How to Write a Marketing Plan 

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Creating a marketing plan is one thing. But you do not want it to be just a plan for having a plan. You want it to work. So the real question here is how do you create a marketing plan that actually helps you with your marketing goals?

Well, you definitely need a clear understanding of your business objectives and a structured approach. Also, you should stay focused on your mission and keep it in your mind while setting measurable goals. You could also use some inspiration –  existing marketing plan examples which have proven the value already. Don’t worry, we´ll get to it. To make the process easier, you can use a suitable template.

Together, we will find out how to create a marketing plan that will support your success.

What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is your guide to business growth. It is a strategic document that combines your goals with business objectives to make sure your team actions correspond with overall company efforts. An effective marketing plan helps you focus, brings clarity and direction to your campaigns. Moreover, it´s a tool which can be used by other departments to understand the entire marketing strategy and their role in supporting the whole mission.

Types of Marketing Plans

Different types of companies face different marketing challenges, so the approach to solutions needs to differ as well. That’s why you should choose your marketing plan template carefully. Each one has its purpose but probably won’t serve you well in other cases.

• Are you in the phase of playing with an idea? You might want to try a basic one-page marketing plan template to get a glimpse of the whole process.
• Is your business about to start? Use the startup marketing plan template. 
• Already have your business which is now launching a new product or project? You need a product launch marketing plan template and a product marketing plan template or a marketing project plan template.
• Creating a campaign? Choose a marketing campaign plan template or a marketing promotion plan template.
• Need to prepare social media content? Use a social media marketing plan template. If you create multi-platform strategies, the channel marketing plan template could be a good fit. For specific audio content, podcast marketing plan template could also be useful.
• Organising a conference, festival, concert or meetup? Go for an event marketing plan template or a social media event marketing plan template.
• Overall marketing? A marketing launch plan template, marketing content plan template, digital marketing plan template, marketing strategy template, marketing execution plan template or integrated marketing communication plan template, integrated marketing plan template, marketing operations plan template or marketing action plan template might be just what you need.
• Planning for the next quarter or the whole year? A quarterly marketing plan template or a yearly marketing plan template will be just what you are looking for. Generally, you can use a marketing plan calendar template.
• Need a localised or format-specific option? Try a marketing plan template UK, USA, Germany… Consider using the Google Sheets marketing plan template. You can also use an online tool to create a marketing plan templatethat fits your needs.

Benefits of a Marketing Plan

A well-structured marketing plan helps you turn chaos into order. It puts all activities in context, brings measurable results and improves coordination across the team. Thanks to the quality plan, you’ll find your target customers and improve customer engagement while sharpening your messaging.

Furthermore, it helps you use your budget wisely and become more consistent across multiple marketing channels. Your market presence gets stronger by tracking progress and adjusting tactics as needed due to setting measurable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).

With a formal marketing plan, your company will also be better equipped to navigate through economic uncertainties by enhancing resource management, performance and all (not only) marketing activities.

How to write a marketing plan

Creating a marketing plan is a nice idea. But how to turn it into reality? Let’s take it easy. Start by aligning your marketing activities with clear business outcomes that you can imagine – and measure.

The main key is structure. You need to follow the step-by-step process starting with research and plan every move from strategy to execution. This approach will turn marketing activities into a focused roadmap for your growth.

In the following sections, we will take a look at each essential phase of creating a marketing plan so you’ll know how to create an entire marketing plan that works for you.

Conduct a SWOT analysis

The first step should definitely be understanding where your business stands. In other words, the SWOT analysis. Find strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats describing your business.

When you identify your strong and weak points, you can make better decisions about strategy, marketing activities, and messaging or positioning, as well as recognise market opportunities and risks. It can also help you to highlight the areas where you can beat your key competitors. That leads to more purpose-driven actions rather than just random activities.

Profile your customers

How could you reach your target audience if you don’t know who you are talking to? Even the best campaigns may fall apart if you skip the phase of defining your customers.

First, find a broader target market. Then go more specific and break it into location, age, sex, needs or hobbies, etc. What do they desire? What are their main interests? And, on the other hand, what discourages them? This way you can picture your ideal costumers and align your communication with what matters to them.

Just go deeper and create your own personas: semi-fictional profiles based on real data you collected. It will help you to make your customer segments more focused on actual people. Your marketing team will also benefit from it, because this way it is much easier to design campaigns that resonate.

