How to Create a Marketing Plan: Your Step-by-Step Guide

Why Create a Marketing Plan?

Whether they're brand new startups, small businesses, or titans in their industry, every business needs a solid marketing plan.

According to this article from Coschedule, marketers who organize ideas, set short and long term business goals, document their strategies, and proactively plan projects are roughly 300%+ more successful than those who don’t.

We agree that a good marketing plan is crucial to your marketing efforts. Simply put, it’s a formal business document that tells you, your company, and others:

• What to market

• How to market it

• What the prospect's current external/internal situations are

• Which channels to use

• How to measure KPIs

• Whether it is financially feasible.

A good marketing plan will serve not just as a guide to your marketing success but play a key role in your presentations to future stakeholders and investors.

Don’t worry if this sounds daunting. From your mission statement to your justification, we’re going to show you how to create a marketing plan for your business. The idea is to divide your marketing goals into different sections and take it one step at a time.

Why not download our free marketing plan example template and note down your ideas as we go?

The Need for a Marketing Plan: Example

Let’s pretend you’re a marketer working at a computer store where you sell various computer parts.

After some quick market research and conversations with customers on social media, you found out that there is a rising demand for pre-built, mid-range gaming computers. Based on this information, you realize:

• Your store could assemble parts into finished computers and then sell those.

• You could charge more for complete computers than for the individual parts.

• You could easily assemble the computers with the resources you already have, so you wouldn’t have to pay out for more manpower.

• You wouldn’t need to pay for additional warehouse cost, stocking cost, or display cost.

All you have to do is to market the computers properly, and to do that you need to create a marketing plan. After that, you can start building the computers to order.

What are we waiting for? Let’s market your product!

The Parts of a Marketing Plan

Almost every business organizes their parts of a marketing plan in a similar way. Starting with the big picture idea, they break their marketing plan down into sections and flesh out the details as they go.

Our free marketing plan template (and this guide) uses the following structure:

• Executive Summary

• Company Profile

• Situation Analysis

• Product/Service Details

• Target Audience

• Marketing Strategies

• Types of Marketing Channels

• Project Mapping, Assigned Roles, and Responsibilities

• KPI

• Budgeting

• Financial Analysis

• Justification

We'll go over them one by one.

Executive Summary

The executive summary is an overview of your whole marketing plan, so it’s best to write it once you have everything else worked out. That’s why we advise writing this section last even though it appears at the beginning.

The executive summary should end with why your marketing plan should be accepted. Think of it as a one-minute pitch.

When writing your executive summary, it’s best not to exceed half a page. Keep it concise.

For more information, Chron has a great article on how to write a great executive summary.

Company Profile

Although this is something everyone in the company knows, it’s still a good idea to outline the company profile. After all, your brand identity is an important part of your marketing plan!

This section is a great opportunity to remind your marketing team and any external collaborators of your vision, including:

• Products

• Operations

• Publicly available financial details (total valuation, profit margin, etc.)

• Brief history of the company

• Company vision

• Company mission

• Short and long term business goals

Product/Service Details

This is where you outline your product/service idea, your market research, and your experience. You don’t need to go into the technical details or what the product's packaging will look like, though technical details can be stated briefly. Just a brief overview will do.

The focus of this section is to identify the Unique Service Proposition (USP) of your product or service. Though some industry products are similar, they always have distinct attributes that make them unique—a USP.

Let's use vacuum cleaners as an example:

 

Great Value	Dyson
Likely the most affordable	High quality and convenient
Appeals to buyers with low to medium income	Appeals to buyers with medium to high income

 

Situation Analysis: SWOT & PEST

Situation analysis uncovers the potential challenges your marketing plan will face. Performing a situation analysis can be tricky, but the key to performing an effective analysis is to stick to only the information that is useful and relevant to your marketing goals.

The two most common situation analysis tools are:

• SWOT

• PEST (sometimes PESTLE or PESTEL)

SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

A SWOT analysis outlines the four aspects of the product:

1. The strengths that make it a great product.

2. The weaknesses that might make prospective buyers opt for a competitor instead.

3. The opportunities your product has to thrive in the market. These are a great resource for your marketing team!

4. The threats to your product that may jeopardize its public performance. Your marketing team will cleverly have to work around these. 

For the purposes of our gaming computer marketing plan example, we've listed 3 strengths identified using SWOT. We've also narrowed our threats down to two:

• Competition: The target audience for our gaming computers is niche, so it's not very large. This means that even a little competition can have significant impact.

• Cannibalism: Making pre-built PCs might hamper our regular business (selling PC parts) which risks product cannibalism.

