product marketing business plan

Product Marketing 101: Templates, Strategies, and Examples

By Joe Weller | August 11, 2017 (updated August 12, 2023)

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In this article, you’ll learn all the fundamental components of a product marketing plan based on tips from experts.

Included on this page, you’ll learn how to create and implement a product marketing plan with free downloadable templates, key elements of a product marketing strategy , and how product marketing aligns with your company’s growth strategy .

How to Create and Implement a Product Marketing Plan

To help kickstart your product marketing plan, download any of the following free, ready-to-use templates to help you plan, strategize on, and track your product marketing plans.

Product Marketing Plan Template

Download Product Marketing Plan Template

Excel   |   PDF 

Once you’ve mapped out your product’s essentials, it’s time to create the go-to-market plan that guides how it will be promoted and sold. This launch plan covers everything from developing the pricing and messaging for the product to creating training materials for your sales staff. It keeps everyone on the same page and makes sure that your team is ready when the product is ready. The plan also spells out timetables, release schedules, resources, and tasks.

Marketing Mix

You can frame your product marketing plan, or marketing mix, with the Four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion, a process developed by E. J. McCarthy in 1960. In 1981 Bernard Booms and Mary Bitner added three more components: process, people, and physical evidence. Read the Definitive Guide to Strategic Marketing Planning to learn more about the Four Ps here. These are some of the key elements you’ll need to start framing your marketing plan:

Product: While you will spell out the unique designs, features, services, and other elements that describe your product, your marketing plan covers more than the details. It’s a positioning statement that defines what makes your product different.

Price : When you set your pricing, you need to consider several factors. First, you know how much it costs to make your product. Then, you need to know how much value customers will assign your product. Consider marketplace conditions: Is your product in high demand? Are there a lot of competitors who will respond with pricing strategies of their own? What kinds of discounts, sales, payment periods, or other terms can you include with your pricing? The bottom line is that your product is only worth what your customers are willing to pay, so make sure you understand your product’s value in the marketplace.

Place: Place can mean the brick-and-mortar store where customers find your product, but it also extends to include all the distribution channels you use to get your product to your customer. (Software startups, for example, typically sell online.) Delivery methods vary widely depending on the product, but the goal is getting your product into the marketplace.

Promotion: This may seem like the most natural part of product marketing. Promotion includes all the channels and methods you will use to reach customers about the value of your product. Tactics include advertising, sales, events, email marketing, content marketing, social media, and more. Every aspect of your promotion is centered on your product messaging.

Process: Think of process as the pipeline for your product. This is especially important if you deliver a service. For a startup, the first product launch has several benefits. First, you get your product into the marketplace. Then, you also learn how to improve your process in subsequent product development. For any company, the process always reveals your strengths and your opportunities for improvement.

People: The people behind your product are critical to marketing the product. From the engineers and product development team, to sales and support, your success depends on your people. Do you have enough staff to handle the launch and product fulfillment? Have you given your sales team everything they need to explain what sets your product apart?

Physical Evidence: Successful product marketing fosters a superior customer experience. How does your messaging shape the perception of your product, whether it’s in a store or online? The consumer experience could be the biggest differentiator of your product.

The Four Ps as the Four Cs

The Four Ps are business focused, but product marketing is customer focused. To accommodate product marketing and put the customer ahead of the seller, the Four Cs approach was developed in the 1990s: Customer, Cost, Convenience, and Communication.

• Customer Solutions, Not Products: Customers want to buy a solution to their problem, not simply purchase a product.
• Cost, Not Price: What is the value of the product to the consumer, and is the price point something they are willing to pay?
• Convenience, Not Place: How easy is it for customers to find and buy your product?
• Communication, Not Promotion: Promotion is one-way messaging from the company to the consumer. By setting up social channels and other ways for customers to offer feedback and insight, you create value and loyalty.

Creating a Sales Guide

By working through the marketing mix, you will identify the differentiators and details of your product. This is the information your sales team needs. One more responsibility of product marketing is to turn these positioning statements into materials that help your sales team sell your product and achieve the company’s revenue goals. The sales guide should not focus on price, but on the differentiators of your product:

• Features and product details
• Advantages of your product
• Benefits of your product   

In addition to a sales guide, you should develop data sheets, training materials, and other collateral that your sales team can use to take your product to your audience.

Coordinating the Product Launch with the Promotion

Product development and product marketing have to work in sync so both are ready simultaneously. Imagine releasing a product and not letting your customers know it’s in the market - you won’t get many sales, and you also can’t create positioning statements that are inaccurate about the product’s features and benefits. Either way, you are alienating yourself from your customers. Customer satisfaction is your primary goal, and one you can share across departments to help you achieve it.

Communicating Across Departments and Summarizing Findings

Time is your most precious resource. Don’t waste it by working independently of other departments or leaving key stakeholders out of the loop. Create a marketing brief at the beginning of your process and use it for regular updates across the organization. Your project brief should include:

• Product goals
• Positioning and messaging

Product Marketing Brief Template

Download Product Marketing Brief Template

Excel    |    PDF

Elements of Product Marketing Strategy

A product marketing strategy goes hand-in-hand with the product strategy — the plan that identifies and defines what you want to accomplish. A good strategy points everyone (from the CEO to engineering to sales and customer support) in the same direction. It keeps you focused on your customers and your market. It’s your guide to working together on what matters most.   A product marketing strategy will have several components:

Vision A product starts with your organization’s vision. The product must sit squarely in the strategic vision of the organization. That vision feeds the development of the product and conveys energy and excitement to your customers. It outlines your customers, what they need, and how you will address those needs. You might even get a sense of the life cycle of the product , what it could become and when it might reach its end stage.   Insights You have a vision about what you want to achieve. Now you need the information that turns this vision into reality. Here are some vital areas:

• Your Competitors: What companies are offering what you want to offer? (Find at least the top three.) How will your product be different? What makes it unique? Who are their customers? What problems will your product solve for those customers? Competitive research, also known as a market review, is key to your success. Learn more about conducting a competitive analysis .
• Your customers: Which ones will you target with this product? What is their pain point? What is the customer or buyer persona? What are the demographic and psychographic traits (age, gender, education level, values)? What are their buying patterns? How are they using current products? How many customers will you talk to? (These conversations will help shape your product messaging down the road and help target your marketing and advertising.)
• Your market position: How will your product offer value? What is the real problem that your product solves? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

You may have had a rough idea of how you wanted your product to function. Armed with these insights, you can nail down all the details that will make customers happy and drive your business forward. You will be able to speak with confidence about the specific product functions that meet the consumers’ requirements — from features and colors, to additional services and warranties. The product description you craft tells the story of how this product meets your customers’ needs.   Understanding the Product Life Cycle Few products last forever. From the beginning of your product, you should prepare for the growth, maturity, and drop in demand. At some point, sales will decline. Competitors will offer a comparable product. Insights are the key to identifying the stage your product is in. Always monitor the life cycle of your product and be ready with improvements, updates, or even a new product that builds on what exists. (For example, while pay phones barely exist today, the problem they once solved still exists, and has been replaced by cell phones.)   Goals and Initiatives  Management guru Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, "You can't manage what you can't measure." That’s not only true in the C-suite, but also extends to every product and department in your company.   Once you’ve defined the product, it’s time to define what you want to achieve. Without goals, how will you know whether your product succeeds? Use simple, clear, and precise goals (whether it’s improving your market share, re-engaging with customers, or driving revenue) to keep on track. Keep in mind that the product goals don’t stand alone. They need to align with your company’s strategic and business goals. After all, your product is part of the company’s success. For more information on writing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals, read this article . 

