Successful business planning starts with a strong marketing plan. Whether you are a small business drafting your first business plan or you are a global corporation launching a new product, a marketing strategy is an important part of the planning process.
On the surface, our marketing plan template might look simple—there are fields for your initiatives, your timelines, the effort involved, and which objective these tasks are laddering up to. But don’t let the simplicity fool you: this is a template that can track all types of marketing goals—from social media campaigns to new product launches, from market research to that new slogan campaign (spoiler, everybody loves it).
With this template you can:
A marketing plan is a document, spreadsheet, or (better yet) piece of software that outlines your organization’s strategy. That strategy can be structured in many ways, but it’s common to use an OKR framework, which pairs objectives with key results.
But even the best marketing strategy will fall flat if it’s not intrinsically shareable and constantly updated.
This marketing plan is designed to be used by an ever-widening group of people. First, executive leadership can begin using the document to fill out their OKRs, then team leads can fill in the dates, and share with the wider organization. Eventually, the entire company can—and should—have some version of this to peruse.
Whether you rely on OKRs, SMART goals, MBOs, or some other string of acronyms, every marketing plan needs ambitious goals and the tactics you’ll employ to accomplish them. (In our template, we’ve employed Objectives and Key Results but you can easily rename these!)
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 just how much effort is involved with each initiative. Finally, every initiative needs a status—is your aforementioned slogan campaign on track, at risk, or paused?
While creating a strategy for an entire marketing team can be daunting, putting that strategy into our template isn’t. Here are a few tips to consider beforehand:
Discover more resources: how to create a marketing plan, how to create a marketing calendar, marketing plan examples, 8 steps to build a successful content strategy, learn about integrated marketing campaigns, best content marketing software.