PEST: Political, Economic, Social, and Technological

According to GroupMap, “A PEST analysis is a strategic business tool used by organizations to discover, evaluate, organize, and track macro-economic factors which can impact on their business now and in the future. The framework examines opportunities and threats due to Political, Economic, Social, and Technological forces.”

A PEST analysis must be concise, so focus only on the key pain points.

For instance, if two of our gaming computer company's Economical challenges are the competition friendly market and minimum earning ability, we’ll focus on the competition friendly market as our headache.

As well, the Technological factors are overall more influential for our computer product and business, so we prioritize those and consider more of them compared to other factors.

Once you have completed your situation analysis, you will be able to extract valuable information that will be used later to formulate a marketing strategy.

Target Audience

Setting up a target market is one of the main sections of the marketing plan. Every product or service is aimed at a specific group of people and this section outlines which people your product is right for.

By identifying your target audience, you can gain the insights you need to focus your marketing goals, strategies, and tactics based on your group's buyer persona. This is especially important because depending on the type of product, your group can range from thousands to millions! 

A few examples:

• Practically everyone is a potential customer for a soap item

• New parents are the primary target group for baby wipes

• Athletes are the target audience for running shoes.

If you market baby wipes to athletes and running shoes to new parents, you might hit on some success here and there, but not as much as if you had focussed on the best target audiences for those items.

A target audience is usually defined by a wide range of demographic factors such as:

• Gender

• Age

• Income

• Education

• Area of residence

• Family status

• Relationship status

• Height

• Weight

• Race

• Religion

Even tiny details matter. This is one the reasons social media platforms try to collect information about their users through various data points.

Using these factors, you can precisely define your target audience, identify your marketing goals, and establish a buyer persona.

Let's return to our gaming computer marketing plan example

If you aim to sell mid-range gaming computers, your target audience, (PC gamers) should be teenagers or young professionals who have the time and money to play video games.

If your product is a high-end gaming computer, then you might have to consider their income level or the area of living.

You also have to consider education, gender, and marital status. Though plenty of women play video games and even stream, Statista's investigations show that males are more into gaming than females.

As a result of these considerations, your target audience (at the time of writing) looks like this: 

Just remember that trends will change over time, so it's good to revisit this to make sure your target market picture is still up to date.

You can also have secondary target markets! In this case, likely parents or grandparents. This market would indicate customers (the people who buy the computer), not the consumers (the people who use the computer).

At the time of writing, your secondary buyer persona would look like this:

By analyzing each buyer persona, you can formulate the next steps of your marketing plan:

• What does the above information tell you?

• Where do you think these people spend most of their time?

• What are their other hobbies? 

• What kind of messaging would appeal them?

With these answers, you can shape your marketing strategies.

Marketing Strategy

It’s easy to get off topic or overwhelmed in this section, but you can focus the scope of your marketing goals and strategy based on the insights from your SWOT and PEST analysis.

Remember that marketing is a lot of hard work, luck, persistence, and trial and error. There is no golden rule and there are no right or wrong answers. One company may see success with only peer review and another company may struggle despite using multi channel marketing and precise, extensive planning.

Usually marketers use “marketing mixes” to generate ideas before they set a strategy.

The 7 Ps of Marketing	The 7 Cs of Marketing
Product	Customer
Price	Consistency
Place	Creativity
Promotion	Culture
People	Communication
Process	Change
Physical	Channel

 

Brick-and-mortar marketing might only use the 7 Ps marketing mix, whereas digital marketers will use the 7 Ps and the 7 Cs.

With these aspects in mind, generate your overall marketing strategy and execution plan. 

A typical marketing strategy will:

• List the types of marketing channels you plan to use.

• Map the project outline.

• Assign roles and set KPIs for the marketing team.

• Create an estimated budget.

Marketing Channels

Depending on the nature of your business and your product, there are a few types of marketing channels you can set up:

Traditional	Digital
Commercials (Television, Radio)	Email marketing (newsletters)
Podcasts	Social media
Print (Flyers, Brochures)	Pay-per-click
Banners, Billboards	Affiliate
Posters	Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

For our gaming computer marketing example plan, we could employ multi channel (or "omnichannel") marketing. Our tech-savvy primary audience would likely prefer digital media like email marketing, social media marketing, PPC, and affiliate marketing. Looking at our market research, our secondary audience would probably respond better to traditional media such as brochures.

Most businesses use multi channel marketing and dabble in a combination of methods for further reach. Just make sure the user experience is consistent with your brand identity across all channels:

• Tone

• Color

• Fonts

• Making sure your logo is visible

• Keeping a consistent voice across your written and spoken content

For added engagement, why not try utilizing demos of your product too? Let your customers see first hand how great it is!

