Everything You Need to Write a Marketing Plan

Would you like to develop a marketing plan for your company? Click here to download HubSpots for free Marketing plan template to get started.

Types of marketing plans

Depending on the company you work in, you may want to use different marketing plans. Here are just a few:

• Quarterly or annual marketing plans: These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns that you will run over a period of time.
• Paid marketing plan: This plan could highlight paid strategies such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media advertising.
• Marketing plan for social media: This plan could highlight the channels, tactics, and campaigns that you want to run specifically on social media.
• Content marketing plan: This plan can highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you use content to promote your company or product.
• Marketing plan for the launch of new products: This plan is a roadmap for the strategies and tactics that you implement to promote a new product.

Note that there is a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

Marketing strategy vs. Marketing plan

A Marketing strategy describes how a company achieves a specific mission or goal. This includes which campaigns, content, channels and Marketing software You will complete this mission and pursue its success.

For example, while a larger plan or department could take over social media marketing, you could consider your Facebook work as an individual marketing strategy.

A Marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It is the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are built, and will help you reconnect each strategy with a larger marketing process and business goal.

Suppose your company launches a new software product that customers should sign up for. This requires that the marketing department develop a marketing plan that will help introduce this product to the industry and achieve the desired registrations.

The department decides to launch a blog for this industry, a new YouTube video series on building expertise, and an account on Twitter to participate in discussions on the topic. All of this serves to attract an audience and convert that audience into software users.

Can you see the difference between the company’s marketing plan and the three marketing strategies?

In the example above is the deal Marketing plan is dedicated to launching a new software product on the market and promoting registration for this product. The company will execute this plan with three Marketing strategies: a new industry blog, a YouTube video series and a Twitter account.

Of course, the company could also consider these three things as a huge marketing strategy, each with its own specific content strategies. How detailed your marketing plan should be is entirely up to you. Nevertheless, there are a number of steps that every marketing plan goes through when it is created. Find out what they are below.

1. State your company’s mission.

Your first step in creating a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve as the main mission statement for your company. Be precise, but not too specific. There is still plenty of room in this marketing plan to explain how you can win new customers and accomplish this mission.

For example, if your company’s mission is to “make travel booking a pleasant experience,” your marketing mission could be to “attract an audience of travelers, educate them about the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our booking platform “.

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

Any good marketing plan describes how the department will track the progress of its mission. To do this, you need to identify your key performance indicators, or “KPIs” for short. KPIs are individual metrics that measure the different elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you set short-term goals within your mission and share your progress with the directors.

Let’s take our example marketing mission from the step above. If it’s part of our mission to “attract an audience of travelers,” we can track website visits using organic pageviews. In this case, organic pageviews is a KPI, and we can see that the number of pageviews increases over time.

These KPIs will be included in the conversation again in step 4 below.

3. Identify your buyer personalities.

A buyer personality is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, gender, location, family size, job title and more. Every buyer personality should be a direct reflection of the customers and potential customers of your company. It is therefore important that all company managers agree on your buyer personalities.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

Here you will find the most important points of your marketing and content strategy. With a laundry list of content types and channels available today, it is important that you choose carefully and explain how to use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.

A content strategy should:

• What types of content will you create? These can be blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books and more.
• How much of it are you going to create? You can describe the volume of content in daily, weekly, monthly or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on your workflow and the short-term goals you have set for your content.
• The goals (and KPIs) you use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which pages you want to direct this traffic to, e.g. B. product pages, blog pages or landing pages.
• The channels on which you distribute this content. Some popular channels that are available to you are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram.
• Any paid advertising that takes place on these channels.

5. Clearly define the omissions in your plan.

A marketing plan explains what the marketing team will focus on. However, it also explains what the marketing team is Not will focus on.

If there are other aspects of your business that you don’t address in this particular plan, add them to this section. These omissions help justify your mission, buyer personalities, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn’t looking for something, you need to get it known.

6. Define your marketing budget.

Your content strategy may use many free channels and platforms, but there are a number of hidden costs for a marketing team that need to be considered.

Use this cost to create a marketing budget and outline the individual expenses in this section of your marketing plan, whether it’s freelance fees, sponsorship, or a new full-time marketing position.

7. Identify your competition.

Part of marketing is knowing who you are marketing to. Find out about the most important players in your industry and consider whether you want to create a profile in this section.

Remember that not every competitor presents the same challenges for your company. For example, while a search engine competitor ranks high for keywords you want your website to rank for, another competitor may have a strong social network footprint where you want to open an account.

8. Describe the contributors to your plan and their responsibilities.

After your marketing plan is fully worked out, it’s time to explain who is doing what. You don’t need to delve too deeply into your employees’ daily projects, but you should know which teams and team leaders are responsible for certain content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

Ready to create your own marketing plan? Start with this free template and let yourself be inspired by the following examples.

6 examples of marketing plans that you can use to write your own

1. HubSpot’s comprehensive guide to content marketing strategy

Main goal: content marketing plan

At HubSpot, we built our marketing team from two Business School graduates who work from a coffee table to a powerhouse of hundreds of employees. Along the way, we learned countless lessons that shaped our current content marketing strategy. That’s why we decided to share our findings in a blog post to teach marketing professionals how to develop a successful content marketing strategy regardless of the size of their team.