Another thing to point out, it will improve collaboration between marketing, products teams and sales by sharing understanding of the customer. Therefore, your marketing effort becomes more relevant and personalised, which likely leads to engagements and conversions.

Set clear objectives

By now, you should have basic information about your market position and quite a clear vision of your audience. So the next step should be defining your success. What is it like? Set specific and realistic goals and make sure your marketing is aligned with your business objectives.

To create effective goals, follow the SMART framework. Keep it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. “Getting more followers” is not specific enough, whereas “increasing newsletter subscription by 20 % till the end of the quarter” is a right SMART objective.

💡 Here is one more specific example of applying SMART method: Improve the company’s Google Business Profile rating from an average of 4.2 to 4.5 stars within one month by encouraging 20 satisfied customers (identified through post-purchase surveys) to leave positive reviews via a personalized, automated email follow-up.

Having your overall business goals in mind and putting these marketing objectives in line makes you keep the strategy on spot and measurable. Moreover, it helps you use your resources more effectively and justify your marketing budget with real results.

With all being said, you probably see it already. Clear objectives are more than just a strategic necessity. They improve performance tracking, support accountability in your team and drive better campaign outcomes across your marketing activities.

Address the “four Ps” of marketing

Once you find your goals, it´s time to find out how to achieve them. That’s when you use the marketing mix (the Four Ps).

What do the Ps stand for?

• Product: What are you offering? How does it solve your customers’ needs? Describe the main features and benefits. But don’t forget to think about packaging and positioning as well.
• Price: What pricing strategy should you use? Consider your brand’s value, cost, competition,and what your target customers are willing to pay.
• Place: Where and how will you sell your product? Will it be on the e-shop or in store? Will it be done directly or through partners?
• Promotion: How will people find you? What will you do to reach your audience? You can use advertising campaigns, focus on content, e-mail marketing, events and social media strategies… Find a combination that serves you the best.

All of these elements shape how your product is perceived. When there is harmony between them, it brings a great support for your positioning and impact. The Four Ps help you to stay in tune with your customer’s expectations.

And if your business is in a service-orientated area, you can add 3 more Ps (to make it 7 Ps) –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ People, Process, and Physical Evidence –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for a bigger focus on the customer experience.

Create a budget

Setting a marketing budget is one of the key parts of the process. It helps you to stay on track and spend your money wisely and consciously. It also encourages you to create achievable goals.

Wrap your marketing budget around your overall business objectives. Make every dollar worthy by contributing to your company’s growth. Regardless of whether your focus goes to social media campaigns, paid advertising or content marketing, you really need to decide how much money to allocate to individual activities in order to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

There are several approaches to create an overall marketing budget:

• Percentage of revenue: A common approach to setting a marketing budget is by allocating some part of the revenue. Companies usually put 5–10 % of their revenue to marketing. Higher percentages often go to startups (15-30 %) and fast-growing companies. It’s simple and straightforward. However, it can be if the revenue fluctuates due to predicting and managing difficulties.
• Objective and task: This is probably the most strategic approach. The budget is determined by finding the specific marketing tasks that are required to achieve your goals and determining the cost of each of them.
  
• Competitive parity: This method involves setting the marketing budget based on competitors’ spending. The idea behind it is to match the marketing spend of competitors to make sure your business is competitive in the market. This approach should be used with caution, as competitors’ budgets may not reflect your own needs.
• Affordable Method: This approach means you allocate funds you can afford after covering other business’s expenses. It’s quite a practical solution for businesses with tight cash flows, but it can limit growth and make marketing efforts reactive rather than proactive.

There are also more ways of allocating a budget by categories, such as by marketing channel or activity. An interesting rule to follow is The 70-20-10 Rule:

• 70 % to proven strategies and channels that are delivering consistent results
• 20% to new strategies or channels to fuel growth and explore other opportunities
• 10% for experiments or innovative approaches with higher risk but also potential for high reward

By breaking down the budget across various activities, you’ll see where your money goes and can adjust it when needed to use your resources effectively.

