What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a tool used to organize, execute, and track specific marketing strategies over a given period. It helps you set goals and optimize the impact of your marketing campaigns. It helps you get a clear view of all your big picture marketing tasks.

A good marketing plan helps you communicate clear messages with defined tactics. Last but not least, it provides a guide that helps you track the success of your campaigns.

What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a document with a spreadsheet that outlines your organization’s overall strategy. That strategy can be structured in many ways, but the framework is pretty similar between them all.

A marketing plan should include:
• Your long-term and short-term marketing goals.
• A description of your target audience and buyer persona.
• High-level marketing strategies and tactics.
• Overall refinements of lower-level tasks.

1. Executive Summary
An executive summary is a paragraph summary overview of your company that grabs readers’ attention and summarizes critical information about your business and upcoming short-term and long-term goals.

A marketing plan’s business summary breaks down what your business does and why. After you add it to your plan, you can use it as your starting template for future opportunities to explain your business.

These elements explain your business, so you know how to market its strongest elements.

2. Mission statement
• An overall mission or vision of the company
• The company’s core values
• The goals and objectives

What is the difference between the company vision and its mission?

The vision is your big picture overall goal and foundation of why your company exists. The mission and vision go together plus actions you will do to help advance its vision.

The first part of any pitch is a personal story and a quick description of your business’ “why”.
Your mission statement condenses your business’ philosophy into a few sentences. Think of it as the guiding principles that drives your company.

3. Market Analysis (SWOT)
Market Research and Analysis.

SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is a framework used to evaluate a company's competitive position and to develop strategic planning. SWOT analysis assesses internal and external factors, as well as current and future potential.

It is sometimes called situational assessment or situational analysis.

4. Competitor Analysis

Market: The market-focused sections of a marketing plan analyze your competition and audience to help you understand your position in the market.

5. Target market & buyer personas
Target Audience
Customer Profiling.

6. Marketing Goals and Objectives.

Your marketing plan’s marketing goals are your marketing goals at the highest level. At this point, you don’t need to get into specific objectives or metrics, just the gist of the goal.

Marketing outcomes: Sections covering marketing goals and objectives determine the outcomes you want to see from your marketing plan and strategy.

6b. Marketing Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) KPI is quantifiable measurement of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help you make better decisions.

KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages.

7. Strategy
Components set up a plan for marketing and selling your products using the marketing mix product, price, place, promotion, packaging, and positioning.
8. Growth

Marketing Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) Plan of action that aims to increase market share. If you are looking to expand, a market growth strategy will enable you to chart your path to expansion, taking into account your industry, your target market, and your finances.

What are the 4 growth strategies in marketing?

They are Product, Placement, Promotion and Price.

A company’s overall brand growth strategy may include a combination of different strategies, such as market penetration, market development (entering a new market with an existing product), new product development and diversification. Brand awareness, perception, association, and consideration can all play a role when someone is choosing a brand.

Other ideas you can use are:
• finding new audiences,
• new location targeting,
• new distribution channels,
• ravamping and enhancing customer service to be more helpful for your customers as they grow and change community,
• enhancing the customer experience beyond the regular life cycle by offering them something else that keeps them engaged,
• connect with your various niche audiences known as “tribes” and further narrowed into core groups that have their own #,
• charity,
• influencers,
• coop or sponsorships,
• helping your customers,
• parlaying on your customers behavioral trends and making that, which seemed like a negative, into a new marketing push values branding with purpose,
• branding overhaul,
• piggybacking PR,
• pruning your audiences, products, or services, to make room for what is yielding better results,
• targeting younger audiences who help their parents become customers and themselves will be your customers of tomorrow.

We shy away from the types of hard-sell features out there that ramp into reaching audiences in ways the customers complain about. There are plenty of ways to reach your customers that they want to participate in, so you don’t have to go to desperate measures. Just pay attention to them and nurture what works for your business and, like a garden, it will grow.
Paid discovery commerce finds and brings customers to you by using AI for the same goal

This can go a lot deeper, as the other categories can. The depth aspect of this category is advanced data science to predict when individuals will be in the market to make (additional) purchases. Data science can map online data points for millions of consumers including individual search behavior, contextual interests, in-market data and geographic data, what they are looking for, when and where they are while doing a specific action.

9. Marketing Channels
Marketing Strategies.
Marketing Methods: Marketing plan sections related to methods determine the actions you’ll take to perform marketing. Action plan: These elements record the who, what, where, when, and how of executing your marketing strategy.

10. The Budget
This is a spreadsheet that has all the things you will purchase and spend money on throughout the year. It has a broad budget on the first worksheet and each section gets connected to its own worksheet in the same file. We also program the formulas so the spreadsheet can easily be altered and the prices will automatically repopulate with the new correct calculations.

11. Branding
Branding is the language and imagery associated with your company and product. The branding section of a marketing plan includes logos, images, writing tone, taglines, and other essential branding assets.


Products -

• Product or service planning
• Pricing
• Branding
• Channels of distribution
• Personal selling
• Advertising
• Promotions
• Packaging
• Display
• Servicing
• Physical handling (for products)
• Fact finding and analysis


While your objectives can and should be lofty, your individual goals must be measurable and bound to a timeline. It can also help to lay out what will be involved with each initiative. Finally, every initiative needs a status section so you can keep track of what has been done when.

12. Accountability: After you hash out your marketing plan, you’ll need to explain how you’ll stick to it. Accountability components set processes in place to monitor your execution and results.

Marketing Steps -

• Product Focus Components
• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion
• Packaging
• Positioning & Messaging
• Marketing Methods Components
• Marketing Tactics
• Marketing Channels
• Marketing Media & Content
• Action Plan Components
• Roles & Responsibilities
• Marketing Timelines
• Content Schedule
• Marketing Plan Checklist
• Marketing Budget
• Accountability Components
• Monitoring & Controls
• Reviews & Revisions
• Tracking Guidelines
• Reporting Guidelines
• Contingency Plan

Marketing Plan

12-month Cross-Platform Marketing Plan Development Package

Our Ultimate Marketing Plan Template has been used to quickly and easily create winning marketing plans in every industry, including yours!

We include each section you need in your marketing plan. The key components are Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing, Email Marketing, Direct Mail Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Paid Online Advertising, Paid Print Advertising, Branding, and lays out a plan to tackle each.
You also get a checklist of the most important marketing materials you will need to drive more new leads and sales. With this plan, you can generate more revenue without paying for advertising.
This plan also helps you ensure long-term sales because it sets you up for success.
Includes: 2 Meetings, research, conceptualization, campaign planning, initial graphic design of one template for each platform, one online presentation, one set of changes, our time, our proprietary Monthly Marketing Calendar customized for your Marketing Plans, timelines for each platform, your Marketing Budget, all for any combination of up to 6 marketing and advertising platforms and/or channels.
Does Not Include: Implementation, materials, working with vendors or customers, printing, platform fees, anything on your accounts.

Add-ons: Please request custom quotes for graphic design of all the individual pieces for the whole year, monthly, or weekly. This is quoted separately because it depends on what your options are.