectives, strategies, and financial plans of the founder. A business plan comes into play very early on in the process of starting a company—more or less before you do anything else.

“You should start a company with a business plan in mind—especially if you plan to get funding for the company,” Cobello says. “You’re going to need it.”

Whether that funding comes from a loan, an investor, or crowdsourcing, a business plan is imperative to secure the capital, says the U.S. Small Business Administration . Anyone who’s considering giving you money is going to want to review your business plan before doing so. That means before you head into any meeting, make sure you have physical copies of your business plan to share.

Different types of business plans

The four main types of business plans are:

Startup Business Plans

Internal business plans, strategic business plans, one-page business plans.

Let's break down each one:

If you're wondering how to write a business plan for a startup, Cobello has advice for you. Startup business plans are the most common type, she says, and they are a critical tool for new business ventures that want funding. A startup is defined as a company that’s in its first stages of operations, founded by an entrepreneur who has a product or service idea.

Most startups begin with very little money, so they need a strong business plan to convince family, friends, banks, and/or venture capitalists to invest in the new company.

Internal business plans “are for internal use only,” says Cobello. This kind of document is not public-facing, only company-facing, and it contains an outline of the company’s business strategy, financial goals and budgets, and performance data.

Internal business plans aren’t used to secure funding, but rather to set goals and get everyone working there tracking towards them.

As the name implies, strategic business plans are geared more towards strategy and they include an assessment of the current business landscape, notes Jérôme Côté, a Business Advisor at BDC Advisory Services .

Unlike a traditional business plan, Cobello adds, strategic plans include a SWOT analysis (which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and an in-depth action plan for the next six to 12 months. Strategic plans are action-based and take into account the state of the company and the industry in which it exists.

Although a typical business plan falls between 15 to 30 pages, some companies opt for the much shorter One-Page Business Plan. A one-page business plan is a simplified version of the larger business plan, and it focuses on the problem your product or service is solving, the solution (your product), and your business model (how you’ll make money).

A one-page plan is hyper-direct and easy to read, making it an effective tool for businesses of all sizes, at any stage.

How to create a business plan in 7 steps

Every business plan is different, and the steps you take to complete yours will depend on what type and format you choose. That said, if you need a place to start and appreciate a roadmap, here’s what Cobello recommends:

1. Conduct your research

Before writing your business plan, you’ll want to do a thorough investigation of what’s out there. Who will be the competitors for your product or service? Who is included in the target market? What industry trends are you capitalizing on, or rebuking? You want to figure out where you sit in the market and what your company’s value propositions are. What makes you different—and better?

2. Define your purpose for the business plan

The purpose of your business plan will determine which kind of plan you choose to create. Are you trying to drum up funding, or get the company employees focused on specific goals? (For the former, you’d want a startup business plan, while an internal plan would satisfy the latter.) Also, consider your audience. An investment firm that sees hundreds of potential business plans a day may prefer to see a one-pager upfront and, if they’re interested, a longer plan later.

3. Write your company description

Every business plan needs a company description—aka a summary of the company’s purpose, what they do/offer, and what makes it unique. Company descriptions should be clear and concise, avoiding the use of jargon, Cobello says. Ideally, descriptions should be a few paragraphs at most.

4. Explain and show how the company will make money

A business plan should be centered around the company’s goals, and it should clearly explain how the company will generate revenue. To do this, Cobello recommends using actual numbers and details, as opposed to just projections.

For instance, if the company is already making money, show how much and at what cost (e.g. what was the net profit). If it hasn’t generated revenue yet, outline the plan for how it will—including what the product/service will cost to produce and how much it will cost the consumer.

5. Outline your marketing strategy

How will you promote the business? Through what channels will you be promoting it? How are you going to reach and appeal to your target market? The more specific and thorough you can be with your plans here, the better, Cobello says.

6. Explain how you’ll spend your funding

What will you do with the money you raise? What are the first steps you plan to take? As a founder, you want to instill confidence in your investors and show them that the instant you receive their money, you’ll be taking smart actions that grow the company.

7. Include supporting documents

Creating a business plan is in some ways akin to building a legal case, but for your business. “You want to tell a story, and to be as thorough as possible, while keeping your plan succinct, clear, interesting, and visually appealing,” Cobello says. “Supporting documents could include financial projects, a competitive analysis of the market you’re entering into, and even any licenses, patents, or permits you’ve secured.”

A business plan is an individualized document—it’s ultimately up to you what information to include and what story you tell. But above all, Cobello says, your business plan should have a clear focus and goal in mind, because everything else will build off this cornerstone.

“Many people don’t realize how important business plans are for the health of their company,” she says. “Set aside time to make this a priority for your business, and make sure to keep it updated as you grow.”

How to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2024 [Data + Expert Tips]

Updated: March 29, 2024

Published: October 26, 2023

Creating a marketing strategy is essential to effectively nurture your customers, improve your business’s bottom line, and increase the ROI of your efforts.

A marketing strategy is especially critical if you want to use the highest ROI trends for 2024 : short-form video and social media. To get powerful results, you must carefully weave both emerging trends and proven strategies into your plan.

Let’s dive into the critical components of a complete marketing strategy in 2024, followed by some examples for inspiration.

Table of Contents

• What is a marketing strategy?

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

Marketing strategy components, why is a marketing strategy important, marketing strategy process, recommended resources, examples of successful marketing strategies, what to expect after following your marketing process steps, marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy covers a company’s overall approach for promoting its brand to a target audience. The process involves research, goal-setting, and positioning.

A completed marketing strategy typically includes brand objectives, target audience personas, marketing channels, key performance indicators, and more.

A marketing strategy will:

• Align your team to specific goals.
• Help you tie your efforts to business objectives.
• Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience.
• Empower you to capitalize on emerging trends.

The last one is especially important. Keeping up with marketing trends is important for your strategy, but it could be a full-time job.

Why? Because almost 80% of marketers say this industry changed more in the last three years than it has in the past five decades.

Add to that the fact that 50% of marketers believe their marketing strategy in 2023 was only *somewhat effective,* which means there’s plenty of room for improvement.

In short, what worked for your marketing strategy in the past might not fly today.

A marketing strategy outlines the long-term goals and overall approach, while a marketing plan covers the specific actions and tactics to achieve those goals.

Phrased another way, marketing strategy guides the overall marketing efforts of a business. It includes goal-setting, market and competitor research, as well as messaging and positioning for a brand.

For example, say you’re creating a marketing strategy for a new fashion brand. Your strategy might target young urban professionals and position the brand as trendy and affordable.

But a marketing plan is a detailed tactical roadmap. It outlines the specific actions and tactics that should achieve the marketing strategy’s goals.

For example, the marketing plan for the fashion brand mentioned above might include:

• Targeted social media campaigns.
• Influencer partnerships.
• Online advertising timeline.

Both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan are essential for a business’s success.

To succeed in the fast-paced marketing world — and maintain a sense of relevance with your audience — it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve.

To help ease some of that uncertainty, we’re going to show you step-by-step how to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. But first, let’s go over the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.

Free Marketing Plan Template

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• Marketing Mix (4 Ps of Marketing)
• Marketing Objectives
• Marketing Budget
• Competitive Analysis
• Segmentation, Targeting, & Positioning
• Content Creation (Including Trending Content)
• Metrics & Key Performance Indicators

1. Marketing Mix

• Conduct market research.
• Define your goals.
• Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.
• Conduct competitive analysis.
• Develop key messaging.
• Choose your marketing channels.
• Create, track, and analyze KPIs.
• Present your marketing strategy.

1. Conduct market research.

Before you can begin creating your marketing strategy, you need to gather useful data for making informed decisions. Market research is like playing detective, but instead of solving crimes, you’re uncovering juicy details about your customers.

Market research will help your businesses make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategy. It also makes it easier to understand your target market, find gaps, and make the most of your resources.

This process is essential for understanding your customers and adapting to changing trends. If you’re new to this process, this complete market research guide and template can help.

Once you have the data you need, you’ll be ready to set some marketing goals.

2. Define your goals.

What do you want to achieve through your marketing efforts?

Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or diversifying your customer base, well-defined goals will guide your marketing strategy.

Your marketing strategy goals should reflect your business goals. They should also offer clear direction for marketing efforts.

For example, say one of your business goals is to increase market share by 20% within a year. Your goal as a marketer could include expanding into new target markets, updating your brand, or driving customer acquisition.

Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value.

Defining clear goals provides direction and clarity, guiding marketing efforts toward desired outcomes. It helps with resource allocation, decision-making, and measuring the success of marketing initiatives.

This SMART goal guide can help you with more effective goal-setting.

3. Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.

To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to understand who your ideal customers are. Take a look at your market research to understand your target audience and market landscape. Accurate customer data is especially important for this step.

But it’s not enough to know who your audience is. Once you’ve figured out who they are, you need to understand what they want. This isn’t just their needs and pain points. It’s how your product or service can solve their problems.

So, if you can’t define who your audience is in one sentence, now’s your chance to do it. Create a buyer persona that’s a snapshot of your ideal customer.

For example, a store like Macy’s could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.

With this description, Macy’s Marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in mind.

Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information, including age, job title, income, location, interests, and challenges. Notice how Belinda has all those attributes in her description.

For B2B SaaS companies, keep in mind that buyer personas don’t apply solely to the end user. When you’re selling a product to another business, you also have to address the decision-maker, the financial buyer, and the technical advisor, among other roles, says Head of Marketing at Entrapeer, Hillary Lyons .

“You need to be able to tailor your message to each of these unique personas even though most of them will never actually use the product,” says Lyons. “You have to sell each of them on the unparalleled benefit you provide without muddling your [overall] message.”

You don’t have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it’s really fun).

You can also use a platform like Versium , which helps you identify, understand, and reach your target audience through data and artificial intelligence.

Buyer personas should be at the core of your strategy.

4. Conduct competitive analysis.

Now that you have an understanding of your customers, it’s time to see who you’re competing with to get their attention.

To begin your competitive analysis, start with your top competitors. Reviewing their websites, content, ads, and pricing can help you understand how to differentiate your brand. It’s also a useful way to find opportunities for growth.

But how do you know which competitors are most important? This competitive analysis kit with templates will walk you through the process. It will help you choose and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of your competitors.

This process will help you find market gaps, spot trends, and figure out which marketing tactics will be most effective. Competitive analysis can also offer valuable insights into pricing, positioning, and marketing channels.

5. Develop key messaging.

You’ve figured out who you’re talking to, what they’ve already heard, and what they want to hear. Now, it’s time to share your brand’s unique value proposition .

In this step, you’ll craft key messaging that shows the benefits of your product or service and resonates with your target audience. This process should show off the research and work you have done up to this point. It should also incorporate your creativity, inventiveness, and willingness to experiment.

Well-crafted key messaging:

• Sets businesses apart from the competition.
• Resonates with the target audience.
• Is flexible enough to be consistent across all marketing channels.
• Builds brand credibility.
• Creates an emotional connection with customers.
• Influences buying decisions.

The key messaging in your marketing strategy is critical to driving engagement, loyalty, and business growth. These value proposition templates can help if you’re not sure how to draft this important messaging.

6. Choose your marketing channels.

You know what you have to say. Now, decide on the best marketing channels for your message. Your top goal for this stage of your strategy is to align your channel choices with your target persona’s media consumption habits.