Finally, ask how this product fits with the initiatives of your business. Your product may be a better mousetrap. It meets customer needs by making them feel safer with fewer mice. (They buy solutions, not products.) The product also addresses the company’s initiative to move into new neighborhoods, territories, or areas. You can map your product’s features to the larger initiatives of your company.

Use the free template below to map out your product marketing strategy.

Product Marketing Strategy Template

Download Product Marketing Strategy Template

Excel   |   PDF

What Is Product Marketing?

The key function of product marketing is connecting your consumers to your products. Not only does product marketing require deep knowledge of your customers, but you must also understand your product and how to position it in a crowded marketplace. As the product marketer, you are responsible for the success of your product. Key deliverables include:

• A clear market position that distinguishes you from the competition
• Product pricing and packaging
• A marketing and promotion plan to help your sales channels succeed
• Analysis of customer response and keeping the product relevant

What Product Marketing Is Not

As noted earlier in this article, product marketing started as brand management and works directly with product development. While the two roles work together, they have different areas of responsibility: Product management focuses on the product and its features and requirements, whereas product marketing focuses on the customers who will use the product.

Who Uses Product Marketing Plans and Strategy?

Because product marketing is at the heart of connecting the customer to the product, everyone from CEOs to engineers and salespeople relies on their work. Internal communication across and among departments is just as important as the external messaging to customers. Everyone needs to understand the key messaging and be on the same page. Your messaging builds a strong connection among all the stakeholders in the company who are committed to the product’s success.

It’s important to get approval and buy-in from key stakeholders . Once you’ve got it, you’ll find it easier to get the necessary resources and generate excitement about your work. It’s also important to make sure all the stakeholders have what they need. A CEO may not need the sales brochures and spec sheets that your sales staff relies on in the field. The engineers may not need the strategy overview that your CEO reads. With a solid product marketing plan, you can keep everyone on message while making the relevant materials available without wasting their time.

What Does Product Marketing Do?

While all departments in a company may think about customers, product marketing puts the customer at the front and center of everything it does. The goals of traditional marketing include building brand awareness, growing new markets or audiences, and even strategic communication. By contrast, product marketing focuses solely on existing customers and keeping them happy. To succeed, you need deep knowledge of who your customers are, what they want, what influences their decisions, what problems they need to solve, and how they perceive that your business can provide a solution. Keep in mind that, while it seems as though people buy products, they are actually buying solutions to their problem. So, knowing their problem enables you to build and market the best solution to that problem.   Having this expertise gives you an influential voice in shaping the goods and services your business provides. Product marketing works with product development and the marketing and sales teams to plan the packaging, features, pricing, and promotion of the end of product. Because the work of product marketing crosses so many areas of a company, product marketing can be aligned with product development, product management, and sales and marketing. The most successful product marketers learn to work across departments, regardless of the official structure of their company.

According to David Fradin, an expert Product Leader, Product Manager, and Product Marketing Manager, product marketing emerged in the 1930s at Procter & Gamble as brand management. Over the years, the duties of the brand manager have evolved into two roles: the product developer and the product marketer. By 2015, 84 percent of the companies surveyed by Regalix Research said they invested in product marketing. You can read more from Fradin in his books: Building Insanely Great Products available now and Foundations in the Successful Management of Products , available soon from Wiley. 

What Is the Value of Product Marketing?

Product marketing brings many benefits to your company. By identifying the right product and getting it to the right customers, product marketing drives sales and profits. Using customer data wisely also helps your company develop new products, as well as create smarter overall marketing strategies. In an increasingly competitive (and innovative) marketplace, product marketing is your key to success.

For start-ups, your company is your product. Product marketing is really marketing for your entire company, since the only way you can grow is by knowing your audience and knowing how your product meets their needs.

At the B2B level, product marketing faces additional opportunities and challenges. According to Kapost article by Gerardo Dada, VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at SolarWinds, B2B buyers are 57 percent through their purchase decision-making before they ever talk with a sales representative. The challenge is that purchasing decisions with B2B customers are made by a range of stakeholders, from CEOs and other C-suite executives, to sales and marketing teams. The opportunity here is to demonstrate the value of your product in a way that deepens the relationship with your customer—and can’t be duplicated by the competition.

Whether you’re just getting started or your business has years under its belt, product marketing helps your company scale by:

• Gathering and analyzing detailed information about customers
• Defining which products will meet audience needs
• Identifying and evaluating your competition
• Setting the price for the products
• Creating the go-to-market plan, with consistent messaging

 As your business grows, product marketing gives you key insights into which new products and services you should add. With consumer insights, you will be able to identify needs in the marketplace and create a successful strategy. In an innovation economy, your skill at anticipating your customers’ needs (whether B2B or B2C) will help your company survive and thrive. In the digital age, customers can go anyplace, anytime to find new products and services to meet their needs - you must be one step ahead so they consistently turn to you to solve their problems. 

Do You Need Help in Product Marketing?

If all your products are selling quickly and your only feedback is kind notes from happy customers, you likely have a successful product marketing strategy. However, these covert signs might indicate that you need help: 

• Decisions about audience, features, and pricing are made by people who don’t have the data or understand the market.
• Products are developed and put into the market without a launch plan or a budget.
• Sales staff have to create their own collateral and spec sheets.
• Your company doesn’t have relevant data about its customers, market share, and sales.
• The role of marketing is simply to write web copy or social media messages or design brochures.

Don’t hire product marketing professionals simply to help your overworked product development team get the product finished. The jobs, while related, are not the same. Product marketing will not make the product faster. It will make the product better, because they understand what your audience needs.

How Product Marketing Aligns with Your Growth Strategy

No company wants to simply maintain its current level of revenue and audience by keeping a static line of products. Using a combination of markets and services, you can identify how your product will help your company grow. Each of the following growth strategies is based on a combination of markets and services. Growth strategies are based on: Market Penetration: The combination of current products and current market. Your product marketing strategy focuses on increasing your market share and getting existing customers to use more of your product.   Market Development: The combination of current products and new markets. Your product marketing strategy focuses on new audiences and communities with different packaging and pricing.   Product Development: The combination of new products and current market. By listening to your audience you stay ahead of your competitors, developing new and innovative products.    Diversification: The combination of new products and new markets. Your product marketing strategy must clearly define your goals, since your current product is not growing at the rate you need for business to flourish. There are two types of diversification: 

Related diversification means you develop (or buy) products that are related to your current offerings. One example is the line of beverages that Coca-Cola offers.   By contrast, unrelated diversification means you create products in a completely new area. For example, Samsung has developed solar panels, bio-tech drugs, medical devices, and more. In fact, their mission statement describes their product marketing strategy: “For over 70 years, Samsung has been dedicated to making a better world through diverse businesses that today span advanced technology, semiconductors, skyscraper and plant construction, petrochemicals, fashion, medicine, finance, hotels, and more. Our flagship company, Samsung Electronics, leads the global market in high-tech electronics manufacturing and digital media.”   There’s one more way to think about diversification: Horizontal (buying companies that are your direct competitors or are directly related to current products) and vertical (buying the suppliers and distributors of your product or developing your own channels). Each of these strategies has risks and rewards, so your decisions should be based on a solid understanding of your audience and your competitors, as well as an examination of your business strategy.     Key Growth Questions to Help with Product Marketing   Product marketing is at the intersection of product development, marketing, and sales. It covers a lot of corporate ground from defining product details, tracking customer data and market testing, creating marketing collateral, setting price and promotion strategies, training the sales staff, and even giving product presentations. To ensure your efforts stay on track with the company’s larger strategic goals, ask these questions:

• What are our revenue goals for the next year? Overall and by product line?
• What resources changes will be made in the coming year, including marketing staffing and budget?
• Do we anticipate any strategic partnerships, mergers or acquisitions?
• In which existing markets do we want to grow? What existing markets are we willing to move away from? What new markets do we plan to pursue?
• What existing services do we plan to maintain and improve? Which are at the end of their life cycle? What new products are being discussed?
• What are the biggest challenges we will face this year?

