How to create a marketing plan in 7 steps

 A marketing plan should be rooted in company strategy, and structured in terms of projects and tasks. This is true whether you’re writing a marketing plan from scratch, or revisiting one that needs a little love. 

Keep reading to learn how to design and execute a marketing plan, and use our 7-step process to get started quickly.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategy for execution—including things like timeline, resources, and deliverables—that connects to high-level business goals. 

A  detailed marketing plan should serve two purposes: keeping stakeholders on track to meeting deadlines, and giving marketing leaders an overview of what’s happening this week, month, and year. 

When you create your marketing plan, you should establish metrics to measure and goals to meet for every marketing activity. It’s also a good idea to include market research and strategy behind every planned deliverable; this context makes it easy to fight for budget to put behind promotional efforts.

Marketing plans vs. marketing strategies

You might hear the terms “marketing plan” and “marketing strategy” used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing.

A marketing strategy describes the philosophy and guiding principles behind your marketing efforts, including overarching goals. But to put your strategy in action, you need a plan: a tactical map of the people, timelines, channels, and assets that will bring your strategy to life.. The strategy should inform the plan—not the other way around. 

For instance, if you have a strategic goal to raise awareness of your product, you might decide to double down on paid social. To do that, you need to identify channels, create a budget, get approvals, and align on timelines. Those individual tasks are a part of your marketing plan.

How to write a marketing plan in 7 steps

These seven steps will help you create a cohesive marketing plan that’s based on overarching objectives and specific to your business and the audience you’re hoping to attract.

1. Define KPIs 

A marketing plan can’t exist at all if you don’t have goals to guide it. There are various ways marketing teams go about elucidating their goals, and perhaps you’ve heard of KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs are metrics that help you make sure your campaigns are achieving what you need them to achieve. Some example KPIs include:

When setting KPIs for your marketing plan, you should consider your overall marketing goals, industry benchmarks, and what feels realistic based on past performance. Choose KPIs strategically to set your marketing team up for success.

2. Define your target audiences

A successful marketing plan should be tailored to your specific audience (or even a subset of that audience like in enterprise marketing) Once you understand the demographics, behaviors, and habits of the people you’re targeting, it becomes easier to figure out the best way to engage and convert. When you’re trying to define your marketing plan’s audience, include questions like: 

3. Identify your competition

Competitor research helps you hone your marketing approach—and organizations that don’t invest in this might fall behind. If you know what other companies in your arena are doing and saying to attract customers, you can purposefully differentiate yourself from  the competition.

As you conduct research, consider these points about your competition:

The point of competitor research is not to copy your competition. In fact, the more original your marketing, the higher your odds of gaining traction. 

4. Develop campaigns 

Now that you have basic information about your goals, audience, and competition, the next step is to create actual campaigns to populate your marketing plan. For instance, you might build integrated campaigns like:

Within a campaign, consider which marketing channels you’ll use and who within your team will handle which aspect of the production of the campaign. You should also decide what the workflow will look like, how you’ll set deadlines, and apportion budget.

5. Set a budget

Every marketing team approaches their budget differently—some teams may build an in-house marketing team and invest in new marketing technologies, while others may source the help of third-party agencies.

In your marketing plan,  detail how you’re going to spend your allocated budget over the next quarter or half. You may optimize your budget by establishing an overall budget cap or by breaking it down by campaign or channel. Eventually, you should be able to create line items for each spend.

6. Consider reporting

Getting clear about campaign management and reporting ahead of time will keep your team accountable to the KPIs you established earlier. Plus, frequent performance check-ins allow you to make adjustments along the way if needed. Here are some tips for planning out your reporting process:

If you’ve planned your marketing campaigns according to data-driven strategy, this step should be relatively painless. If not, make a note for next time—how might you plan differently to produce better insights?

7. Write a project brief

Just as organizations have mission statements, marketing plans need a project brief, an abstract, or an introduction. The brief should specify your objective for creating a marketing plan—why you’re doing it and what you hope to get out of it.

Since the brief is typically one of the very first pages of a marketing plan, it might seem counterintuitive to work on it last. But the summary is informed by all the other work you’ve done to create a marketing plan. It distills your plan down to a quick overview—just a few paragraphs that briefly summarize your plan and how it links to your overall marketing strategy.

If you’re planning to share your marketing plan with other stakeholders—members of your team, company leaders, or even outside investors—this brief becomes even more important. Think of it as your “book jacket”—draw your audience in with your vivid, concise description of your marketing activities, and why they’re critical to achieving your overall strategy.

Types of marketing plans

Different types of marketing plans follow the same basic principles, but dive deeply into specific areas. See how these different types of plans may fit your marketing needs.

Time-based marketing plan

A time-based marketing plan contains all of the same elements as a standard marketing plan, but it’s very specific to the period of time it’s covering. For instance, it may be more a detailed plan to execute holiday sales marketing or to address a specific quarterly initiative. 

Social media marketing plan

This plan will focus on social platforms, strategy, and campaigns across different social platforms. You may even detail paid social tactics. While social media marketing can be included in a broader marketing plan, a social media marketing plan allows you to hone in on strategy regarding content creation, community management, advertising, and influencer outreach.

This type of plan aims to align social media marketing efforts with broader business goals, increase customer engagement, and generate measurable ROI. Social media marketing plans also tend to be more flexible than standard marketing plans, since social media trends and audience behavior change in response to news, requiring frequent adjustments to tactics and strategies. 

Content marketing plan

A content marketing plan outlines a business’s approach to the creation and distribution of content that attracts and offers value to a specific audience, or multiple audience segments with enterprise content marketing. This plan includes strategies for content creation, publication, promotion, and measurement. 

Its goals may include establishing the business as an industry thought leader, building brand awareness, or driving action from your target audience.

Product launch marketing plan

This type of marketing plan focuses on how a business plans to introduce and market a product to its target market. A product marketing plan will include product strategy like positioning, messaging, pricing, promotion, and distribution. 

While this type of plan and a typical marketing plan share many features, the contents will differ. For instance, the product’s direct competitors and target audiences may differ from the larger company’s main competitors and audience. The metrics for this type of plan will also be different, as they’ll solely track sales-focused KPIs like revenue, market share, and customer acquisition.

Marketing plan example and template

To get an idea of how you might build out a marketing plan in Airtable, here’s an example of a marketing plan for a B2B company.

KPIs

Target audiences

Our target audience includes small to midsize businesses in the technology industry. Our two primary personas are the IT director and the chief executive officer (CEO). 

IT director: 

CEO:

Competition

Our primary competitors include [Company A] and [Company B]. [Company A] offers similar products but lacks our level of customer service, while [Company B] focuses on a different segment of the market.

Campaigns

Our marketing campaigns will focus on showcasing our unique value proposition and demonstrating our expertise in the technology industry. Examples of campaigns include:

Budget

Our marketing budget for the year is $250,000. This budget will be allocated toward campaign development (25%), advertising (40%), event sponsorships (25%), and marketing technology tools (10%). 

Reporting

We will track our KPIs on a monthly basis and adjust our strategy accordingly. Lead team members will create and send the marketing manager a comprehensive report detailing engagement, leads, traffic, and SEO metrics. The marketing manager will then communicate key points to executives. 

Project brief 

[Company Name]’s marketing plan for the next fiscal year is designed to increase revenue and market share by targeting specific personas, showcasing our unique value proposition, and maintaining a competitive edge in the marketplace. Our campaigns will focus on demonstrating our expertise in the IT management software industry through thought leadership content. We will measure our success with engagement, leads, traffic, and SEO metric benchmarks and adjust our strategy as needed to achieve our goals.