Start with media channels you’re already using. Then, consider a mix of traditional and digital channels such as social media, TV, email marketing, podcast ads, SEO, content marketing, and influencer partnerships.

To streamline this process, think of your assets in three categories — paid, owned, and earned media.

To decide which marketing channels are best for your marketing strategy, look carefully at each channel. Think about which channels are best for reaching your audience, staying within budget, and meeting your goals.

For example, a business targeting a younger demographic might consider using TikTok or Reddit to reach its audience.

Don’t forget to take a look at emerging platforms and trends as you complete this review. You may also want to look at the content you’ve already created. Gather your materials in each media type in one location. Then, look at your content as a whole to get a clear vision of how you can integrate them into your strategy.

For example, say you already have a blog that’s rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media). You might consider promoting your blog posts on Threads (owned media), which customers might then repost (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.

If you have resources that don’t fit into your goals, nix them. This is also a great time to clean house and find gaps in your materials.

7. Create, track, and analyze KPIs.

Once you have a clear outline of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to think about how you’ll measure whether it’s working.

At this stage, you’ll shift from marketing detective to numbers nerd. With a little planning and prep, your analytics can unveil the mysteries of marketing performance and unlock super insights.

Review your strategy and choose measurable KPIs to track the effectiveness of your efforts. Pick a marketing analytics software solution that works for your team to collect and measure your data.

Ideally, the analytics platform of your choice should allow you to track data across all of your marketing channels — from emails to social media and your website. This centralizes all of your data, which makes it easier to understand how each channel contributes to your overall strategy. 

You can then, plan to check and analyze the performance of your strategy over time and identify the channels that bring the best results. This can help you refine your approach based on results and feedback.

Lexi Boese , an ecommerce growth strategist and co-founder of The Digital Opportunists, recommends making data a priority when building your marketing strategy this year.

“The more data you can use, the easier you can track your success,” she says. “This could be as simple as understanding which channels convert the highest amount of customers (to determine how your team should prioritize ad spend), or assessing whether you have a higher amount of first-time or returning customers to [determine] if you should focus on internal or external marketing.”

Analyzing KPIs helps businesses stay agile, refine their strategies, and adapt to evolving customer needs.

8. Present your marketing strategy.

A finished marketing strategy will pull together the sections and components above. It may also include:

Executive Summary

A concise overview that outlines the marketing goals, target audience, and key marketing tactics.

Brand Identity

You may want to create a brand identity as part of your strategy. Brand positioning, voice, and visual identity may also be helpful additions to your marketing strategy.

Marketing Plan and Tactics

Your marketing plan is the specific actions you’ll take to achieve the goals in your marketing strategy. Your plan may cover campaigns, channel-specific tactics, and more.

Not sure where to start? This free marketing plan template can help.

Don't forget to share this post!

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The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Campaigns self.__wrap_n!=1&&self.__wrap_b(":Rhj6daiukm:",1)

Craig Dennis

June 25, 2024

Customers want personalized experiences, and brands want to deliver. The problem is that many companies don’t have the data they need to provide great customer experiences, leading to wasted ad spend, customer churn, or social media backlash. The most popular brands have one thing in common: they build and deliver excellent marketing campaigns.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• Why marketing campaigns important
• How to build a great marketing campaign
• What types of marketing campaigns can you use to power campaigns
• What is the biggest challenge of marketing campaigns
• Five examples of great marketing campaigns

What are Marketing Campaigns?

A marketing campaign is a coordinated series or single promotion of a product, service, or company to increase sales, generate leads, drive conversions, or create brand awareness. The ultimate goal of a marketing campaign is to drive a user to take action.

Once you know your marketing campaign's target, you can use various data like behavior, demographics, or purchase history to curate a message that will resonate with your ideal customer profile and connect with that individual using a specific marketing channel. Ultimately, every marketing campaign starts with data because the more you understand your customer, the better you can hone in on your messaging, target audience, creative, and the specific marketing channels you want to use.

Why are Marketing Campaigns Important?

Marketing campaigns matter because they drive tangible business outcomes that impact your company’s bottom line. The challenge is figuring out what outcomes matter to your business. Here are the five most common outcomes marketers want to drive through campaigns.

• Customer Acquisition : Marketing campaigns offer diverse strategies and channels to attract new customers. One effective approach is using lookalike audiences, providing ad platforms with a list of high-value customers to find similar prospects to improve customer quality. By experimenting with various campaigns, you can identify those with the lowest CAC and allocate more of your budget to them.
• Sales : Launching new product campaigns can create a significant impact and engage existing customers through content like thought leadership articles or sales emails. Simple tactics such as retargeting users with ads and emails for abandoned carts can also boost conversions. These strategies enhance customer lifetime value, reducing the need for constant new customer acquisition.
• Customer Loyalty : Offering exceptional customer experiences is essential for fostering customer loyalty. Marketing campaigns reflecting this loyalty can be created by analyzing buying habits and sending personalized emails with exclusive offers, points, and cashback. Such campaigns not only increase average order value (AOV) but also encourage repeat purchases, setting you apart from competitors.

How to Build a Great Marketing Campaign?

Building a great marketing campaign involves many moving parts. The good news is that you can control just about everything except the response from your customers. With that in mind, here are the five most important steps to consider when developing a marketing campaign.

Step 1: Identify Your Goals and KPIs

First, you must understand your goal to effectively plan and measure your success. This influences every aspect of your marketing campaign. Ultimately, the outcome you want to drive will depend on your business model.

For example:

• A media company like Netflix cares about reducing customer acquisition costs and churn.
• An e-commerce platform like Amazon cares about increasing order frequency and average order value.
• A B2B SaaS company like Salesforce cares about upselling existing customers to purchase additional products and solutions.

Before executing any marketing campaign, you need to examine your data to understand your company's key north star metrics.

Step 2: Define Your Target Audience

To help identify your target audience, start by understanding the customer journey. This will allow you to group customers into specific buying stages and segment them accordingly into different audiences.

For example, if you notice a steep drop off in cart-abandonment, you could create an audience of cart abandoners to target with special offers and reminders to increase the number of orders that actually get completed.

Step 3: Choose Your Marketing Channels

Choosing the right marketing channel involves understanding who your ICP is and where they frequent the most online. For example, LinkedIn can be effective for a B2B company, whereas advertising on Facebook might be a better alternative for a D2C company.

If you already have customer data, you can advertise via owned channels like email, web, push, or SMS. You don’t have to limit yourself to a single channel; a combination of channels can be more effective. You should analyze your gathered data to determine which approach would be best.

Step 4: Build Your Creative Assets

Next, it's time to create compelling creative assets to capture your target audience's attention and prompt them to take the desired action. The nature of these assets will vary based on the marketing channel. For SEO, it's the blog image, meta title and description, and the actual article content. For social media ads, it's the image or video and the ad's words.

You can divide creative assets into two parts: imagery and words. The imagery is designed to interrupt the customer's current activity and draw their attention. The words aim to persuade customers to click and take the desired action. Using copywriting techniques such as the AIDI formula , scarcity tactics, or storytelling can significantly enhance the likelihood of customer engagement and action.

A Hightouch LinkedIn Ad

Considering all four components holistically ensures your campaign is cohesive and maximizes its potential to perform well.

Step 5: Deliver Your Message

With all components ready, it's time to launch your marketing campaign. You first need the data for your target audience, which lives in your data warehouse. Start by gathering data for your target audience from your data warehouse. Tools like Hightouch can simplify this process, allowing you to build audiences using a user-friendly interface without technical expertise. You can then send these audiences to your downstream tools.

Once your target audience is set in your selected channels, integrate your creative assets into the campaign. Assemble the images, videos, and text in the appropriate format for each channel and proceed to launch your marketing campaign.

What Types of Marketing Channels Can You Use To Power Campaigns?

To help you strategize what marketing channel is right for you, here are some of the most common ones typically chosen for marketing campaigns.

Online Marketing Channels

Online marketing channels involve digital strategies to engage potential customers via web or mobile devices.

• Paid Search : Advertising on search engines by bidding on keywords to display ads at the top of the search results. This helps you reach more customers and drive conversions by targeting relevant keywords based on user intent.
• Paid Social : Creating ads that appear in users' feeds on social media platforms. This helps target users based on demographics and behavior, helping you acquire new customers or increase brand awareness.
• Publisher and Retail Media Networks : Placing ads on high-traffic publisher websites or retail platforms. This broadens your reach through established networks with existing audiences.
• SEO : Producing high-quality content that ranks for specific keywords in search engines, driving organic traffic and increasing brand awareness.
• Influencers : Collaborating with individuals with a large online following to promote your business. This leverages their trust and reaches a niche audience interested in your offerings.
• Affiliates : Partnering with individuals or companies to promote your business in exchange for a commission. This expands your reach without the need to hire additional staff.
• Content Creation: Developing articles, videos, and social media posts to boost brand awareness and authority.
• Paid Video : Advertising through video content on platforms like YouTube or social media. This engages viewers with compelling visuals and encourages them to take action.
• Display Ads : Placing banner ads on websites through Google Adsense. This captures a large number of impressions and increases brand visibility.
• Sponsorships : Supporting events, activities, or content to get your brand in front of a large audience. This associates your brand with the event's theme and boosts exposure.

Offline Marketing Channels

Offline marketing channels involve traditional media and direct outreach strategies to connect with customers in the physical world

• Direct Mail : Sending promotional material like brochures, catalogs, or postcards to potential customers. This targets a large geographic area, ideal for local businesses.
• Offline Retail Media Networks : Advertising within retail locations through in-store promotions, shelf ads, and flyers. This engages shoppers in a specific location.
• Radio : Broadcasting audio advertisements on radio stations, reaching a broad audience through targeted radio programs.
• TV : Displaying video advertisements on cable TV. This reaches a broad audience, targeting specific demographic segments worldwide.
• Out-Of-Home (OOH) : Advertising in physical locations such as billboards, transit ads, and posters. This places ads in high-foot-traffic areas to increase brand visibility.

What Causes Marketing Campaigns to Fail?

Marketing teams face similar challenges, such as reaching their target audience or optimizing ad spend. However, the data needed for most marketing teams is disjointed and siloed across systems because their tools aren’t innately designed to talk to one another.

Operating off limited data can compound problems into bigger issues, such as wasting ad spend, targeting the wrong customer, using the wrong personalization type, and privacy and consent issues. Even worse, it can prevent your campaigns from starting because the data is simply unavailable.

For years, marketing teams have relied on traditional CDPs to solve these problems, but they don’t have all the data available in the data warehouse, which is essential for marketing campaigns and a complete view of customers. Marketers really want a way to build audiences, orchestrate campaigns, and execute across channels seamlessly.

To help avoid these bottlenecks, the largest companies in the world are adopting a Composable CDP. PetSmart leverages a Composable CDP to power their entire "Treats Rewards" program to send four billion personalized emails, and Calendly uses this same approach to power a year-in-review email for 20M users.

5 Examples of Great Marketing Campaigns

The best marketing campaigns all share one thing in common: they use data to personalize them and understand potential customers' needs. Here are five great examples of industry leaders utilizing data in their marketing campaigns.