The Future of Product Marketing

David Fradin is a Distinguished Professor of Practise and Advisor, and Product Management Programs at Manipal Global Academy of Information Technology. He is also the author of Building Insanely Great Products and the soon-to-be-released Foundations in the Successful Management of Products , available soon from Wiley. Fraudin thinks the biggest change in the role of product marketing is the advent of social media and tools to manage social media.  

“The product marketing manager should be working strategically not tactically, thereby developing and maintaining the product’s marketing strategy including social media,” explains Fradin. “Social media is a huge part of marketing now and it is important for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing and sales.”

He also recommends a shift in titles to reflect the changes in product marketing. “The product marketing manager’s title should be changed to product marketing success manager to reflect the actual role played,” he adds. “They are given the budget for the marketing that needs to be done, so they have the authority they need to go with their responsibilities. Accordingly, they should not be the demo god. That should be done by pre-sales support.”

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How to create a brilliant product marketing strategy

Even the most life-changing product won’t sell if no one knows about it. To get the word out, you need a product marketing strategy—a research-backed plan that presents your product to current or potential customers. 

Developing a strategy seems more complex than it really is. You just need to take it one step at a time, focusing on the value your product offers, its place in the vast market landscape, and how it meets your customers’ needs.

A product marketing plan helps you position, promote, and sell your product throughout its lifecycle. Create one in just five simple steps:

Research your customers to deeply understand them and shape your strategy around their needs

Conduct competitive intelligence research to understand the broader market and your product’s place in it

Develop product positioning and messaging that highlights your offer’s unique value so you can resonate with your target audience

Create a pricing strategy that makes sense for your customers, industry, and goals

Develop a promotional plan to build awareness and interest, and encourage buyers to take action

5 steps to create an effective product marketing strategy

A strong product marketing strategy ensures you have a structured, cross-functional roadmap to achieving product success. Here are five steps you need to follow to do just that.

1. Research your customers

Whether your goal is a new product launch or longevity in the marketplace, your first step is research. Pinpoint who your ideal customer is, including their demographics, wants, needs, and behaviors. 

This research informs the rest of your product marketing strategy and ensures that you maintain an empathetic, customer-centric mindset. 

Some tried-and-tested user research approaches for product marketers include

Launching surveys to gather your target audience’s demographic data and pain points quickly

Conducting user interviews and focus groups to understand user needs and opinions more deeply

Delving into website analytics to see who comes to your site and from where

Using heatmaps to see which parts of your website or web app people engage with or ignore

Watching recordings to observe how users interact with your product and learn what user experience (UX) issues they face

Gathering this information helps you create accurate buyer personas—profiles of your ideal customer personas (ICPs)—ensuring that your strategy is spot-on and user-centric.

💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Engage to connect with your ICP and gather valuable insights for your product marketing strategy. 

Watch users interact with your product in real time, and ask follow-up questions to learn what they like and dislike. Then, use these insights to develop targeted messaging—and share them with your product team, so they can make design improvements. It’s a win-win-win!

2. Conduct competitive intelligence

Once you have a thorough understanding of your customers, it’s time to analyze the competitive landscape and understand how your product fits in the marketplace. 

Conducting competitive intelligence ensures you

Price your product correctly 

Find market gaps and position your product accordingly

Anticipate market trends that might affect how you promote your product

Competitive intelligence sounds a bit like secret spy work, but it’s all above board. 🕵️ It simply involves widening your research lens to

Pull up your competitors’ profiles on industry databases

Study similar brands’ websites and product landing pages

Keep tabs on competitors’ press releases about new offerings

Monitor their social media accounts to understand customer sentiment

Run a SWOT analysis to unpack your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from competitors 

By keeping an eye on your competitors’ product marketing strategy, you learn how to position your own. For example, you might learn that customers love another scheduling software’s features and integrations, but don’t enjoy its UX. Your own product’s effortless UX could become a major selling point.

💡 Pro tip: gather quick info on how your users view your competitors with a market research survey . Hotjar’s free template lets you discover

The challenges your users face

Their existing tech tools

The features they value 

Their pain points

This helps you see who your competitors are—and where they may fall short—so you can market your product accordingly.

Hotjar’s customizable market research survey template lets you gather user insights on your competitors in seconds

3. Develop product positioning and messaging

Product positioning is the process of defining where your product fits in the marketplace and how you want your audience to feel about it. 

A key step in this process is determining your product’s unique selling proposition (USP) , the characteristics that set it apart from competitors’ products to make it desirable.

For example, online graphic design tool Canva’s USP is empowering the world to design since it puts formerly intimidating professional design tools in the hands of anyone who wants to use them.

To position your product and develop your USP, ask yourself questions like

What makes our product different? 

Why is it perfect for our target customer?

What unique value does it provide to them? 

Your USP is the cornerstone of your messaging strategy—the way you communicate your product’s value with customers. It also gives all of your company’s teams, from public relations to sales, a cohesive way to talk about your product.

Ensure consistency by creating an internal product messaging hub that contains

A product vision that captures what your product is, who uses it, and why it matters

A positioning statement that shows what differentiates it from the competition

A value proposition that sums up its benefits to customers 

A one-liner or elevator pitch, a short description of your product that captures why it’s great

Key phrases to use with different audience segments 

Notes on tone and voice , which align with your brand’s overall messaging strategy

💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar’s product suite to understand how your users feel about your messaging. Ask them directly with interviews or surveys, or gather data indirectly with heatmaps and session recordings.

Session recordings show you how individual users interact with key elements on marketing assets like your landing page. Pay close attention to where they linger on the page and what they skip. 

Engagement Zones , a type of heatmap based on users’ click, scroll, and move patterns, highlights copy and content that catches users’ attention.

Engagement Zones’ grid overlay shows you the most engaging areas on your page

4. Create a pricing strategy

Even with perfect positioning and messaging, you need a smart pricing strategy to keep your product afloat in the marketplace. Pricing your offer too high halts sales, but underpricing could create an impression that your product is low quality.

It’s not just a numbers game, either. You also need to understand buyer psychology and motivations—whether people value scoring a deal or feeling like they’re investing in a top-of-the-line item. 

Luckily, you don’t need to create a pricing strategy from scratch. Start with a model that makes sense for your industry and product.

Competitor-based pricing focuses solely on the price of competing products instead of production costs, and is particularly useful in a saturated industry

Value-based pricing is common among one-of-a-kind or highly sought-after products, and is based on a customer’s perception of a product’s value

Cost-plus pricing , also called markup pricing, calculates the item’s production cost and then adds extra on the top for profit. While less common in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, it’s popular among grocers and other retailers.

Dynamic pricing works well for industries that experience frequent shifts in demand, such as hotels or airlines

Price skimming prices a product high to begin with and gradually lowers the price to maximize profit short-term

Penetration pricing starts a product at a low price and gradually increases it once they have a solid customer base, with the intent of maximizing profits long-term

💡 Pro tip: stay flexible with your pricing strategy throughout your product’s lifecycle, remaining ready to pivot or adapt as the market changes. 