Project Mapping, Assigning Roles & Responsibilities

Some marketers consider their available resources before setting up their strategies, and some marketers set up their strategy and then modify it based on available resources. 

Whichever type of marketer you are, you’ll find that setting up a project roadmap and assigning roles and responsibilities is essential. By preparing these guideposts, you provide your marketing team with a workflow that helps them simulate your marketing plan prior to launch. This is also a great way to identify risk factors and allocate resources to mitigate those.

Again, there is no golden rule for setting up a project and assigning roles. Success takes a lot of trial and error aided by:

• How you design your strategy

• Availability of resources

• Skilled team members

• The types of marketing channels you are going to use

• Luck

Marketing goals for our gaming computer marketing plan example

The aim of our multi channel marketing is traffic for our business's landing page. Once there, prospective customers can sign up for more information about our gaming computers, preferably via a short, embedded sign up form.

Your sales team will then import client contact information into a CRM tool, communicate with them, maybe demo the computers, and ultimately close the deals.

These are not ultra-high-end gaming computers, but they will probably cost between $500 and $900 dollars. Many customers will want to build a relationship with your brand via a salesperson (likely over the course of multiple calls or visits to your store) before deciding their money is best spent with you.

You can probably already see where your marketing team (copy writers, SEO, social media, graphic designers) and sales team will shine in this process.

Try using this chart to assign each step of the project:

Setting up KPIs

Your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is how many people sign up for more information about your product.

Although our overall aim is to make as many sales as we can, the marketing portion of the KPI should be based on marketing goals.

For example: say the target audience for our gaming computers consists of roughly 100,000 people. We should aim to sign at least 20%, making our marketing KPI 20,000 sign-ups.

For even better results, we suggest breaking your KPIs down across your various types of marketing channels. For example, if after the first week you notice that the number of sign-ups is critically low from the affiliate marketing channel whereas social media is booming more than expected, you could transfer funding from affiliate marketing to invest more in social media instead.

Remember to use this information to formulate future marketing plans!

To get an accurate look at your sign ups and website traffic, make sure to use tracking tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, and SimplyCast Sonar. This information is invaluable as it will show you where people are signing up for your products, and give you the information you need to refine your marketing strategy.

Budgeting

Setting up a budget for the marketing plan is basically calculating the overall cost spent over the channels:

• Each email spent using an email marketing tool.

• Boosting content on social media.

• Asking affiliate marketers to write about your amazing product.

• Design, print, and post for each brochure.

  

The best way to keep track of the money you are spending is to fix a budget and do your best to remain within it.

Financial Analysis

At this point, you have the complete attention of top management. Understandably, they are interested in how much of a profit your marketing plan can make.

At this point, you have the complete attention of top management. Understandably, they are interested in how much of a profit your marketing plan can make.

For a short-term marketing plan (such as one to six months), you could simply demonstrate feasibility via the simple revenue > expense model.

If this marketing plan is intended for the next three to five years, then a more complex model is the better choice, such as calculating cash flow each year and estimating the Net Present Value.

Let's consider our gaming computer marketing plan example:

Here you are demonstrating that just by spending an additional $20,000, your company can gain a net profit of $80,000.

Justification

This is the part where you extract information from the previous sections to justify the marketing plan. We suggest you do this by interrogating your plan and looking for loopholes. 

In our gaming computer marketing plan example:

Question: Although you are selling 500 computers, you are also blocking individual parts from sale, resulting in product cannibalism.

Answer: Customers who buy our computers are either buying a new computer or replacing their old one, so technically customers who buy only computer parts will not be attracted to this plan.

Another justification might be that by selling 500 computers, you are opening up leads for future parts selling because computer parts can be individually upgraded. After two or three years, gamers might want to install a new graphics card. Because they bought their computer from you and had a positive experience, it is more likely that they will visit your store again instead of going somewhere else. That’s future market creation.

You can also claim that by selling pre-built gaming computers you are also creating a unique product that can provide your brand identity with an additional boost.

In addition to these positive points, make sure to mention any imminent risk factors and how you plan to mitigate those.

The Next Step: Your Successful Marketing Plan!

The easiest way to create a marketing plan is to build a framework first and then work on the structure. Now you've seen how it all works, why not download our free marketing plan template today? Just follow the sections and insert your information. It's a great brainstorming tool!

Once you are done with your first draft, give it a thorough check and perform self-criticism. The most successful marketing plans go through multiple revisions.

Good luck in your future business endeavours!