Spotify Wrapped

If you use Spotify , every December, you receive a yearly compilation of your top songs, genres, total minutes listened, favorite albums/artists, etc. Spotify pioneered this product usage campaign back in 2015, and it’s one of the most viral marketing campaigns ever. Spotify dominates social channels one week out of every year because everyone shares their compilations.

Under the hood, this campaign is powered entirely by data. Spotify’s data science team computes individual-level metrics for each user and global metrics about their platform. Then, it passes this data to the marketing team, which packages it into a giant campaign. One of the factors that make this campaign so unique is that anyone not using Spotify is unable to participate, so it drives a ton of awareness to the brand and encourages new users to sign up so they can participate next year.

Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign

Liquid Death

It’s staggering to think that Liquid Death , a canned water business, is valued at $1.4 billion . The company is a perfect example of how invigorating the marketing behind a boring product, such as water, can breathe new life into an industry. The company broke every marketing playbook in the industry and created a series of provocative ads. Two core factors made the company explode:

• They used data to serve ads to hyper-specific audiences across various
• They create abnormal brand messaging to stand in a boring industry

Both factors were powered by data-backed research, which has made the brand one of the most popular water companies for Gen Z and Millenials .

Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club is a brand that isn’t shy about breaking the mold. The company’s viral marketing campaign in 2012 became the standard model that all other direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies have imitated for success. Their breakthrough was a wisely spent $4,500 budget for a YouTube ad that racked up 28 million views. That breakthrough led to their major success, which led to their acquisition by Unilever for $1 billion.

They have a data warehouse that centralizes all their customer data, which allows them to track and capture all customer interactions. They then leverage this data to personalize the user experience and segment their customer better in their advertising for more effective targeting. All of this equates to a successful brand that took a boring product like a razor and made it into a hugely successful brand.

You've probably seen Duolingo's green owl mascot. It's all over social media at this point. However, most people don't realize that Duolingo's real marketing genius is actually in the company's in-app notifications. The biggest risk to Duolingo is inactive users because if people aren't using your product, they're at risk of churning. To try to reduce their churn rate, Duolingo uses some creative methods to re-engage users.

One method they used was to add some personality to their app notifications, such as "It would be a bummer to lose that 21-day streak. Just saying." or "Look like you missed your Italian lesson again. Good luck talking your way out of this one!" This was followed by a text message saying, "Why is the Mafia at the house?" All of these messages are powered by data-driven insights, which the marketing team uses to identify what message to send and when to send it because users don't want to lose their streak.

Image source : An example of Duolingo's notifcations

Robinhood is one of the largest brokerage platforms in the world, but that wasn’t always the case. The company is so popular today because they simplified the complex process of buying and selling stocks and an easy-to-use mobile app.

One marketing tactic that has hugely accelerated their growth is their approach to affiliate marketing using incentives. Robinhood users can invite friends to join the app, and both individuals will receive stock options valued up to $1,500. The virality hack here is that the more people you invite, the more stocks you can add to your portfolio to grow your wealth.

Image Source : Robinhood's refer a friend marketing campaign

Building and launching an effective marketing campaign is difficult, but it’s even more challenging if you don’t have access to the right data. The biggest brands in the world are leveraging the Composable CDP to power everything from loyalty programs to paid media, lifecycle marketing, and in-app personalization.

Hightouch is a Composable CDP that lets you build any audience for any campaign or channel. If you’re interested in learning more about how Hightouch can help drive growth for your business, book a demo with one of our solution engineers.

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Friends Don’t Let Friends Buy a CDP

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Examples of Actionable Marketing Objectives

By Joe Weller | June 25, 2024

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We break down how to achieve your marketing goals by creating step-by-step objectives that are specific and measurable. We outline unique examples of potential marketing objectives, based on each type of marketing goal, and provide advice from marketing pros. 

Included in this article, you’ll find the following:

• Over 50 examples of marketing objectives based on popular marketing goals
• Marketing goals cheat sheet
• How to set marketing objectives 

What Are Marketing Objectives?

Marketing objectives are specific and measurable outcomes that a marketing plan aims to achieve within a set time frame. Examples include expanding market share by 20 percent in a year and increasing brand awareness in the 20-25 age demographic within six months.

Marketing Objective vs. Marketing Goals

Marketing goals are the broader aims that a business wishes to achieve. Marketing objectives are the specific outcomes within a goal that a business will need to execute in order to achieve the goal.

For example, if your broader marketing goal is to improve customer experience, a marketing objective would be to increase customer retention by 5 percent by the end of the year. Discover more  examples of business goals .

View this  chart to see the difference between goals and objectives .

Examples of Marketing Objectives

We have listed below different types of marketing goals with examples of specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound (SMART) marketing objectives. Use these examples as benchmarks for your own marketing plan.

Digital Marketing Objective Examples

When it comes to digital marketing, it’s important to think about the entirety of your web presence and target different facets of how people interact with it. These objectives focus on tactics to improve digital marketing efforts.

• Hire a contract designer to make your website more efficient and user friendly in three months for improved customer experience.
• Increase social media impressions by 15 percent by the end of two quarters.
• Create a YouTube platform for your company, and produce a slate of at least three relevant videos by the end of the year.
• Boost customer conversion rate by 20 percent through targeted email campaigns in the next quarter.
• Expand email subscriber list by 25 percent by the end of this quarter.
• Increase organic search traffic by 30 percent by the end of the year.

Marcom Objective Examples

These examples represent the focus on branding and industry relationships when setting marketing communication objectives.

• Conduct market research for one month, and develop a strategy to communicate with that market by the end of the quarter.
• Set up relationships with five new industry influencers by the end of Q3, and sign promotional contracts with them.
• Build a positive brand image by placing at least five new instances of press coverage for the company or a product by the end of the year.
• Increase brand awareness by 15 percent with your target audience within 10 months.
• Use webinars to improve product awareness by 30 percent by the end of the quarter.
• Increase lead generation 20 percent with email campaigns in six months.

Marketing Plan Objective Examples

When creating marketing plan objectives, consider the larger goals you want to achieve and how to create objectives in concert with them.

• Increase revenue by 10 percent by the end of the fiscal year.
• Generate new leads by creating five new, branded content relationships by the end of Q2.
• Increase brand awareness and brand recall by 20 percent with a new brand campaign by the end of the quarter.
• Increase market share 10 percent by the end of the fiscal year.
• Launch a new product and achieve a 30 percent revenue increase by the end of the year.
• Increase market share by 15 percent by the end of the fiscal year.

New Business Marketing Objectives

New business marketing objectives should focus on collecting research to set the game plan for crafting brand identity.

• Conduct market research on your company’s target customers and competitors by the end of the quarter and use that data to craft a positioning statement.
• Build brand identity and brand reputation by allocating 15 percent more of the annual marketing budget to brand partnerships and influencer partnerships.
• Improve customer advocacy by increasing your customer service workforce by 10 percent by the end of the quarter and investing revenue into monthly customer service training sessions.
• Generate 200 leads through a targeted social media marketing campaign in the first six months after the launch of the business.
• Establish a brand presence on two major social media platforms and gain 5,000 followers total within the first six months.
• Attract 1,000 website visitors a month by the third month of the business launch.

New Product Marketing Objectives

For new product objectives, the aim should be expanding brand awareness to new markets while satisfying your current customer base. 

• Reach new markets and obtain new customers by conducting marketing research on three new markets by the end of the quarter that you think would find the product meaningful.
• Expand brand awareness by increasing click-through rate on social media ads 5 percent within three months of completing marketing research.
• Increase sales revenue by 5 percent in the first three months after the product launch.
• Generate 500 leads pre-launch with email sign-ups and social media engagement six months prior to the product’s release.
• Secure partnerships with three key retailers to ensure product availability in at least 100 stores nationwide within the first six months.

Marketing Campaign Objective Examples

Marketing campaign objectives need to have a wider scope than regular marketing objectives.

• Increase conversions of people in the prospect pipeline to customers by 10 percent in the first three months after your marketing campaign.
• Create more brand awareness by targeting your campaign to three new markets or demographics by the end of the year.
• Increase reach and click-through rate by 15 percent on all forms of ads by the end of Q3.
• Increase sales revenue 30 percent by the end of the campaign.
• Grow subscriber base email list by 20 percent by two months after the campaign.
• Increase total social media followers by 15 percent by the end of the campaign.

Download a Marketing Campaign Report Template for Microsoft Excel  | Google Sheets

Use this marketing campaign report template to track the performance of your social media platforms by campaign. Use that information to determine overall marketing reach and channel growth. Note: This template uses different data examples than the examples listed above.

Long-Term Marketing Objective Examples

Long-term marketing objectives should focus on big vision scope such as sales, return on investment (ROI), and staffing planning. 

• Improve ROI by 10 percent upselling and focusing on high-value customers by the end of the year.
• Increase ad revenue by 20 percent by Q4.
• Hire a marketing manager in Q1 to set business and marketing goals for the current fiscal year.
• Improve search engine ranking to be in the top three search results for relevant keywords within the next six months by utilizing SEO strategies and deploying website optimization.
• Expand market share 15 percent in the next three years by capturing new markets and demographics with product and distribution channel diversification.
• Improve customer retention rate by 25 percent within the next 18 months by bolstering post-purchase support.

Download a Blank Marketing and Sales Goals Template for Excel  |  Microsoft Word  |  Adobe PDF

This template can help you ideate long-term goals and consider potential strategies, resources, and obstacles. Once complete, use that information to think about how to measure the success of the goal.

Short-Term Marketing Objective Examples

Short-term marketing objectives detail smaller steps that are designed to further larger goals.

• Increase lead generation by 30 percent by offering a downloadable service for free by the end of Q2.
• Promote a 20 percent discount on a product to attract and potentially retain new customers this quarter.
• Develop a loyalty program to increase customer retention by 15 percent in six months.
• Improve brand awareness by securing coverage in at least two industry-relevant online publications in the next three months via PR outreach.
• Engage with followers regularly and create more interactive content to increase social media engagement by 15 percent by the end of the quarter.
• Increase web traffic by 20 percent by the end of Q2 by implementing SEO informed content marketing strategy.

Digital Channel Objectives

Digital channel objectives entail improving the entirety of your digital footprint.

• Double the click rate from Google Ads by targeting better keywords by the end of the year.
• Increase SEO capture by 25 percent in two quarters by improving keyword targeting.
• Gain 30 percent more social media followers by the end of the fiscal year with targeted advertising campaigns and influencer partnerships.
• Increase email database by 10 percent this quarter by optimizing the email sign-up process.
• Improve social media advertising ROI by reducing cost per acquisition by 15 percent over the next two quarters through audience targeting refinement and performance analysis.
• Increase the click-through rate of email campaigns by 20 percent within the next 3 months through A/B testing subject lines.   

Download the Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign Media Plan Template for Excel

This template is a useful tool for managing all the moving elements of a digital marketing campaign. When you enter data such as total impressions, the sheet will auto-populate rows, making it easy to track your campaign’s effectiveness.

For other marketing tools to help you manage your efforts and meet company goals, check out this  collection of digital marketing campaign templates .

SMART Marketing Goals Template

Download a SMART Marketing Goals Template for Excel  |   Microsoft Word  |   Adobe PDF

Use this template to write SMART marketing goals. Once those are set, you can start to identify objectives to reach those marketing goals.