Put an exit-intent survey on your pricing page to gather feedback about unclear wording or ways to improve your packages.

Use Hotjar’s exit-intent survey template as a pop-up on your pricing page to learn what visitors think of your pricing

5. Develop a promotional plan

You’re in the home stretch. To ensure your product gets in front of the right people—whether that’s brand-new leads or established customers who might be interested in a newly released feature—you need a promotional strategy. 

Start by setting measurable goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, so you can gauge whether your promotional strategy is successful down the road. 

Consider which channels your target audience frequents and the types of content they prefer, such as video, blogs, or graphics. Then, choose tactics to promote your product, such as 

Creating landing pages to highlight product features and benefits

Planning targeted social media campaigns on 1–3 channels

Investing in email marketing 

Creating an ad campaign for television, radio, or social media

Drawing on influencer marketing 

Seeking brand partnerships to promote each other’s products—Hotjar’s Partner Program lets you earn a revenue share of up to 25% for referrals

Developing content marketing plans for blogs or case studies 

Tapping into search engine optimization (SEO) to attract more web traffic to your site

💡 Pro tip: gather product experience insights to see how real users use your marketing assets, and then optimize your promotion plan.

Run A/B testing on two different landing pages to compare how they perform

Use Hotjar Heatmaps to better understand how users experience each variant. See how far the typical visitor scrolls, what catches their attention, and what they miss entirely.

Once you know what floats users’ boats—say, how-to videos for easy onboarding—tweak your promotional strategy to tout that benefit.

Hotjar’s five types of heatmaps help you visualize how users interact with your page

Find lasting product success with user insights

For long-term success, continue to analyze your data to find new ways to improve your product marketing strategy. By optimizing and iterating your plan—and assets like landing pages, blog content, and ads—you continue to attract new customers and keep your existing customers happy and coming back for more.

Transform your campaigns with Hotjar’s powerful insights

Use Hotjar’s tools to discover who your users are and what they want—and create a product marketing strategy that works.

FAQs about product marketing strategy

What is a product marketing plan.

A product marketing plan, also known as a product marketing strategy or framework, is a step-by-step blueprint to generate awareness for and continued interest in your product. It ensures that the people who need your product find and purchase it.

Why is it important to have a product marketing strategy?

A product marketing plan tells you exactly how you should position and promote your product. Having a strategy guides the messaging and marketing for each stage of your product’s life cycle—and it’s research-based, so you can feel confident you’re setting your offer up for success. Ultimately, a product marketing plan boosts conversions and revenue, helping you achieve customer retention and loyalty.

How do I create a product marketing framework?

Creating a product marketing framework might seem challenging, but it’s actually a simple five-step process. Follow these steps to ensure product marketing success:

Get to know your customers

Conduct competitor analysis

Determine product positioning and messaging

Decide on a product pricing strategy

Create a promotional plan

KPIs and OKRs

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Blog Marketing

What is a Marketing Plan & How to Create One [with Examples]

By Sara McGuire , Oct 26, 2023

A marketing plan is a blueprint that outlines your strategies to attract and convert your ideal customers as a part of your customer acquisition strategy . It’s a comprehensive document that details your:

• Target audience:  Who you’re trying to reach
• Marketing goals:  What you want to achieve
• Strategies and tactics:  How you’ll reach your goals
• Budget:  Resources you’ll allocate
• Metrics:  How you’ll measure success

In this article, I’ll explain everything you need to know about creating a marketing plan . If you need a little extra help, there are professionally designed marketing plan templates that’ll make the process much easier. So, let’s ditch the confusion and get started!

Click to jump ahead:

What is a marketing plan?

How to write a marketing plan .

• Marketing plan v.s. business plan
• Types of marketing plans

9 marketing plan examples to inspire your growth strategy

Marketing plan faqs.

A marketing plan is a report that outlines your marketing strategy for your products or services, which could be applicable for the coming year, quarter or month.  

Watch this quick, 13-minute video for more details on what a marketing plan is and how to make one yourself:

Typically, a marketing plan includes:

• An overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals
• A description of your business’s current marketing position
• A timeline of when tasks within your strategy will be completed
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) you will be tracking
• A description of your business’s target market and customer needs
• A description of how you will measure the performance of the strategy

For example, this marketing plan template provides a high-level overview of the business and competitors before diving deep into specific goals, KPIs and tactics:

Learning how to write a marketing plan forces you to think through the important steps that lead to an effective marketing strategy . And a well-defined plan will help you stay focused on your high-level marketing goals.

With Venngage’s extensive catalog of marketing plan templates , creating your marketing plan isn’t going to be hard or tedious. In fact, Venngage has plenty of helpful communications and design resources for marketers. If you’re ready to get started, sign up for  Venngage for Marketers   now. It’s free to register and start designing.

Whether you’re a team trying to set smarter marketing goals, a consultant trying to set your client in the right direction, or a one-person team hustling it out, Venngage for Marketers helps you get things done.

As mentioned above, the scope of your marketing plan varies depending on its purpose or the type of organization it’s for.

For example, you could create a marketing plan that provides an overview of a company’s entire marketing strategy or simply focus on a specific channel like SEO, social media marketing, content marketing and more, like in this example:

A typical outline of a marketing plan includes:

• Executive summary
• Goals and objectives
• User personas
• Competitor analysis/SWOT analysis
• Baseline metrics
• Marketing strategy
• Tracking guidelines

Below you will see in details how to write each section as well as some examples of how you can design each section in a marketing plan.

Let’s look at how to create a successful marketing plan (click to jump ahead):

• Write a simple executive summary
• Set metric-driven marketing goals
• Outline your user personas
• Research all of your competitors
• Set accurate key baselines & metrics
• Create an actionable marketing strategy
• Set tracking or reporting guidelines

1. Write a simple executive summary

Starting your marketing plan off on the right foot is important. You want to pull people into your amazing plan for marketing domination. Not bore them to tears.

One of the best ways to get people excited to read your marketing plan is with a well-written executive summary. An executive summary introduces readers to your company goals, marketing triumphs, future plans, and other important contextual facts.

Basically, you can use the Executive Summary as a primer for the rest of your marketing plan.

Include things like:

• Simple marketing goals
• High-level metrics
• Important company milestones
• Facts about your brand
• Employee anecdotes
• Future goals & plans

Try to keep your executive summary rather brief and to the point. You aren’t writing a novel, so try to keep it under three to four paragraphs.

Take a look at the executive summary in the marketing plan example below:

The executive summary is only two paragraphs long — short but effective.

The executive summary tells readers about the company’s growth, and how they are about to overtake one of their competitors. But there’s no mention of specific metrics or figures. That will be highlighted in the next section of the marketing plan.

An effective executive summary should have enough information to pique the reader’s interest, but not bog them down with specifics yet. That’s what the rest of your marketing plan is for!

The executive summary also sets the tone for your marketing plan. Think about what tone will fit your brand ? Friendly and humorous? Professional and reliable? Inspiring and visionary?

2. Set metric-driven marketing goals

After you perfect your executive summary, it’s time to outline your marketing goals.

(If you’ve never set data-driven goals like this before, it would be worth reading this growth strategy guide ).

This is one of the most important parts of the entire marketing plan, so be sure to take your time and be as clear as possible. Moreover, optimizing your marketing funnel is key. Employing effective funnel software can simplify operations and provide valuable customer insights. It facilitates lead tracking, conversion rate analysis, and efficient marketing optimization .

As a rule of thumb, be as specific as possible. The folks over at  VoyMedia  advise that you should set goals that impact website traffic, conversions, and customer success — and to use real numbers.