In this comprehensive guide for modern marketers, you will learn:

• What exactly is content marketing?
• Why your company needs a content marketing strategy.
• Who should lead your content marketing efforts?
• How to structure your content marketing team based on the size of your company.
• How to hire the right people for every role in your team.
• What marketing tools and technology do you need to be successful?
• What type of content should your team create and which employees should be responsible for creating it?
• The importance of spreading your content across search engines, social media, email, and paid ads.
• And finally, the recommended metrics that each of your teams should measure and report on should optimize your content marketing program.

2nd Shane Snow’s marketing plan for his Book Dream team

Main goal: content marketing plan

A successful book launch is a prime example of data-driven content marketing. Using data to optimize your content strategy increases the awareness of your book, gets more people to subscribe to your content, turns more subscribers into buyers, and encourages more buyers to recommend your book to their friends.

When Shane Snow started promoting his new book Dream team, He knew he had to use a data-driven content strategy framework. So he chose his favorite: the Content Strategy Waterfall, which is defined by Economic times as a model for creating a system with a linear and sequential approach. Check out the diagram below to get a better idea of ​​what this means:

Snow wrote a blog post about how the waterfall’s content strategy helped him successfully publish his new book. After reading it, you can use its tactics to inform your own marketing plan. More specifically, you will learn how he:

• Applied its business goals to decide which marketing metrics to track.
• His ultimate business goal was to earn $ 200,000 in sales or 10,000 purchases to estimate the conversion rate for each stage of his funnel.
• Buyer personalities were created to determine which channels their audience would most like to consume their content on.
• Used his average post view in each of his marketing channels to estimate how much content to create and how often to post on social media.
• Calculates how much earned and paid media can reduce the amount of content it needs to create and publish.
• Designed his process and workflow, built his team, and assigned tasks to members.
• Analyzed content metrics to refine its overall content strategy.

You can use Snow’s marketing plan to develop a better content strategy plan, get to know your audience better, and think outside the box when it comes to promoting and distributing content.

3rd Chief Outsider launch plan for a new product

Main goal: Marketing plan for the introduction of new products

If you’re looking for a marketing plan for a new product, submitting Chief Outsiders is a good place to start. Marketing plans for a new product are more specific because they are focused on one product compared to an entire company’s marketing strategy.

After reading this plan, you will learn how to:

• Validate a product
• Write strategic goals
• Identify your market
• Create a competitive landscape
• Create a value proposition for a new product
• Include sales and service in your marketing plan

4th Buffer content marketing strategy template

Main goal: content marketing plan

Writing a content plan is challenging, especially if you’ve never written one. Since Only 55% of the marketing teams have a documented content strategyBuffer decided to help the content marketing community.

By searching through countless templates for content marketing strategies and testing the best ones, they created a template for content marketing plans with instructions and examples for marketers who have never documented their content strategy.

After reading Buffer’s marketing plan template, you will learn how to:

• Answer four basic questions to help you make a clear summary.
• Set SMART Content Marketing goals.
• Create high-precision audience personalities by interviewing real content strategists.
• Solve your audience’s problems with your content.
• Conduct competitive research by analyzing the content of your competitors and industry leaders.
• Evaluate your existing content strategy by examining the themes and themes of your plays with the highest and lowest performance.
• Use the skills and breadth of your team to determine what types of new content to create.
• Set up an editorial calendar.
• Develop an advertising workflow.

The Buffer template is an incredibly thorough step-by-step guide with examples for each section. In the “Audience” section you will find, for example, case studies of real potential audiences like “Blogger Brian”. If you feel overwhelmed by the creation of a marketing guide, this can help you get started.

5. Content plan of Contently

Main goal: content marketing plan

The Contently content method works like a flywheel. Instead of applying a completely new strategy to each new marketing campaign, they use the strategy of their previous marketing campaign to push the next one. Similar to a flywheel, the content method needs an initial energy boost to set the gears in motion.

What does this energy deliver? Your content plan.

The entire content plan was refined in a blog post to help marketers maintain themselves Marketing process. After reading it, you will learn:

• Align your content goals and KPIs with your business goals.
• Create highly detailed buyer personalities using psychographics instead of traditional demographic data.
• Create content for each phase of your marketing funnel based on the pain and passion points of your potential customers.
• Identify your most effective marketing channels.
• Discover the content topics that your audience really craves.
• Assess your company’s resource needs.

By applying a flywheel-like strategy to your own marketing efforts, you are essentially relieving the burden of applying new strategies to each and every marketing campaign. Instead, your past efforts will gain momentum over time, distributing continuous energy on what you publish next.

6. Forbes’ marketing plan template

Main goal: content marketing plan

An oldie but a goodie – Forbes has released a marketing plan template that has been viewed nearly four million times since late 2013. To help you create a marketing roadmap with a real vision, use the template to learn how to fill out the 15 key sections of a marketing plan that are:

• Summary
• target group
• unique selling point
• Price and positioning strategy
• Distribution plan
• Your offers
• Promotional material
• Advertising strategy
• Online marketing strategy
• Conversion strategy
• Joint ventures & partnerships
• Transfer strategy
• Strategy to increase transaction prices
• Retention strategy
• Financial projections

If you really don’t know where to start with a marketing plan, this guide can help you define your audience, find out how to reach them, and make sure the audience becomes loyal customers.

These marketing plans serve as the first resources to get your content marketing plan on track. However, to really deliver what your audience wants and need, you will likely need to test different ideas, measure their success and then go about refining your goals as you wish.