SMART Objectives Worksheet

Download a SMART Objectives Worksheet for Microsoft Word  |  Adobe PDF

This worksheet helps map out your marketing objectives and make sure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Separating out these components will keep your objectives useful and effective. 

How to Set Marketing Objectives

Setting marketing objectives starts with taking stock of current objectives and the methods you’re using to achieve them. Once you analyze the efficacy of your current or past objectives, you will be able to start crafting, implementing, and measuring new ones.

“Marketing objectives need to be reasonable and attainable but also push you,” advises Williams, author of  Evolve for Growth: Leading Innovation with an Evolutionary Approach .

• Analyze Data Metrics Spend time ascertaining what has and has not worked so far with your marketing efforts. Compare marketing metrics from the last quarter (such as email campaigns) and how it moved the needle on company metrics (such as sales). If one webinar had more downloads and led to more sales or email sign-ups, you know to put more resources into reproducing that as opposed to an email campaign with low click-through rate.
• Ideate Goal Metrics for Objectives Based on Review of Past Efforts Think about what are realistic objectives and goals based on the data you have collected. “You need to know how marketing metrics contribute to the company metrics,” explains Palmer. Using measurable metrics, develop objectives that are in line with your marketing goals and are informed by your review of what has and hasn’t worked last quarter.
• Make and Implement a Marketing Plan After collecting the necessary data, you can build your new plan of forward motion. Make a plan for how you will execute and achieve your marketing objectives, based on what you know to be useful from your last quarterly review. If you haven’t done one before, follow this tutorial on  how to write a marketing plan .
• Measure Results Keep track of the data and metrics you will need to be able to assess whether your marketing objectives hit their target by the specified time.

Download Marketing Goals Cheat Sheet

Download the Marketing Goals Cheat Sheet for Adobe PDF

This cheat sheet shows popular marketing goals alongside a list of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely marketing objectives. Use this document as inspiration for creating useful marketing objectives for your own marketing goals.

Using SMART Marketing Objectives

SMART objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound to your marketing goals. Once you have a marketing goal in mind, set the objective by picking a specific action outcome that you want to measure that will set you up to achieve your goal.

Make sure the action outcome is measurable by metrics that you can review. Then assess whether the objective is achievable with the teams available to work on it. Think about if this objective will be relevant to achieving a specific larger goal. Set a reasonable time limit that you will aim to achieve the outcome that you have set.

Learn  how to write SMART goals and turn them into objectives.

Track Your Marketing Objectives and Goals in Smartsheet

The best marketing teams know the importance of effective campaign management, consistent creative operations, and powerful event logistics -- and Smartsheet helps you deliver on all three so you can be more effective and achieve more. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Try Smartsheet for free, today.

Improve your marketing efforts and deliver best-in-class campaigns.

Project Plan Examples: How to Write an Effective Plan (2024)

Key takeaways What is a project plan? A project plan outlines the project’s scope, objectives, and schedule; it details what needs to be done, when, and by whom. The plan includes significant deliverables, methods to achieve them, team roles, stakeholder feedback, and milestones. This transparency makes sure everyone involved understands their role and how it…

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Key takeaways

• A project plan is a vital document in project management that outlines the project’s scope, objectives, and schedule.
• Effective project planning enhances resource management, mitigates risks, and improves project implementation and success.
• Project plans can vary in format, such as Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Gantt charts, and mind maps for brainstorming.

Jan. 8, 2024: Irene Casucian reviewed the information on this page for accuracy, refined the page layout, and added elements to improve the visual flow of information. She also created a downloadable project plan template.

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What is a project plan.

A project plan outlines the project’s scope, objectives, and schedule; it details what needs to be done, when, and by whom. The plan includes significant deliverables, methods to achieve them, team roles, stakeholder feedback, and milestones. This transparency makes sure everyone involved understands their role and how it contributes to the overall goal.

A project plan is the tangible output of the second phase of project management , project planning . This phase involves identifying and arranging each task necessary to cover the project’s scope, achieve deliverables, and meet the project’s goals. A comprehensive project plan developed in this phase is instrumental in tracking dependencies, staying updated on the status, and maintaining productivity throughout the project.

What are the key elements of an effective project plan?

A well-prepared project plan requires several key elements that will outline the project’s goals and define the stakeholders ‘ individual roles. Incorporating these key elements into a project plan is essential for effective project management and a higher success rate.

How do you create a project plan?

Step 1: define the project’s overall goals and objectives.

Identifying your project’s overall objectives and goals will help you measure the project’s success and keep your team aligned with the overarching mission. In this step, you should determine the desired outcome of your project that would represent its success.

By clearly understanding what the project aims to accomplish, project managers and teams can better identify the necessary tasks and establish the project scope . 

When defining your project goals, apply the SMART standards for a solid foundation. Make your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This approach guarantees a clear, focused, and actionable framework for your project.

Step 2: Establish the project’s success criteria

To measure success effectively, align your success criteria with the project’s key deliverables and outcomes, and make sure they are based on its intended result. Confirm that these criteria are quantifiable and accurately reflect the impact and value your project aims to deliver. Such alignment is essential for accurately assessing the project’s performance and its effectiveness in achieving the intended results.

Step 3: Identify project milestones, dependencies, risks, and deliverables

To identify project milestones, break the project down into key tasks and outcomes and specify significant progress points or phase completions as milestones. Consider dependencies when establishing a realistic workflow. Additionally, identify potential risks that can impact task completion and define deliverables clearly as measurable results expected from each project phase.

Step 4: Assign roles and responsibilities to the team and stakeholders

Your project’s stakeholders include any individuals or groups related to the project. To assess if someone is a stakeholder in a project, determine how much they influence, impact, or have an interest in the project’s outcome. Consider if their involvement is direct, if the project’s results affect them, or if they can influence the project’s direction or success.

Examples of stakeholder groups include:

• Team members.
• Departments.
• Project sponsors.
• Contractors.

Once you have determined your stakeholders, you can define their roles and responsibilities. This can help you structure your project team, identify members who are directly responsible for its success, and make sure they are assigned the correct tasks to carry out the project appropriately.

When assigning roles and responsibilities, utilize a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to clarify the involvement of each stakeholder in the project. This provides clear communication and accountability and prevents overlaps or gaps in responsibilities.

Step 5: Create a schedule and set a timeline

Creating a schedule and timeline for each task can provide visibility into the execution process and keep each team member productive.

Consider how much time is required to complete each task necessary for your project milestones. You can even break down tasks into smaller subtasks to make them more manageable. However, be mindful of factors that can cause delays such as:

• Resource limitations.
• Task dependencies.
• Unforeseen risks.

When creating a project schedule, visual tools like Gantt charts and Kanban boards help you map out task dependencies and timelines. A useful project management tool you can use for this step is Trello. Trello offers an intuitive platform for creating Kanban boards. It allows easy visualization and management of tasks through customizable columns and cards for streamlined project workflow.

Step 6: Establish an estimated project budget

To generate an estimated project budget, you must consider all of the necessary project resources, including personnel, labor, materials, and equipment. Establishing a project budget will help you make wise spending decisions throughout the project execution phase to avoid overspending. 

Step 7: Plan for communication and collaboration

A communication plan should show how information is shared among stakeholders. For instance, in a software development project, the communication plan might specify that the development team shares a beta version of the software with the client for feedback every two weeks. It’s a systematic approach to making sure that the client receives consistent updates about the project’s progress. Having a communication plan in place will also outline the channels of communication and frequency to all necessary parties. 

Leverage collaboration tools , such as Slack , that integrate with your project management software to receive real-time updates and interactions among team members and stakeholders. 

Step 8: Document the project plan

Compile all related planning information and documentation as you plan your project. Some of these vital documents include: 

• Stakeholder analysis.
• Feasibility study .
• Business case.
• Work breakdown structure .

Having these reports in one place will serve as a reference during the project’s execution.

Utilize a centralized digital platform, like Sharepoint , where stakeholders can store, update, and access all project documentation. This approach serves as a reliable reference and streamlines the management and tracking of the project’s progress.

Learn more about Sharepoint and other document management tools in our video overview:

Free project plan template download

Project plan examples.

Using an appropriate project plan format is essential to keeping stakeholders well-informed. Here are some of the widely-used project plan formats: 

1.  Spreadsheets

Using spreadsheets for project planning is beneficial due to its simplicity and widespread use, especially suitable for small-scale projects with straightforward tasks. Its customizable nature is excellent for simple initiatives like office events or basic marketing plans.

However, a significant drawback of using spreadsheets in project planning is the limited visualization options. While spreadsheets can manage data, they fail to offer comprehensive visual representations essential for a holistic view of project progress. Lastly, the risk of human error in data entry and formula setup in spreadsheets is high and can lead to critical miscalculations affecting the entire project plan.

Try this software

For more complex projects, Smartsheet is an ideal upgrade. It merges the simplicity of a spreadsheet with advanced project management features such as real-time collaboration, automated workflows , and app integration. More than just a basic spreadsheet tool, Smartsheet is particularly effective for large-scale projects like detailed marketing campaigns or cross-departmental efforts, offering comprehensive task tracking and resource management in a user-friendly format.

2. Slideshow presentations

Slideshow presentations for project plans provide a visually engaging method to simplify complex information. They effectively break down project components into understandable segments, using visuals, charts, and bullet points to highlight key information and timelines for team members and stakeholders.

However, the downside is that slide shows can oversimplify complex projects and potentially leave out critical nuances. They also require significant preparation time and may not be the best medium for detailed, data-heavy projects.

Microsoft PowerPoint is an excellent choice for creating slide show presentations as part of project plans. It’s user-friendly and offers many templates and design tools. That’s why it’s suitable for beginners and seasoned professionals. PowerPoint’s ability to integrate with other Microsoft Office tools, like Excel for data representation, enhances its utility in project planning.

3. Gantt charts

Gantt charts create a clear visual timeline of a project’s schedule and progress by displaying various project elements’ start and finish dates. This approach helps identify potential bottlenecks and overlaps and facilitates better resource allocation and time management. However, Gantt charts can become cumbersome for complex projects with numerous tasks and dependencies.

Gantt charts are particularly effective in construction projects, event planning, and software development, where timelines and task dependencies are critical.

TeamGantt is an effective PM tool that creates clear visual timelines for project schedules and progress tracking. By allowing users to input various project elements, including tasks, milestones, and dependencies, and then assigning start and finish dates to each, TeamGantt generates an intuitive Gantt chart.

This chart visually represents the project timeline, displaying how different tasks and phases overlap and interconnect over the project duration. The color-coded bars and easy-to-read format make it simple to understand the sequencing of tasks and the project’s overall progress at a glance.

4.     Mind maps

Mind maps differ from other project visualization methods by showing a radial, non-linear format ideal for brainstorming and capturing the holistic view of a project. They emphasize the creative mapping of ideas and relationships. They promote the free flow of ideas and easy visualization of relationships between different aspects of a project. Mind maps can also help identify key components, dependencies, and potential challenges at the early stages of a project.

Moreover, using a mind map before presenting a Gantt chart can help ease the transition from creative brainstorming to detailed scheduling, resource allocation, and progress tracking.