Avoid outlining vague goals like:

• Get more Twitter followers
• Write more articles
• Create more YouTube videos (like educational or Explainer videos )
• Increase retention rate
• Decrease bounce rate

Instead, identify  key performance metrics  (KPI) you want to impact and the percentage you want to increase them by.

Take a look at the goals page in the marketing plan example below:

They not only identify a specific metric in each of their goals, but they also set a timeline for when they will be increased.

The same vague goals listed earlier become much clearer when specific numbers and timelines are applied to them:

• Get 100 new Twitter followers per month
• Write 5 more articles per week
• Create 10 YouTube videos each year
• Increase retention rate by 15% by 2020
• Decrease bounce rate by 5% by Q1
• Create an online course  and get 1,000 new leads
• Focus more on local SEO strategies

You can dive even deeper into your marketing goals if you want (generally, the more specific, the better). Here’s a marketing plan example that shows how to outline your growth goals:

3. Outline your user personas

Now, this may not seem like the most important part of your marketing plan, but I think it holds a ton of value.

Outlining your user personas is an important part of a marketing plan that should not be overlooked.

You should be asking not just how you can get the most visitors to your business, but how you can get the right visitors.

Who are your ideal customers? What are their goals? What are their biggest problems? How does your business solve customer problems?

Answering these questions will take lots of research, but it’s essential information to get.

Some ways to conduct user research are:

• Interviewing your users (either in person or on the phone)
• Conducting focus groups
• Researching other businesses in the same industry
• Surveying your audience

Then, you will need to compile your user data into a user persona  guide.

Take a look at how detailed this user persona template is below:

Taking the time to identify specific demographic traits, habits and goals will make it easier for you to cater your marketing plan to them.

Here’s how you can create a user persona guide:

The first thing you should add is a profile picture or icon for each user persona. It can help to put a face to your personas, so they seem more real.

Next, list demographic information like:

• Identifiers
• Activities/Hobbies

The user persona example above uses sliding scales to identify personality traits like introversion vs. extroversion and thinking vs. feeling. Identifying what type of personality your target users tend to have an influence on the messaging you use in your marketing content.

Meanwhile, this user persona guide identifies specific challenges the user faces each day:

But if you don’t want to go into such precise detail, you can stick to basic information, like in this marketing plan example:

Most businesses will have a few different types of target users. That’s why it’s pertinent to identify and create several different user personas . That way, you can better segment your marketing campaigns and set separate goals, if necessary.

Here’s a marketing plan example with a segmented user persona guide:

The important thing is for your team or client to have a clear picture of who their target user is and how they can appeal to their specific problems.

Start creating robust user personas using Venngage’s user persona guide .

4. Conduct an extensive competitor analysis

Next, on the marketing plan checklist, we have the competitor research section. This section will help you identify who your competitors are, what they’re doing, and how you could carve yourself a place alongside them in your niche — and ideally, surpass them. It’s something you can learn to do with rank tracking software .

Competitor research is also incredibly important if you are starting a blog .

Typically, your competitor research should include:

• Who their marketing team is
• Who their leadership team is
• What their marketing strategy is (this will probably revolve some reverse-engineering)
• What their sales strategy is (same deal)
• Social Media strategy (are they using discounting strategies such as coupon marketing to get conversions)
• Their market cap/financials
• Their yearly growth (you will probably need to use a marketing tool like Ahrefs to do this)
• The number of customers they have & their user personas

Also, take as deep a dive as you can into the strategies they use across their:

• Blog/Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• SEO Marketing
• Video marketing
• And any other marketing tactics they use

Research their strengths and weaknesses in all parts of their company, and you will find some great opportunities. Bookmark has a great guide to different marketing strategies for small businesses  if you need some more information there.

You can use this simple SWOT analysis worksheet to quickly work through all parts of their strategy as well:

Click the template above to create a SWOT chart . Customize the template to your liking — no design know-how needed.

Since you have already done all the research beforehand, adding this information to your marketing plan shouldn’t be that hard.

In this marketing plan example, some high-level research is outlined for 3 competing brands:

But you could take a deeper dive into different facets of your competitors’ strategies. This marketing plan example analyses a competitor’s content marketing strategy:

It can also be helpful to divide your competitors into Primary and Secondary groups. For example, Apple’s primary competitor may be Dell for computers, but its secondary competitor could be a company that makes tablets.

Your most dangerous competitors may not even be in the same industry as you. Like the CEO of Netflix said, “Sleep is our competition.”

5. Set accurate key baselines & metrics

It’s pretty hard to plan for the future if you don’t know where your business stands right now.

Before we do anything at Venngage, we find the baselines so we can compare future results to something. We do it so much it’s almost like second nature now!

Setting baselines will allow you to more accurately track your progress. You will also be able to better analyze what worked and what didn’t work, so you can build a stronger strategy. It will definitely help them clearly understand your goals and strategy as well.

Here’s a marketing plan example where the baselines are visualized:

Another way to include baselines in your plan is with a simple chart, like in the marketing plan example below:

Because data can be intimidating to a lot of people, visualizing your data using charts and infographics will help demystify the information.

6. Create an actionable marketing strategy

After pulling all the contextual information and relevant metrics into your marketing plan, it’s time to break down your marketing strategy.

Once again, it’s easier to communicate your information to your team or clients using visuals .

Mind maps are an effective way to show how a strategy with many moving parts ties together. For example, this mind map shows how the four main components of a marketing strategy interact together:

You can also use a flow chart to map out your strategy by objectives:

However you choose to visualize your strategy, your team should know exactly what they need to do. This is not the time to keep your cards close to your chest.

Your strategy section may need to take up a few pages to explain, like in the marketing plan example below:

With all of this information, even someone from the development team will understand what the marketing team is working on.

This minimalistic marketing plan example uses color blocks to make the different parts of the strategy easy to scan:

Breaking your strategy down into tasks will make it easier to tackle.

Another important way to visualize your marketing strategy is to create a project roadmap. A project roadmap visualizes the timeline of your product with individual tasks. Our roadmap maker can help you with this.

For example, this project roadmap shows how tasks on both the marketing and web design side run parallel to each other:

A simple timeline can also be used in your marketing plan:

Or a mind map, if you want to include a ton of information in a more organized way:

Even a simple “Next, Now, Later” chart can help visualize your strategy:

7. Set tracking or reporting guidelines

Close your marketing plan with a brief explanation of how you plan to track or measure your results. This will save you a lot of frustration down the line by standardizing how you track results across your team.

Like the other sections of your marketing plan, you can choose how in-depth you want to go. But there need to be some clear guidelines on how to measure the progress and results of your marketing plan.

At the bare minimum, your results tracking guidelines should specify:

• What you plan to track
• How you plan to track results
• How often you plan to measure

But you can more add tracking guidelines to your marketing plan if you see the need to. You may also want to include a template that your team or client can follow,  for  client reporting ,  ensure that the right metrics are being tracked.

The marketing plan example below dedicates a whole page to tracking criteria:

Use a task tracker to track tasks and marketing results, and a checklist maker to note down tasks, important life events, or tracking your daily life.

Similarly, the marketing plan example below talks about tracking content marketing instead:

Marketing plan vs. marketing strategy

Although often used interchangeably, the terms “marketing plan” and “marketing strategy” do have some differences.

Simply speaking, a marketing strategy presents what the business will do in order to reach a certain goal. A marketing plan outlines the specific daily, weekly, monthly or yearly activities that the marketing strategy calls for. As a business, you can create a marketing proposal for the marketing strategies defined in your company’s marketing plan. There are various marketing proposal examples that you can look at to help with this.