Use a Marketing Plan Template

A marketing plan sounds like just what you need, but you don’t know where to start? Sure, creating it from scratch can be a little overwhelming. Luckily, there is an easy solution. It is called a marketing plan template. Such templates provide a clear structure, so you won’t miss the key components, like:

• Business summary
• Mission
• Marketing goals and objectives 
• Target audience 
• Personas
• Market analysis
• Competitor analysis 
• Strategies 
• Budget
• Marketing channels
• Key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Action plan + timeline

Moreover, it saves your time and increases consistency and a flow in the whole planning process. You can focus on content and strategy rather than thinking about the structure. It helps you to cover all the essential sections and align your plan with business objectives.

You can find templates in various formats such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, Excel or PDF  that are customised for different marketing strategies, from digital marketing to communications plans. The templates may also differ based on your specific needs. So when choosing one, consider your business needs. Do you want a comprehensive marketing communications plan template or something more suitable for digital marketing strategies?

Create a Calendar

To turn your strategy into actions, you also need a clear timeline. A marketing calendar will help you to organise, prioritise and track the activities so you can complete them in time to achieve your goals.

Start by writing down your major marketing activities, such as campaigns, content creation or events. Then, divide them into daily, weekly and monthly tasks.

Here are some tips for managing your calendar:

• Prioritise: Focus on what supports your goals.
• Be flexible: Adapt your schedule to urgent changes.
• Use digital tools: Try Google Sheets, Trello or other apps for visualisation tracking.

A well-organised marketing calendar helps you coordinate activities, meet deadlines and track progress.

Marketing plan example

A well-prepared marketing plan should clearly capture key activities as well as their timelines. Here’s a simplified example of an action plan as part of a marketing plan:

Task Description	Owner(s)	Start Date	End Date	Resources Needed	Status
Finalize Product Messaging & USP	Marketing Lead	01/04/2025	15/04/2025	Internal meetings	Completed
Develop Campaign Content (Blog, Social Media)	Content Team	16/04/2025	28/05/2025	Writing tools, design software	In Progress
Launch Product on Website	Web Team	01/06/2025	28/06/2025	CMS access, analytics setup	Not Started
Set up PPC Campaigns	PPC Specialist	16/06/2025	07/07/2025	Ad budget, ad platforms	Not Started

Of course this is just a small sample of the whole plan. There are supposed to be individual parts dedicated to a business summary, personas, analysis, etc. However, it gives you a little glimpse into how it works.

If you are interested in seeing a whole plan example (a template with guidelines on how to fill it out, including specific examples), we’ve prepared one for you. We’ve covered all the basic steps bellow:

• Creating a business overview
• Making competitor and SWOT analysis
• Creating personas by answering specific questions
• Analysing SMART objectives
• Selecting channels and preparing communication tactic
• Allocating budget to individual tasks / parts
• Tracking the key performance indicators
• Preparing an action plan including dates and resources.

Feel free to check it out, explore all the tabs and items and get inspired. In case you find out you need help with creating your own plan, don’t hesitate to reach out; we’re happy to help.

Write a Marketing Plan: Recommended Apps

There are many marketing tools and apps to make the planning process smoother – helping you manage tasks, analyse data and collaborate with your team.

Plans and calendars

You can use Excel or Google Sheets to create tables for your plan from the scratch or download some of the templates for them as have been mentioned before. For more complex plans, you can consider using tools like Gantt charts, which enable you to manage your task visually and track dependencies.

Task management

For creating tasks, supervising them and collaborating with colleagues, you might need other tools such as Trello or Asana. It can also help you to set deadlines and track progress. To make sure your marketing plan is continuously being executed.

Analytics

To see how your marketing efforts go, you need to measure it. Google Analytics might be just the right tool for it. It enables you to track conversion rates, user behaviour, website traffic and much more.

CRM

For tracking customer journeys and lead performance, you could also use some of the CRM systems such as HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce or Bitrix (which is useful for task management as well). It helps you segment audiences, monitor conversions, align your marketing activities with sales and personalise based on user behavior.

Conclusion

Creating a marketing plan might seem like a huge and exhausting task. However, with the right approach and process, it doesn’t have to be so. Just follow the steps one by one, and you will get there.

To ensure you prepare an effective plan and don’t miss anything important, choose a suitable template, which will guide you. You can also use other tools and apps to support you in fulfilling your marketing goals and optimizing budget.

With a clear vision, well-defined objectives and the right tools, your marketing plan will navigate you to your business success.