Lucidchart is an excellent software solution for creating mind maps that can be converted into detailed reports. Its intuitive, drag-and-drop interface is ideal for conceptualizing project plans.

Lucidchart also stands out because it integrates with various tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. This integration can facilitate the transition from a visual mind map to a comprehensive written report.

Components of project planning

Work breakdown schedule development.

Using a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in project planning offers distinct advantages and some drawbacks. The primary benefit of a WBS is its ability to break down a complex project into manageable components. It is then easier to allocate resources, assign responsibilities, and track progress. This hierarchical project decomposition guarantees that every part of the project is apparent.

However, the main disadvantage lies in its potential rigidity; a WBS can become overly prescriptive, limiting flexibility and adaptability to changes or unforeseen challenges. Additionally, creating a comprehensive WBS can be time-consuming, and if not done meticulously, it may lead to gaps or overlaps in project planning.

monday.com includes a work breakdown feature to help teams organize complex projects into manageable tasks. Each task is separated into more minor subtasks assigned to the appropriate individuals. The chart also displays additional information, such as the deliverables, end dates, and schedules based on interdependencies.

Project and documentation management 

Project and documentation management in project planning has its own advantages and disadvantages. With this process, you can make sure that all project-related documents are organized, up-to-date, and easily accessible. This approach is essential for maintaining consistency and clarity throughout the project lifecycle. Yet, the downside includes the possibility of information overload, where team members might get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of documents.

Agile teams use Jira for planning and managing their projects. Here, you can see some of the information regarding risks and dependencies compiled within Jira. This method of organizing this information can be helpful, as the platform can act as a single source of truth to keep team members updated on the status of specific tasks. It also makes it easy for teams to communicate with external stakeholders about factors impacting the project.

Benefits of creating a project plan

Effective project planning is the cornerstone of successful project execution. It involves several key aspects contributing to a project’s smooth functioning and success. Some of these benefits include:

Remember, an effective project plan is not just a document; it’s a strategic tool that integrates various critical elements to secure the project’s success.

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Edtech Business Plan Template

Written by Dave Lavinsky

If you’re looking to create an EdTech business plan, you’ve come to the right place!

Over the past 25 years, the PlanPros team has helped over 1 million entrepreneurs and business owners write business plans….and many of them have started and grown successful EdTech businesses. Our EdTech business plan example below is sure to help you!

EdTech Business Plan Example

Below is our edtech business plan template and sample plan created using our business plan generator :  

I. Executive Summary

Company overview.

At LearnSphere EdTech, located in Richmond, CA, we are on a mission to revolutionize the education technology landscape. Our innovative platform is designed to enhance the learning experience for students of all ages, making education more accessible, engaging, and effective. With a strong focus on leveraging cutting-edge technology, we offer a range of products and services aimed at addressing the diverse needs of the modern learner. Our commitment to quality and excellence ensures that we not only meet but exceed the expectations of educators and students alike, setting new standards in the EdTech industry.

Success Factors

Our success is underpinned by several key factors and notable accomplishments. Firstly, our dedication to innovation has allowed us to develop a comprehensive suite of educational tools that stand out in the market. We’ve established strategic partnerships with educational institutions in Richmond, CA, ensuring our solutions are aligned with local educational standards and needs. Furthermore, our ability to secure initial funding has been crucial for covering startup costs and sustaining operations. Achieving regulatory compliance and building a scalable customer support system are among our foundational achievements. Together, these elements have positioned us as a promising newcomer in the EdTech space, ready to capture significant market share and drive positive educational outcomes.

Industry Analysis

The EdTech industry is experiencing rapid growth, driven by technological advancements and a growing recognition of the potential for digital solutions to enhance education. There is a significant demand for innovative educational tools that offer personalized learning experiences, making this an opportune moment for EdTech startups. With the shift towards more digital and remote learning environments, especially in the wake of global challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for effective, flexible, and accessible education technology has never been greater. This trend is expected to continue, with the industry poised for further expansion as more educational institutions and learners seek out digital solutions to meet their evolving needs.

Customer Analysis

Our target customers are a diverse group of learners and educators seeking innovative solutions to enhance the educational experience. This includes K-12 students, college students, and lifelong learners, as well as teachers and educational institutions looking for effective ways to engage students and improve learning outcomes. Our research indicates a strong demand for customizable learning paths and tools that cater to various learning styles and paces, highlighting the importance of personalization in education technology. By addressing these needs, we aim to attract and retain a broad customer base, fostering a more inclusive and effective learning environment for all.

Competitive Analysis

Direct Competitors: Not specified.

LearnSphere EdTech sets itself apart from competitors through our comprehensive suite of education technology services and our commitment to innovation and excellence. Unlike others, we offer customizable learning paths tailored to individual needs, a feature that many lack. Our focus on staying ahead of technological advancements enables us to provide the most effective and up-to-date educational tools, ensuring a superior learning experience that is unparalleled in the market.

Marketing Plan

Our marketing plan is centred around offering a wide range of products and services at competitive pricing, designed to meet the needs of our diverse customer base. This includes subscription models that offer flexibility and affordability, ensuring access to our educational resources for a broad audience. Our promotions plan is multifaceted, encompassing targeted online marketing campaigns, partnerships with educational institutions, and engaging social media initiatives. By leveraging these channels, we aim to build brand awareness, attract new users, and establish LearnSphere EdTech as a leader in the EdTech industry.

Operations Plan

The key operational processes at LearnSphere EdTech include finalizing product development, securing funding, establishing partnerships with local educational institutions, and launching our business with a compelling go-to-market strategy. Achieving regulatory compliance and building a scalable customer support system are also critical milestones. These steps are essential for mitigating risks, sustaining operations, and positioning us for future growth and success in the EdTech sector.

Management Team

Our management team comprises individuals with a wealth of experience in education, technology, and business management. This diverse skill set is crucial for navigating the complexities of the EdTech industry and driving the company towards achieving its goals. Our leaders are committed to fostering a culture of innovation and excellence, ensuring that LearnSphere EdTech remains at the forefront of educational technology.

Financial Plan

To reach our growth goals, LearnSphere EdTech requires significant funding. This capital will be utilized to cover startup costs, marketing efforts, product development, and operational expenses until we become self-sustaining. Our financial strategy is designed to ensure we have the resources needed to execute our business plan effectively, driving growth and establishing a strong presence in the EdTech market.

Below is an overview of our expected financial performance over the next five years:

II. Company Overview

LearnSphere EdTech is a pioneering EdTech venture located right in the heart of Richmond, CA. As a newly established local EdTech business, we are proud to fill a significant gap in the market, offering high-quality educational technology services that were previously unavailable in our area. Our commitment to innovation and excellence makes us a beacon for learners and educators seeking to enhance their educational experiences through technology.

At LearnSphere EdTech, our product and service lineup is designed to cater to a wide range of educational needs. We offer a robust selection of online courses across various disciplines, ensuring that learners of all ages and backgrounds can find something that interests them. Our Learning Management Systems (LMS) are state-of-the-art, providing educators and institutions with powerful tools to create, deliver, and manage their educational content effectively. Additionally, our interactive learning tools are designed to engage students in a more dynamic learning process, making education both effective and enjoyable. For those in need of personalized attention, our tutoring and mentoring services offer direct support from experienced educators. Lastly, our assessment and analytics tools enable both learners and educators to track progress and identify areas for improvement, ensuring that educational goals are met efficiently.

Our base in Richmond, CA, positions us perfectly to serve the local community with our innovative educational solutions. We are deeply committed to contributing to the educational landscape of Richmond by providing access to quality EdTech services that can transform learning experiences.

LearnSphere EdTech stands out for several reasons. Our founder brings a wealth of experience from successfully running a previous EdTech business, ensuring that we are built on a foundation of proven success. Furthermore, we pride ourselves on offering superior education technology compared to our competitors, alongside a more comprehensive range of services. This unique combination positions us not just as a provider, but as a leader in the EdTech industry within our community.

Since our establishment on January 4, 2024, as a Sole Proprietorship, we have hit several key milestones that underscore our commitment to building a solid foundation for our business. We have developed a distinctive company name and logo that capture the essence of our mission and vision. Additionally, we have secured an ideal location that allows us to connect with our target audience effectively. These accomplishments, though early in our journey, are indicative of our strategic approach to becoming a cornerstone in the EdTech sector in Richmond, CA.

III. Industry Analysis

The Edtech industry in the United States is currently valued at over $8.38 billion, with a projected growth rate of over 17% annually. This growth is being driven by increased adoption of technology in education, as well as a shift towards online and remote learning platforms. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic accelerating the need for digital solutions in education, the market is expected to continue expanding in the coming years.

One of the key trends in the Edtech industry is the rise of personalized learning solutions, which cater to individual student needs and abilities. This trend aligns well with LearnSphere EdTech’s mission to provide tailored educational experiences for students in Richmond, CA. By leveraging technology to create customized learning paths, LearnSphere EdTech can tap into the growing demand for personalized education solutions in the market.

Another trend in the Edtech industry is the increasing focus on lifelong learning and upskilling. As the workforce becomes more dynamic and competitive, there is a growing need for continuous education and skill development. LearnSphere EdTech can capitalize on this trend by offering a range of courses and programs to help individuals in Richmond, CA, stay ahead in their careers and acquire new skills. With the market for Edtech solutions continuing to expand, LearnSphere EdTech is well-positioned to thrive in this evolving landscape.

IV. Customer Analysis

Below is a description of our target customers and their core needs.

Target Customers

We will target local residents in our community, focusing on students who are seeking supplementary educational support outside of their traditional classroom settings. This group is seeking to enhance their learning experiences with innovative digital solutions that can provide personalized and flexible learning opportunities. Our services will tailor to their specific needs, offering a range of subjects and skill levels to cater to various academic requirements.

We will also engage parents looking for quality educational tools for their children. This segment is particularly interested in platforms that offer safe, engaging, and effective learning environments. By focusing on interactive and immersive learning experiences, we will meet the expectations of parents who prioritize their children’s educational advancement without compromising on safety and engagement.

Additionally, we will target adult learners aiming to upskill or reskill to improve their employment prospects. These individuals are seeking convenient, accessible, and flexible learning solutions that can fit into their busy schedules. We will offer specialized courses and certifications tailored to the demands of the job market, thus providing our learners with the skills necessary to advance in their careers.

Customer Needs

LearnSphere EdTech meets the growing demand for high-quality online courses and learning platforms. Residents in the area can now access a variety of educational materials tailored to their needs, ensuring they have the resources necessary for personal and professional development. This access transforms the approach to lifelong learning, making it more flexible and accessible.

The platform also addresses the need for a supportive learning environment. Users can expect interactive features that encourage engagement and comprehension, fostering a community of learners who can share insights and seek help when needed. This sense of community is crucial for motivation and improves the overall learning experience.

Moreover, LearnSphere EdTech recognizes the importance of offering courses that are relevant to the job market. By providing up-to-date and industry-relevant content, learners can equip themselves with the skills required in today’s competitive job landscape. This alignment with market needs ensures that learners are not only gaining knowledge but are also enhancing their employability.

V. Competitive Analysis

Direct competitors.