A company’s extended marketing strategy can be like this:

Notice how it’s more general and doesn’t include the actual activities required to complete each strategy or the timeframe those marketing activities will take place. That kind of information is included in a marketing plan, like this marketing plan template which talks about the content strategy in detail:

Marketing plan v.s business plan

While both marketing plans and business plans are crucial documents for businesses, they serve distinct purposes and have different scopes. Here’s a breakdown of the key differences:

Business plan is a comprehensive document that outlines all aspects of your business, including:

• Mission and vision
• Products or services
• Target market
• Competition
• Management team
• Financial projections
• Marketing strategy (including a marketing plan)
• Operations plan

Marketing plan on the other hand, dives deep into the specific strategies and tactics related to your marketing efforts. It expands on the marketing section of a business plan by detailing:

• Specific marketing goals (e.g., brand awareness, lead generation, sales)
• Target audience analysis (detailed understanding of their needs and behaviors)
• Product:  Features, benefits, positioning
• Price:  Pricing strategy, discounts
• Place:  Distribution channels (online, offline)
• Promotion:  Advertising, social media, content marketing, public relations
• Budget allocation for different marketing activities
• Metrics and measurement to track progress and success

In short, business plans paint the entire business picture, while marketing plans zoom in on the specific strategies used to reach your target audience and achieve marketing goals.

Types of marketing plans that can transform your business strategy

Let’s take a look at several types of marketing plans you can create, along with specific examples for each.

1. General marketing strategic plan / Annual marketing plan

This is a good example of a marketing plan that covers the overarching annual marketing strategy for a company:

Another good example would be this Starbucks marketing plan:

This one-page marketing plan example from coffee chain Starbucks has everything at a glance. The bold headers and subheadings make it easier to segment the sections so readers can focus on the area most relevant to them.

What we like about this example is how much it covers. From the ideal buyer persona to actional activities, as well as positioning and metrics, this marketing plan has it all.

Another marketing plan example that caught our eye is this one from Cengage. Although a bit text-heavy and traditional, it explains the various sections well. The clean layout makes this plan easy to read and absorb.

The last marketing plan example we would like to feature in this section is this one from Lush cosmetics.

It is a long one but it’s also very detailed. The plan outlines numerous areas, including the company mission, SWOT analysis , brand positioning, packaging, geographical criteria, and much more.

2. Content marketing plan

A content marketing plan highlights different strategies , campaigns or tactics you can use for your content to help your business reach its goals.

This one-page marketing plan example from Contently outlines a content strategy and workflow using simple colors and blocks. The bullet points detail more information but this plan can easily be understood at a glance, which makes it so effective.

For a more detailed content marketing plan example, take a look at this template which features an editorial calendar you can share with the whole team:

3. SEO marketing plan

Your SEO marketing plan highlights what you plan to do for your SEO marketing strategy . This could include tactics for website on-page optimization , off-page optimization using AI SEO , and link building using an SEO PowerSuite backlink API for quick backlink profile checks.

This SEO marketing plan example discusses in detail the target audience of the business and the SEO plan laid out in different stages:

4. Social media marketing plan

Your social media marketing plan presents what you’ll do to reach your marketing goal through social media. This could include tactics specific to each social media channel that you own, recommendations on developing a new channel, specific campaigns you want to run, and so on, like how B2B channels use Linkedin to generate leads with automation tools and expand their customer base; or like making use of Twitter walls that could display live Twitter feeds from Twitter in real-time on digital screens.

Edit this social media marketing plan example easily with Venngage’s drag-and-drop editor:

5. Demand generation marketing plan

This could cover your paid marketing strategy (which can include search ads, paid social media ads, traditional advertisements, etc.), email marketing strategy and more. Here’s an example:

1. Free marketing plan template

Here’s a free nonprofit marketing plan example that is ideal for organizations with a comprehensive vision to share. It’s a simple plan that is incredibly effective. Not only does the plan outline the core values of the company, it also shares the ideal buyer persona.

Note how the branding is consistent throughout this example so there is no doubt which company is presenting this plan. The content plan is an added incentive for anyone viewing the document to go ahead and give the team the green light.

2. Pastel social media marketing campaign template

Two-page marketing plan samples aren’t very common, but this free template proves how effective they are. There’s a dedicated section for business goals as well as for project planning .

The milestones for the marketing campaign are clearly laid out, which is a great way to show how organized this business strategy is.

3. Small business marketing strategy template

This marketing plan template is perfect for small businesses who set out to develop an overarching marketing strategy for the whole year:

Notice how this aligns pretty well with the marketing plan outline we discussed in previous sections.

In terms of specific tactics for the company’s marketing strategy, the template only discusses SEO strategy, but you can certainly expand on that section to discuss any other strategies — such as link building , that you would like to build out a complete marketing plan for.

4. Orange simple marketing proposal template

Marketing plans, like the sample below, are a great way to highlight what your business strategy and the proposal you wan to put forward to win potential customers.

5. One-page marketing fact sheet template

This one-page marketing plan example is great for showcasing marketing efforts in a persuasive presentation or to print out for an in-person meeting.

Note how the fact sheet breaks down the marketing budget as well as the key metrics for the organization. You can win over clients and partners with a plan like this.

6. Light company business fact sheet template

This one-page sample marketing plan clearly outlines the marketing objectives for the organization. It’s a simple but effective way to share a large amount of information in a short amount of time.

What really works with this example is that includes a mission statement, key contact information alongside all the key metrics.

7. Marketing media press kit template

This press kit marketing plan template is bright and unmistakable as belonging to the Cloud Nine marketing agency . The way the brand colors are used also helps diversify the layouts for each page, making the plan easier to read.

We like the way the marketing department has outlined the important facts about the organization. The bold and large numbers draw the eye and look impressive.

8. Professional marketing proposal template

Start your marketing campaign on a promising note with this marketing plan template. It’s short, sharp and to the point. The table of contents sets out the agenda, and there’s a page for the company overview and mission statement.

9. Social media marketing proposal template

A complete marketing plan example, like the one below, not only breaks down the business goals to be achieved but a whole lot more. Note how the terms and conditions and payment schedule are included, which makes this one of the most comprehensive marketing plans on our list.

What should marketing plans include?

Marketing plans should include:

• A detailed analysis of the target market and customer segments.
• Clear and achievable marketing objectives and goals.
• Strategies and tactics for product promotion and distribution.
• Budget allocation for various marketing activities.
• Timelines and milestones for the implementation of marketing strategies.
• Evaluation metrics and methods for tracking the success of the marketing plan.

What is an executive summary in a marketing plan and what is its main goal?

An executive summary in a marketing plan is a brief overview of the entire document, summarizing the key points, goals, and strategies. Its main goal is to provide readers with a quick understanding of the plan’s purpose and to entice them to read further.

What are the results when a marketing plan is effective?

When a marketing plan is effective, businesses can experience increased brand visibility, higher customer engagement, improved sales and revenue, and strengthened customer loyalty.

What is the first section of a marketing plan?

The first section of a marketing plan is typically the “Executive Summary,” which provides a concise overview of the entire plan, including the business’s goals and the strategies to achieve them.

Now that you have the basics for designing your own marketing plan, it’s time to get started:

More marketing design guides and templates:

• Marketing Infographics: The Definitive Guide [Includes Infographic Templates]
• 20+ Business Pitch Deck Templates to Win New Clients and Investors
• 20+ White Paper Examples [Design Guide + White Paper Templates]
• The Evolution of Marketing [Timeline Infographic]

What Is a Product Marketing Plan?