LearnSphere EdTech’s competitors include the following companies:

MajorClarity  focuses on career planning and college readiness, offering an interactive platform where students can engage in career assessments, explore career paths, and plan their educational journey accordingly. Their services are primarily subscription-based, targeting middle and high schools as well as higher education institutions. Pricing varies depending on the size of the institution and the range of services opted for, but they are known for their scalable solutions that can fit various budgets. MajorClarity operates primarily in the United States, serving a diverse geographical area with a strong presence in both urban and suburban school districts. The platform’s key strengths include its user-friendly interface and comprehensive career exploration tools. However, its reliance on U.S. education standards and career data may limit its applicability in international markets.

EdConnective  offers a unique service by providing one-on-one coaching for teachers, focusing on improving instructional techniques and student outcomes. Their model is based on direct engagements between educators and coaches through a virtual platform, making their services accessible to teachers nationwide. Pricing is structured per teacher, with packages designed to accommodate individual or multiple coaching sessions, making it accessible for both individual educators and schools or districts. EdConnective reports revenues through contracts with school districts, charter schools, and teacher training programs, indicating a broad customer base. The company’s strengths lie in its personalized approach and evidence-based coaching methodology. However, its focus on individual teacher development may not directly address broader institutional or systemic educational challenges.

Always RepresentED  specializes in diversity and inclusion training for educators and administrators, aiming to improve cultural competency within educational institutions. Their offerings include workshops, seminars, and long-term consulting services, tailored to meet the specific needs of each client. Pricing is customized based on the scope of services and the duration of engagement, making it flexible for different budget sizes. Always RepresentED serves clients across the United States, with a particular focus on urban school districts seeking to address equity issues. The company is recognized for its expertise in diversity training and its ability to effect meaningful change in school cultures. One potential weakness is the niche focus, which may limit its appeal to institutions that do not prioritize diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Competitive Advantages

At LearnSphere EdTech, we pride ourselves on offering superior education technology solutions that truly set us apart from our competition. Our commitment to innovation and excellence means that we consistently deliver cutting-edge tools and platforms designed to meet the diverse needs of today’s learners. Unlike our competitors, our suite of education technology services is more comprehensive, providing a one-stop solution for educators and students alike. This holistic approach ensures that users can access a wide array of resources and tools, enhancing the learning experience and driving better educational outcomes.

Moreover, our advantage does not stop at the breadth and quality of our services. We understand that the key to truly impacting education lies in the customization and adaptability of our solutions. Therefore, we offer customizable learning paths that cater to the individual needs of each learner, a feature that many of our competitors lack. This personalized approach not only fosters a more engaging learning environment but also allows for the accommodation of diverse learning styles and paces. Additionally, our commitment to staying ahead of technological advancements ensures that we can provide the most up-to-date and effective educational tools, further solidifying our position as a leader in the EdTech industry. By choosing LearnSphere EdTech, users can expect a superior, more comprehensive, and tailored learning experience that stands unparalleled in the market.

VI. Marketing Plan

Our marketing plan, included below, details our products/services, pricing and promotions plan.

Products, Services & Pricing

At the forefront of educational technology, LearnSphere EdTech offers a range of products and services designed to enhance the learning experience for students and educators alike. With a focus on accessibility and innovation, this EdTech company ensures that learners and teachers have the tools they need for success in a digital age.

One of the cornerstone offerings is their comprehensive Online Courses and Learning Platforms. These platforms provide a wide array of subjects ranging from science and mathematics to humanities and arts. Each course is meticulously designed to cater to different learning styles, ensuring that every student can find a pathway that suits them best. Pricing for access to these online courses starts at $200 per course, offering a cost-effective solution for quality education.

Another crucial service provided by LearnSphere EdTech is their Learning Management Systems (LMS). This service is pivotal for educators and institutions looking to streamline the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of educational courses or training programs. The LMS platforms are available starting at a subscription fee of $500 per month, which includes ongoing support and customization options to fit the specific needs of each educational institution.

Interactive Learning Tools form an essential part of LearnSphere EdTech’s product lineup. These tools are designed to engage students in the learning process actively, making education both fun and effective. From interactive quizzes to virtual labs, these tools help in reinforcing concepts through practice and interaction. Schools and individuals can access these tools for a subscription fee starting at $100 per month, providing an affordable way to enhance learning engagement.

Understanding the importance of personal guidance in education, LearnSphere EdTech offers Tutoring and Mentoring Services. These services connect students with experienced tutors and mentors across a wide range of subjects. Whether it’s help with homework, preparation for exams, or understanding complex concepts, their tutoring services are tailored to meet individual learning needs. Prices for tutoring and mentoring start at $30 per hour, making personalized help accessible to more students.

Finally, LearnSphere EdTech’s Assessment and Analytics Tools are indispensable for educators aiming to measure learning outcomes accurately. These tools offer detailed insights into student performance, helping teachers identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. Starting at $250 for the basic package, these tools provide valuable data to inform teaching strategies and improve student learning experiences.

With this diverse range of products and services, LearnSphere EdTech is poised to make a significant impact on the education landscape, offering effective, engaging, and affordable solutions for learners and educators in today’s digital world.

Promotions Plan

At LearnSphere EdTech, we understand the importance of innovative promotional methods to attract our customers. In today’s digital age, online marketing stands at the forefront of our promotional strategy. We will leverage social media platforms, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing to reach our target audience effectively. Our social media campaigns will engage users with compelling content about our educational offerings, while our SEO efforts will ensure that when potential customers search for educational services in Richmond, CA, LearnSphere EdTech appears at the top of their search results.

Beyond online marketing, we will also utilize content marketing to establish our brand as a thought leader in the EdTech sector. By creating and sharing valuable educational content, we will attract and retain a clearly-defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer action. Our content marketing strategy will include blog posts, e-books, and webinars that provide insights and value to our customers.

Referral programs will form another cornerstone of our promotional efforts. We will encourage our satisfied customers to refer their friends and family to LearnSphere EdTech, rewarding both the referrer and the referee with benefits such as discounts on future courses. This method not only helps in acquiring new customers but also strengthens our relationship with existing ones.

Partnerships with educational institutions and local organizations in Richmond, CA, will also play a crucial role in our promotional strategy. By collaborating with schools, colleges, and educational non-profits, we will gain access to a wider audience, enhancing our visibility and credibility within the community.

Lastly, we will not overlook the power of event marketing. Hosting and participating in educational fairs, seminars, and workshops will allow us to directly interact with our potential customers, providing them with a firsthand experience of what LearnSphere EdTech has to offer. These events will serve as an excellent platform for live product demonstrations and customer engagement.

In conclusion, our comprehensive promotional strategy, combining online marketing, content marketing, referral programs, strategic partnerships, and event marketing, will ensure that LearnSphere EdTech attracts and retains a broad base of customers, establishing ourselves as a leading EdTech provider in Richmond, CA.

VII. Operations Plan

Our Operations Plan details:

• The key day-to-day processes that our business performs to serve our customers
• The key business milestones that our company expects to accomplish as we grow

Key Operational Processes

To ensure the success of LearnSphere EdTech, there are several key day-to-day operational processes that we will perform.

• Customer Support:  Maintain a responsive and helpful customer support team that can address user issues, provide technical assistance, and answer queries regarding course content, platform navigation, and account management.
• Content Update and Management:  Regularly update and review educational content to ensure it remains current, accurate, and engaging. This includes adding new courses, updating existing ones, and removing outdated material.
• Platform Monitoring and Maintenance:  Continuously monitor the online platform for any technical issues, ensuring high uptime and smooth operation for users. Perform scheduled maintenance and updates without significantly disrupting user access.
• Marketing and Outreach:  Execute ongoing marketing campaigns to attract new users and retain existing ones. This includes social media marketing, email campaigns, and community engagement in Richmond, CA.
• User Feedback Collection:  Implement mechanisms to collect user feedback on courses, platform usability, and overall service. Use this feedback to make informed improvements and adapt to user needs.
• Data Analysis:  Regularly analyze user data, course performance, and market trends to make evidence-based decisions on content development, platform enhancements, and marketing strategies.
• Financial Management:  Oversee day-to-day financial operations, including billing, subscriptions, and vendor payments. Monitor financial health through regular reporting and budgeting exercises.
• Compliance and Security:  Ensure that all operations comply with educational regulations and standards, as well as data protection laws. Regularly update security measures to protect user data and privacy.
• Partnership Development:  Seek and manage partnerships with educational institutions, content creators, and other stakeholders in Richmond, CA, to expand course offerings and enhance the learning experience.
• Staff Training and Development:  Provide regular training and professional development opportunities for staff to keep them updated on the latest EdTech trends, teaching methodologies, and customer service practices.

LearnSphere EdTech expects to complete the following milestones in the coming months in order to ensure its success:

• Product Development Completion:  Finalize the development of the initial product offerings, ensuring they are responsive, user-friendly, and tailored to the educational needs of our target audience in Richmond, CA. This includes completing beta testing to gather early feedback for improvements.
• Securing Initial Funding:  Obtain the necessary capital to cover startup costs, marketing, and operating expenses until the business becomes self-sustaining. This may involve pitching to investors, applying for grants, or launching a crowdfunding campaign.
• Establishing Partnerships with Local Educational Institutions:  Form strategic partnerships with schools, colleges, and educational organizations in Richmond, CA. These partnerships will not only serve as a channel for product promotion but also as a means to ensure our offerings are in alignment with local educational standards and needs.
• Launch Our EdTech Business:  Officially launch LearnSphere EdTech with a clear go-to-market strategy that includes a compelling launch event, targeted marketing campaigns, and initial customer engagement activities to build brand awareness and attract early users.
• Building a Scalable Customer Support System:  Implement a robust customer support framework that can scale with the business. This includes setting up a helpdesk, creating an online knowledge base, and training staff to ensure users receive timely and helpful support.
• Achieving Regulatory Compliance:  Ensure all products and services comply with local education laws, data protection regulations, and online safety standards. This milestone is critical to building trust with users and avoiding legal pitfalls.
• Get to $15,000/Month in Revenue:  Implement and refine sales and marketing strategies to consistently generate at least $15,000 in monthly revenue. This milestone is crucial for demonstrating the business model’s viability and supporting ongoing operations without external funding.
• Expanding Product Offerings:  Based on customer feedback and market demand, expand the range of products and services offered to address additional educational needs, gaps in the market, or to differentiate from competitors.
• Establishing a Strong Online Presence:  Develop a comprehensive online presence through an engaging website, active social media channels, and content marketing. This online presence will serve to educate, engage, and convert potential users into loyal customers. By successfully completing these milestones, LearnSphere EdTech will not only mitigate risks but also position itself as a leading EdTech provider in Richmond, CA, paving the way for future growth and success.

VIII. Management Team

Our management team has the experience and expertise to successfully execute on our business plan.

Management Team Members

LearnSphere EdTech management team, which includes the following members, has the experience and expertise to successfully execute on our business plan:

Iris Hill, CEO

Iris Hill brings a wealth of leadership and educational technology experience to her role as CEO of LearnSphere EdTech. With a proven track record of success, Iris has already demonstrated her ability to steer an EdTech company to success. Her background includes both strategic and operational roles, where she has been instrumental in driving growth, fostering innovation, and building strong, collaborative teams. Iris’s deep understanding of the EdTech landscape, combined with her passion for enhancing education through technology, makes her uniquely qualified to lead LearnSphere EdTech towards achieving its vision of transforming the learning experience for students worldwide.

IX. Financial Plan

Funding requirements/use of funds.

To accomplish our growth goals, LearnSphere EdTech needs $490,000 in funding. Key uses of this funding will be as follows:

Financial Projections

5 Year Annual Income Statement

5 Year Annual Balance Sheet

5 Year Annual Cash Flow Statement

What Is an Edtech BusinessPlan?

An EdTech business plan is a document that outlines the strategies you have developed to start and/or grow your EdTech. Among other things, it details information about your industry, customers and competitors to help ensure your company is positioned properly to succeed. Your EdTech business plan also assesses how much funding you will need to grow your business and proves, via your financial forecasts, why the business is viable.  

Why You Need a Business Plan for your Edtech Business

A business plan is required if you are seeking funding for your EdTech. Investors and lenders will review your plan to ensure it meets their criteria before providing you with capital. In addition, an EdTech business plan helps you and your team stay focused. It documents the strategies you must follow and gives you financial projections you should strive to achieve and against which you can judge your performance.  

Edtech BusinessPlan Template PDF

Download our Edtech Business Plan PDF to help guide you as you create your business plan for your own EdTech.  

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Lead Generation in 2024: The Ultimate Guide 

Written by: Masooma Memon

Up to 61% of marketers say generating leads and traffic is their biggest challenge. 

If you’re among these marketers, you’re in the right place. Because in this guide, we’ll walk you through 12 proven lead generation strategies that are sure to drive leads your way. 

The one thing you need to be mindful of though is being consistent. 

Once you shortlist some lead generation tactics, stick with them. 

Most of the time, the problem isn’t in the tactic like the majority of us assume. Instead, it’s in the inconsistency — the haste to see results and, when failing to do so, giving up way too soon. 

With that, let’s dig into the nuts and bolts of your biggest challenge, lead generation. 

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

Table of Contents

• What Is Lead Generation

The Lead Generation Process

12 lead generation strategies for 2024, lead generation best practices.

• Lead Generation FAQs
• Lead generation, or lead gathering, attracts interested customers to your business, nurturing them and converting them into paying customers. A lead is a potential customer who shows interest in your product/service and may end up buying from you.
• First, you generate a lead by collecting a contact email; then, you nurture it through the lead generation cycle until they convert.
• The three industry-standard lead generation types are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLSs), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Product Qualified Leads (PQLs).
• Lead generation helps brands target the right people, build brand loyalty, increase business awareness and create a pipeline of qualified leads.
• Some creative lead generation ideas include writing problem-solving blog posts, hosting podcasts and webinars, launching well-timed popups, email marketing, referral programs and much more.
• Follow these lead generation best practices for optimal results: segment your email lists, craft killer copy and retarget hesitant leads.
• Incorporate Visme Forms into your strategy to collect qualified leads from your landing pages, blogs and digital content.

What is Lead Generation? 

Lead generation is the process of attracting interested customers to your business, nurturing them and converting them into paying customers. 

So you aren’t only going to focus on attracting leads but also nurturing and converting them. But first: 

What is a lead?

A lead is a potential customer—a stranger who shows interest in your product/service and may end up buying from you. 

Not all leads are created equal, though. 

Some leads come from the marketing team and are therefore, called Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLSs) . Other leads come from the sales teams and are called Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) . S till, others are generated from the free product trials that you may offer. These are Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) . 

Similarly, not all leads show an equal level of interest in your business. It’s why you have: 

• Cold leads or leads with next to no interest in your product/service 
• Warm leads or leads with some interest in your product/service 
• Hot leads or ready-to-convert leads 

Warm leads need nurturing (engaging with value) to convert. Hot leads, on the other hand, need the right push with the right offer to convert. 

Cold leads, however, won’t convert—no matter what you do. It’s best to leave them be and focus on attracting and engaging interested leads. 

Types of Lead Generation

Some leads come from the marketing team, while others come from the sales team. And still, others are generated from the free product trials that you may offer. That said, not all leads show an equal level of interest in your business.

These are the best and most common types of leads.

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLSs)
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
• Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)
• Cold leads or leads with next to no interest in your product/service
• Warm leads or leads with some interest in your product/service
• Hot leads or ready-to-convert leads
• In-person vs. online lead generation

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• Inspire your sales team to create their own content with branded templates for easy customization

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Lead Generation vs. Lead Nurturing

Lead generation and lead nurturing are sequential; first, you must generate the lead to be nurtured. Nurturing a lead means that you, as a brand, must use value to engage with the lead in order to convince them to convert.

Looking at the types of leads, for example, warm leads need nurturing to convert, while hot leads need the right push with the right offer to convert. The amount of nurturing differs and depends on how warm or hot the lead is.

Why Is Lead Generation Important for Brands?

Without lead generation, you’re never going to have a pipeline of customers interested in your product/service. 

You may buy some leads and call it a day. 

But be warned: those leads are likely not your target buyers and they’ve never heard of you before. 

So any attempt at reaching out to them will feel like an invasion of their privacy since they never gave you explicit permission to cold contact them.

The question now is: what’s the right way to reach out to leads aligned to your buyer persona? Lead generation.

The process helps you: 

Target the right people 

Valued-focused lead generation that’s designed to resonate with your target audience helps you attract qualified leads . 

These leads are also more likely to share their contact information with you, therefore, giving you permission to reach them. 

Build brand loyalty 

The right leads who find your marketing valuable are not only going to convert into paying customers but also loyal customers. The reason? You’ve reached them out only after they gave you permission. 

Plus, you’ve nurtured them by providing value. This way, they can tell you’re focused on their success — not just making sales. 

Improve brand impact on your lead magnets by applying your branding guidelines. Use the Visme Brand Wizard to not only create branded lead magnets but all sorts of content for every aspect of your business.

Increase business awareness 

Even if strangers don’t convert into leads, seeing your value-centered lead generation tactics can make them aware of your brand. 

As a result, they’re likely to recommend you to others or buy from you down the line whenever they’re ready. 

Create a full pipeline of leads

With the correct lead generation marketing strategy in place, you’ll keep generating new leads, nurturing them and converting them regularly. This helps you develop a healthy pipeline of customers, keeping your business afloat.

When you share lead magnets made with Visme you have the ability not only to track opens and reads but also to capture emails. Add a lead capture form to the lead magnet where readers can input their email before reading the content. All collected emails will be available inside your Visme analytics window.

Opportunity to personalize your messaging 

As leads share their contact information with you, you can use it to personalize your marketing materials . This helps you learn more about your target buyer and nurture them better. 

Personalizing lead magnets is easy when you use Visme’s dynamic fields feature . Create a dynamic field for the target’s name and personalization mentions. Then simply change that in the dynamic fields window instead of having to skim through every lead magnet every time.

Create any type of marketing content with Visme!

• Choose from dozens of professionally designed templates
• Add and alter icons, colors, fonts, images and more
• Customize anything to fit your brand image and content needs

Following a process with your lead generation efforts will help your team do it repeatedly and effectively every time. Over time, you'll be able to build a solid lead generation system that drives consistent success.

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Here is an 8-step cyclical process:

• Analyze and plan a lead generation goal.
• Research the market and conduct a gap analysis.
• Craft your message following brand guidelines.
• Promote lead magnets at the top of the funnel with TOFU lead generation strategies.
• Design and launch lead generation landing pages to collect emails in exchange for valuable content.
• Send emails or make phone calls mid-funnel to potential leads. These outreach efforts are part of your sales lead generation strategy.
• Score leads and add them to a nurture sequence.
• Evaluate results to create reports to use as a reference in the future.
• Analyze, Iterate and improve the process.

On to the meaty part now: the 12 lead generation ideas. These proven lead generation tips will fuel will your success in 2024.

1. Write problem-solving blog posts.

In-depth, SEO-optimized content is an effective way to attract your target leads by providing the answers to the questions they have. 

With each blog post though, make sure you add a call-to-action (CTA). This could be anything from trying your SaaS tool for free or downloading a related checklist in exchange for their contact information. Your CTAs can be visuals that break up the text or popups with a signup form. The trick is to not overwhelm the reader but instead pique their interest.

Image Source

The goal? Get your readers’ contact information (in exchange for value) and add them to your lead nurturing pipeline. 

2. Launch a podcast.

This could be in collaboration with a teammate or you could invite guest hosts. 

Either way, use the podcast to build relationships in the industry and with your target audience. 

For example, at the end of an episode, you can tell listeners you’ve a guide on the topic that they can download using a specific URL shared in the show notes. In doing so, you can encourage them to share their contact details with you, generating leads the right way. 

For successful lead generation with podcasting though, aim to take the same approach as blogging: answering the questions your target listeners have. 

You can even ask them to email their questions to you as Michael Stelzner, host of the Social Media Marketing Podcast does. 

Use a template like the one below to share teasers for upcoming episodes.

3. Try email marketing.

Email marketing showcases an impressive ROI of $44 for every $1 spent . 

Build your email list organically using social media and collaborations with other newsletter creators. 

Remember that people are always conscious about sharing their email addresses. However, the good news is that only interested ones are open to sharing their contact information. 

Meaning: chances of building an email list of interested leads are high. 

Once people share their email though, it’s essential you make subscribing to your newsletter worth their time. Offer them: 

• Helpful content such as quick tips 
• Interviews with industry-leading experts
• Subscriber-only content resources and discount codes 

Whatever the format you finalize for your emails, make sure you consistently message your list on a set day and time. This helps set your audience’s expectations who start anticipating your emails (provided the content is good). 

Also, note that the key to leads-winning email marketing is a non-salesy approach. 

The form template below is a newsletter sign up form which you can add as a popup to your website, inside blog content or inside a digital document.

4. Host webinars.

Webinars are a great lead generation tool. The reason? 

Unlike blogging, your audience gets to meet you live (or recorded) and ask questions. This helps double the amount of value you offer, earn more trust, and build better connections. 

What’s more, you can leverage webinars not just to attract leads, but also to slowly introduce your product to the viewers. This way, you can show (not just talk about) your product benefits .

Use a customizable template like this one to create your own webinar slides.

5. Create value-packed lead magnets.

Lead magnets such as white papers , research reports, ebooks, and more are great lead generation tools . 

And, they come with a ton of benefits. 

Case in point: ebooks . These are easy to create. Simply repurpose written content. For example, expanding on it where needed to make it more in-depth. 

Plus, use a Visme ebook template like the one below for designing it and you’re done. 

The same is true about white papers . However, you’d need a subject matter expert to write the content. As for designing: again pull a template from Visme’s bank and design your lead magnet in no time. 

Similarly, research reports can help you build links — not just leads. Plus, you can use the findings from your report to inform more of your content. 

Don’t forget to create a landing page for your research report so interested leads can easily share their email and get the report in exchange. 

6. Take time to network.

Networking with your target audience is the best way to build a reputation and strong relationships. 

With this tactic though, it can be challenging to prove the ROI to relevant stakeholders. Even so, networking opens doors to not just new leads but other opportunities too. 

For example, your target buyers start seeing you as an authority in your field — based on the conversations you have with them. 

Targeted lead generation increases brand awareness and also brings you more referrals. 

You can use Visme's AI writer to help you with copyy for your lead generation content. It can generate content ideas, proofread and edit your text and even create first drafts for you. All you have to do is explain to the tool what you want it to write and watch the magic happen.