A product marketing plan is set up by someone who has the responsibility of overseeing go-to-market (GTM) strategy — usually a product marketer or, in some cases, a product manager or product owner . The product marketing plan lays out what makes a launch successful. This can include who the customer and/or user is, what they find important, what behaviors will certify success, the pricing of the feature/product and even what failure looks like in case the product needs to be shelved.

Why Are Product Marketing Plans Important?

A product marketing plan is important because teams can find themselves attached to building the product but unable to wrap their heads around how to launch it after spending so much time working directly on the product itself. The product marketing plan helps teams launch the product (or feature) smoothly by anticipating possible questions or concerns. They do this by developing a plan to respond through paired content or through the product itself. A great plan ensures the team is able to grade their launch and make the product’s next steps more clear.

More From Adam Thomas What Does a Product Manager Actually Do?

Product Marketing Plan Strategy

Creating a product marketing plan has four steps:

• Collect the data that affects the launch, including information on personas, market forces and anything that could change your marketing, pricing or release timeline.
• Determine what is a good outcome for the product. Define what success looks like.
• Plot out what you need to do in order to be successful. Start by looking at the data you’ve collected. Write out the steps to achieve success and what will lead to failure. What proactive steps can you take now in order to achieve a good outcome later?
• Unveil the plan to the team. How can you make it better? Iterate from there.

Product marketing plans come in many different forms. If you work with product marketers, you’ll see that for yourself if you ask for a GTM strategy .

If you’re the one asked to make a product marketing plan, take a look at the following:

Smartsheet Product Marketing Guide : This guide will give you some great prompts, including asking about current market conditions, current needs of your customers and how your product is perceived by your target market. Your responses to these prompts will give you a head start in making sure you have the right data to form a plan. Now use this data to create a strategy .

How to Create a Marketing Plan for a New Product (2022) - Adacted :  This guide is a great way to take the data above and turn it into a plan. The prompts guide you to think about timelines and what’s important to your company.

Like all documentation, this all means very little without any iteration. Just know that your first attempt will get better when you share it with relevant stakeholders, get feedback and iterate.

More From Built In Experts How Product Managers Build Trusted Marketplaces at Built In and Beyond

What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of a Product Marketing Plan?

Product marketing is a powerful tool to help you become aligned with a launch. It is a requirement for large releases because if no one determines ahead of time what success or failure look like, it is very easy to look up months later and see a release that isn’t serving customers.

These plans are an investment, but it’s important not to overdo them. Smaller releases do not need a full-fledged plan. It is worth thinking about some easy basics for any release, such as building marketing templates that can ensure a quality release when the stakes aren’t high.

Remember, plans are also meant to be broken. As Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth.” Your product release to the market is that punch to the mouth, and the product marketing plan is there to help you figure out how to respond ...  before you get hit in the face.

Built In’s expert contributor network publishes thoughtful, solutions-oriented stories written by innovative tech professionals. It is the tech industry’s definitive destination for sharing compelling, first-person accounts of problem-solving on the road to innovation.

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• Marketing |
• How to create a winning marketing plan, ...

How to create a winning marketing plan, with 3 examples from world-class teams

A marketing plan helps leaders clearly visualize marketing strategies across channels, so they can ensure every campaign drives pipeline and revenue. In this article you’ll learn eight steps to create a winning marketing plan that brings business-critical goals to life, with examples from word-class teams.

To be successful as a marketer, you have to deliver the pipeline and the revenue.”

In other words—they need a well-crafted marketing plan.

Level up your marketing plan to drive revenue in 2024

Learn how to create the right marketing plan to hit your revenue targets in 2024. Hear best practices from marketing experts, including how to confidently set and hit business goals, socialize marketing plans, and move faster with clearer resourcing.

7 steps to build a comprehensive marketing plan

How do you build the right marketing plan to hit your revenue goals? Follow these eight steps for success:

1. Define your plan

First you need to define each specific component of your plan to ensure stakeholders are aligned on goals, deliverables, resources, and more. Ironing out these details early on ensures your plan supports the right business objectives, and that you have sufficient resources and time to get the job done. 

Get started by asking yourself the following questions: 

What resources do I need? 

What is the vision?

What is the value?

What is the goal?

Who is my audience?

What are my channels?

What is the timeline?

For example, imagine you’re creating an annual marketing plan to improve customer adoption and retention in the next fiscal year. Here’s how you could go through the questions above to ensure you’re ready to move forward with your plan: 

I will need support from the content team, web team, and email team to create targeted content for existing customers. One person on each team will need to be dedicated full-time to this initiative. To achieve this, the marketing team will need an additional $100K in budget and one new headcount. 

What is the vision?  

To create a positive experience for existing customers, address new customer needs, and encourage them to upgrade. We’ll do this by serving them how-to content, new feature updates, information about deals and pricing, and troubleshooting guides. 

According to the Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) , CEOs and go-to-market leaders report that more than 60% of their net-new revenue will come from existing customers in 2023. By retaining and building on the customers we have, we can maintain revenue growth over time. 

To decrease the customer churn rate from 30% to 10%, and increase upgrades from 20% to 30% in the next fiscal year. 

All existing customers. 

The main channel will be email. Supporting marketing channels include the website, blog, YouTube, and social media. 

The first half of the next fiscal year. 

One of the most important things to do as you create your marketing strategy is to identify your target audience . As with all marketing, you need to know who you’re marketing to. If you’re having a hard time determining who exactly your target audience is, try the bullseye targeting framework . The bullseye makes it easy for you to determine who your target audience is by industry, geography, company size, psychographics, demographics, and more.

2. Identify key metrics for success 

Now it’s time to define what key marketing metrics you’ll use to measure success. Your key metrics will help you measure and track the performance of your marketing activities. They’ll also help you understand how your efforts tie back to larger business goals. 

Once you establish key metrics, use a goal-setting framework—like objectives and key results (OKRs) or SMART goals —to fully flush out your marketing objectives. This ensures your targets are as specific as possible, with no ambiguity about what should be accomplished by when. 

Example: If a goal of your marketing plan is to increase email subscriptions and you follow the SMART goal framework (ensuring your objective is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) your goal might look like this: Increase email subscription rate from 10% to 20% in H1 . 

3. Research your competition 

It’s easy to get caught up in your company’s world, but there’s a lot of value in understanding your competitors . Knowing how they market themselves will help you find opportunities to make your company stand out and capture more market share.

Make sure you’re not duplicating your competitors’ efforts. If you discover a competitor has already executed your idea, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board and brainstorm new ways to differentiate yourself.  By looking at your competitors, you might be surprised at the type of inspiration and opportunities you’ll find.

To stay ahead of market trends, conduct a SWOT analysis for your marketing plan. A SWOT analysis helps you improve your plan by identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Example: If your competitor launches a social media campaign identical to what you had planned, go back to the drawing board and see how you can build off their campaign. Ask yourself: How can we differentiate our campaign while still getting our message across? What are the weaknesses of their campaign that we can capitalize on? What angles did they not approach?

4. Integrate your marketing efforts

Here’s where the fun comes in. Let’s dive into the different components that go into building a successful marketing plan. You’ll want to make sure your marketing plan includes multiple supporting activities that all add up into a powerful marketing machine. Some marketing plan components include: 

Lead generation

Social media

Product marketing

Public relations

Analyst relations

Customer marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Conversational marketing

Knowing where your consumer base spends the most time is significant for nailing this step. You need to have a solid understanding of your target audience before integrating your marketing efforts. 