7. Launch well-timed popups.

Often, popups earn a negative reputation as they hinder site visitors’ experience on your page. 

However, well-timed popups with relevant messages can skyrocket your conversion rate — whether that’s converting site visitors into leads or leads into customers. 

For example, instead of having a popup surface as soon as a visitor lands on your page, time it to show after they’ve scrolled to a point. 

At the same time, make your offer hyper-relevant to the visitor. 

For example, if they’re reading a blog post on how to live stream, create a scroll-point popup that offers readers a checklist for setting up their first live stream. 

One last point, it’s important you design clutter-free popups with a clear CTA button and exit option.

Visme's popup form builder is an excellent tool for creating effective, well-timed popups. It allows you to customize the forms based on user actions and site interaction, significantly boosting conversion rates. The 3D animated characters and interactive elements not only leave a lasting impression on visitors but double your conversion rates.

8. Create a referral program.

Referral programs encourage your customers to send more leads your way provided you give them a good incentive to do so. 

For instance, you can offer customers a discount for referring your service or product to others. 

However, for a referral program to succeed, it’s essential you make it easy for customers to share your business. By giving them unique referral links, you can make referral marketing work in your favor.

9. Tap into video marketing.

Although it may seem like creating videos takes a lot of work, the right tools can make everything easy. 

But first, make sure video is your audience’s preferred content format. Then, use Visme’s video templates to create bite-size videos for lead generation. 

You can also record yourself or your screen to create quick explainer videos . 

Want to start a YouTube channel for leveraging video marketing for lead generation? Repurpose your blog content into videos. This way, you won’t run out of ideas for videos to create.  

10. Try social media for lead generation.

66% of marketers say they’ve generated leads via social media after spending only six hours per week on social media marketing. 

So how can you start attracting leads with social media lead generation? 

First, figure out which channels your audience uses the most. For B2B marketers selling to professionals , for instance, LinkedIn is a great platform for lead generation. 

For those targeting millennials, TikTok is a better option while marketers trying to reach seniors should give Facebook a shot. 

Second, develop an engaged presence on the network(s) you decide to use for attracting customers. 

It’s important you contribute with value and focus on building relationships. At the same time, share helpful content — complete with custom-designed social media graphics for positioning yourself as the expert in your vertical. 

Choose if you’ll concentrate on organic lead generation techniques or paid ads to create content accordingly.

Here are some must-follow tips for designing the graphics: 

Lastly, share discount codes with your social followers. This way, you can get them to buy from you directly via social. 

But, remember, never take a sales-first approach — always provide value first to win leads’ trust. 

11. Create a community.

Community marketing has become an important part of several businesses’ marketing plans lately. 

The reason it helps generate leads ? Building a community helps you work with your target audience to help them solve their problem (related to your product space) for free. 

It’s when community members see that you’re an authority in your field and are laser-focused on their success that they start trusting you. The result? Not only will they buy from you (when ready) but also refer others your way. 

Want to double the value you provide to your community? Try this: 

• Invite industry thought leaders for AMA (ask me anything) sessions 
• Provide free (and paid) resources such as templates, cheatsheets, and short courses 
• Host community-wide discussion sessions on topics of your community choice 

Do you love Visme and would like to get first access to new features? Are you a Visme power user and want to share your experience with others? Join the Visme community !

12. Tap into visual marketing.

Finally, design custom visuals such as infographics to generate leads. 

You can also submit infographics to guest sites, therefore, attracting leads from other high-traffic websites. 

Essentially, the idea behind creating branded visuals is spreading brand awareness and driving referrals. 

It works well because branded visuals help you stand out from your competitors and leave a memorable impression on your audience. Take advantage of all the design tools inside your Visme editor; from animated illustrations to your very own AI-generated images .

Use a template like the one below to create your own infographic.

Are you looking for more lead generation strategies? Our guide on timeless lead generation strategies is just what you need. And if you want to discover specific B2B lead generation strategies read our guide with 13 ways to maximize your lead generation efforts .

Lead generation is critical for your business, but most importantly, it’s critical to do it right. Otherwise, why all the effort?

If you're wondering how to generate more leads, here are five lead generation best practices to optimize your lead gen strategies:

Make it Easy For People to Give You Their Email

To grab a lead, you need their contact email first. Don’t make it complicated or annoying for people; make it simple.

Instead of lengthy forms, ask only for an email and name. Instead of three popups, use only one powerful one.

Simply the process of collecting contact information using Visme's lead generation forms . The user-friendly form builder allows you to easily create forms and customize the form fields according to your needs.

Write Powerful Calls to Action

The copy in your calls to action must grab the interest of readers and visitors quickly and effectively. Don’t use vague and superficial words that everybody else uses like “the best.” Write calls to action that speak directly to your ideal customer profile (ICP) .

Segment Your Email Contact Lists

Segmenting email lists helps personalize communication with your leads, especially if you have several ICPs. Use different styles of segments like the lead’s industry, location, or interest. You can gain this information with surveys and simple questionnaires.

Retarget Hesitant Leads

Hesitant leads are the ones that seem like they might convert but haven’t yet. They’re also called warm leads and will need more nurturing than other types of leads. You can retarget them by sending segmented emails, calling them on the phone or offering free trials or gifts.

Use Lead Scoring Systems

Knowing if a lead is good or not isn’t simple. You can’t always rely on a hunch to know if a lead is qualified or not. A scoring system can help tag leads according to specific characteristics. Using the score, you can create a list to show you the best leads to contact first.

Frequently Asked Questions About Lead Generation

Still unsure about some things related to lead generation? Don’t worry, these FAQs will surely help.

Q. How Do You Know If a Lead Is Good?

To know if a lead is good, or qualified, ensure that it checks off all these characteristics:

• You can tell they’re a real person. Look for them on LinkedIn or online to find their name and work position.
• They have decision power. These can be business owners or managers with buying power.
• They engage with your content regularly. Find them on social media and see if they interact with your posts.
• Their characteristics match your user personas. You’ll need to have some type of lead scoring system to really know.

Q. What Are the Benefits of Lead Generation?

Lead generation has many positive benefits for all types of businesses. Here are the most impactful:

• It helps expand your market and grow your following.
• Lead generation can boost your revenue.
• It generates more business opportunities.
• Generating leads reduces cold calling and is more cost-effective.

Q. What Are Common Lead Generation Challenges?

Like everything in business, there are some challenges to lead generation, but nothing you can’t overcome with good strategies.

These are the most challenging setbacks, each with a tip on how to overcome it:

• Pinpointing the ideal strategy for your business. Fix this by doing market research and fostering communication between marketing and sales teams.
• Nurturing leads quickly and effectively. Nurturing the wrong leads or not knowing how to do it properly won’t get results. use lead scoring systems and use sales processes to nurture leads positively.
• Always having valuable content to offer as an opt-in. If you don’t have time to create new content every time, use repurposing techniques with content you already have. Simply add more value to the version you offer as an opt-in.
• Not being able to reach the right people. This is another challenge you can overcome with market research and a user persona profile .

Here’s a user persona profile you can use to set yours up.

Q. What Tools Can You Use for Lead Generation?

For optimal lead generation strategies, you need a combination of tools that do different things. Here’s a list of the essentials:

• A content-authoring tool like Visme creates all the valuable content you’ll use in opt-ins and nurturing sequences. Plus, all you need to create lead generation plans, user personas and process flowcharts.
• An email provider to create lead nurturing sequences and send out emails to hesitant leads.
• Landing pages to promote opt-in campaigns for ebooks, downloadable guides and courses.
• Email popups grab people’s attention and entice them to sign up for a webinar, an event or a special offer.
• Sales battlecards empower your sales team to talk to leads on the phone and convert to sales.

Here’s a sales battlecard template you can start using immediately with Visme.

If you want to explore effective B2B lead generation tools and strategies, read our guide about B2B lead generators . It explores how leveraging the right tools, including Visme for content creation, can significantly enhance your lead generation efforts.

Q. What Is a Qualified Lead?

Qualified leads are the best types of leads. They are the ones that will most likely convert with the right amount of effort from your sales team. For a lead to be considered qualified, they must be real people, have decision making power and be honestly interested in your business.

Q. What Is a Lead Gen Lifecycle?

The lead generation lifecycle starts when a person becomes a lead and ends when they buy from you. The process differs for every lead. Some need a lot of nurturing, while others need none at all.

Q. What are the Best Lead Generation Tools?

There's a wide range of tools to help you streamline your lead generation process. Here are the five most popular options:

• Visme : A comprehensive design platform for creating visually engaging lead magnets , landing pages, social media graphics and more. It also offers built-in forms for collecting leads.
• HubSpot : A popular CRM and marketing automation suite with tools for email marketing, landing page creation and lead tracking.
• OptinMonster : A lead generation toolkit specializing in popups, slide-ins and other attention-grabbing forms to capture leads.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: An invaluable tool for identifying and connecting with qualified leads on LinkedIn.
• Mailchimp : A popular email marketing platform that includes features for landing page creation, audience segmentation and lead nurturing campaigns.

Q. How Do You Qualify a Lead?

Lead qualification helps you determine if a potential customer fits your product or service well.

Here's a common approach:

• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Define your ideal customer's characteristics, such as company size, industry, job title and pain points. Leads that closely match your ICP are more likely to be qualified.
• Lead Scoring: Assign points to leads based on their actions like website visits, content downloads and email engagement. Higher scores indicate stronger potential.
• BANT Framework: This is a classic model to assess leads based on:
• Budget: Do they have the resources to buy?
• Authority: Do they have decision-making power?
• Need: Do they have a problem your solution addresses?
• Timeline: How soon are they looking to purchase?

Q. What Are the Different Types of Lead Generation?

There are countless lead generation strategies, but some common types include:

• Content Marketing: Creating valuable content, such as blog posts, videos and ebooks, to attract and engage potential customers.
• Email Marketing: Building an email list and sending targeted messages to nurture leads.
• Social Media Marketing: Using social platforms to connect with potential leads and promote lead-generating content.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website and content to rank higher in search engine results.
• Paid Advertising: Using online advertisements to expand your audience reach and increase website traffic.

Q. What’s the difference Between Lead Generation and Demand Generation?

Lead generation and demand generation are often used interchangeably, but there's a key difference:

Lead generation focuses on capturing the contact information of potential customers interested in your product or service.

On the other hand, demand generation is a broader strategy for creating awareness, interest and desire for your product or service among a wider audience.

In other words, a well-designed demand generation strategy creates the initial interest to fill the top of your demand generation funnel. In contrast, lead generation focuses on converting that interest into identifiable leads for your sales team to pursue.

Level Up Your Lead Generation Today

With these 12 lead generation tactics, you can attract, nurture and convert leads the right way. 

Remember to pick a few of these ideas for lead generation and stick with them. Give them time to deliver results instead of assuming that they aren’t working.

As for your leads-attracting designs, learn more about how your marketing team can use Visme  and start creating today. 

What Are Sales Leads? Types, Best Practices & Tools

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About the Author

Masooma Memon is a pizza-loving freelance writer by day and a novel nerd by night. She crafts research-backed, actionable blog posts for SaaS and marketing brands who aim to employ quality content to educate and engage with their audience.