Example: If your target audience is executives that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, focus your social media strategy around placing branded content on LinkedIn. 

5. Differentiate with creative content

Forty-nine percent of marketers say visual images are hugely important to their content strategy. In other words, a clear brand and creative strategy is an essential component to every marketing plan. As you craft your own creative strategy, here are some tips to keep in mind: 

Speak to your audience: When defining your creative strategy, think about your audience—what you want them to feel, think, and do when they see your marketing. Will your audience find your creative work relevant? If your audience can’t relate to your creative work, they won’t feel connected to the story you’re trying to tell. 

Think outside the box: Find innovative ways to engage your audience, whether through video, animations, or interactive graphics. Know what screens your creative work will live on, whether desktop, mobile, or tablet, and make sure they display beautifully and load quickly across every type of device. 

Tie everything back to CTAs: It’s easy to get caught up in the creative process, so it’s important to never lose sight of your ultimate goal: Get your audience to take action. Always find the best way to display strong Calls to Action (CTAs) in your creative work. We live in a visual world—make sure your creative content counts.

Streamline creative production:   Once you’ve established a strong creative strategy, the next step is to bring your strategy to life in the production stage. It’s vital to set up a strong framework for your creative production process to eliminate any unnecessary back and forth and potential bottlenecks. Consider establishing creative request forms , streamlining feedback and approval processes, and taking advantage of integrations that might make your designers’ lives easier.

Example: If your brand is fun and approachable, make sure that shows in your creative efforts. Create designs and CTAs that spark joy, offer entertainment, and alleviate the pressure in choosing a partner.

6. Operationalize your marketing plan

Turn your plan into action by making goals, deliverables, and timelines clear for every stakeholder—so teams stay accountable for getting work done. The best way to do this is by centralizing all the details of your marketing plan in one platform , so teams can access the information they need and connect campaign work back to company goals.  

With the right work management tool , you can: 

Set goals for every marketing activity, and connect campaign work to overarching marketing and business objectives so teams focus on revenue-driving projects. 

Centralize deliverables for your entire marketing plan in one project or portfolio .

Mark major milestones and visualize your plan as a timeline, Gantt chart, calendar, list, or Kanban board—without doing any extra work. 

Quickly loop in stakeholders with status updates so they’re always up to date on progress. This is extremely important if you have a global team to ensure efforts aren’t being duplicated. 

Use automations to seamlessly hand off work between teams, streamlining processes like content creation and reviews. 

Create dashboards to report on work and make sure projects are properly staffed , so campaigns stay on track. 

With everything housed in one spot, you can easily visualize the status of your entire marketing plan and keep work on track. Building an effective marketing plan is one thing, but how you operationalize it can be your secret to standout marketing.

Example: If your strategy focuses on increasing page views, connect all campaign work to an overarching OKR—like “we will double page views as measured by the amount of organic traffic on our blog.” By making that goal visible to all stakeholders, you help teams prioritize the right work. 

See marketing planning in action

With Asana, marketing teams can connect work, standardize processes, and automate workflows—all in one place.

7. Measure performance

Nearly three in four CMOs use revenue growth to measure success, so it’s no surprise that measuring performance is necessary. You established your key metrics in step two, and now it’s time to track and report on them in step eight.

Periodically measure your marketing efforts to find areas of improvement so you can optimize in real-time. There are always lessons to be learned when looking at data. You can discover trends, detect which marketing initiatives performed well, and course-correct what isn’t performing well. And when your plan is complete, you can apply these learnings to your next initiative for improved results. 

Example: Say you discover that long-form content is consistently bringing in 400% more page views than short-form content. As a result, you’ll want to focus on producing more long-form content in your next marketing plan.

Marketing plan examples from world-class teams

The best brands in the world bring their marketing plans to life every day. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out these examples from successful marketing teams.

Autodesk grows site traffic 30% three years in a row

When the Autodesk team launched Redshift, it was initially a small business blog. The editorial team executed a successful marketing plan to expand it into a premier owned-media site, making it a destination for stories and videos about the future of making. 

The team scaled content production to support seven additional languages. By standardizing their content production workflow and centralizing all content conversations in one place, the editorial team now publishes 2X more content monthly. Read the case study to learn more about how Autodesk runs a well-oiled content machine.

Sony Music boosts creative production capacity by 4X

In recent years the music industry has gone through a pivotal transition—shifting from album sales to a streaming business model. For marketing and creative teams at Sony Music, that meant adopting an “always on” campaign plan. 

The team successfully executed this campaign plan by centralizing creative production and approvals in one project. By standardizing processes, the team reduced campaign production time by 75%. Read the case study to learn more about how Sony Music successfully scaled their creative production process.

Trinny London perfects new customer acquisition 

In consumer industries, social media is crucial for building a community of people who feel an affinity with the brand—and Trinny London is no exception. As such, it was imperative that Trinny London’s ad spend was targeted to the correct audience. Using a work management tool, Trinny London was able to nail the process of creating, testing, and implementing ads on multiple social channels.

With the help of a centralized tool, Trinny London improved its ad spend and drove more likes and subscriptions on its YouTube page. Read the case study to learn more about how Trinny London capitalized on paid advertising and social media. 

Turn your marketing plan into marketing success 

A great marketing plan promotes clarity and accountability across teams—so every stakeholder knows what they’re responsible for, by when. Reading this article is the first step to achieving better team alignment, so you can ensure every marketing campaign contributes to your company’s bottom line. 

Use a free marketing plan template to get started

Once you’ve created your marketing strategy and are ready to operationalize your marketing plan, get started with one of our marketing templates . 

Our marketing templates can help you manage and track every aspect of your marketing plan, from creative requests to approval workflows. Centralize your entire marketing plan in one place, customize the roadmap, assign tasks, and build a timeline or calendar. 

Once you’ve operationalized your entire marketing plan with one of our templates, share it with your stakeholders so everyone can work together in the same tool. Your entire team will feel connected to the marketing plan, know what to prioritize, and see how their work contributes to your project objectives . Choose the best marketing template for your team:

Marketing project plan template

Marketing campaign plan template

Product marketing launch template

Editorial calendar template

Agency collaboration template

Creative requests template

Event planning template

GTM strategy template

Still have questions? We have answers. 

What is a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a detailed roadmap that outlines the different strategies your team will use to achieve organizational objectives. Rather than focusing solely on the end goal, a marketing plan maps every step you need to reach your destination—whether that’s driving pipeline for sales, nurturing your existing customer base, or something in-between. 

As a marketing leader, you know there’s never a shortage of great campaign and project ideas. A marketing plan gives you a framework to effectively prioritize work that aligns to overarching business goals—and then get that work done. Some elements of marketing plans include:

Current business plan

Mission statement  

Business goals

Target customers  

Competitive analysis 

Current marketing mix

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Marketing budget  

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

The purpose of a marketing plan is to grow your company’s consumer base and strengthen your brand, while aligning with your organization’s mission and vision . The plan should analyze the competitive landscape and industry trends, offer actionable insights to help you gain a competitive advantage, and document each step of your strategy—so you can see how your campaigns work together to drive overarching business goals. 

What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy? 

A marketing plan contains many marketing strategies across different channels. In that way, marketing strategies contribute to your overall marketing plan, working together to reach your company’s overarching business goals.

For example, imagine you’re about to launch a new software product and the goal of your marketing plan is to drive downloads. Your marketing plan could include marketing strategies like creating top-of-funnel blog content and launching a social media campaign. 

What are different types of marketing plans? 

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, what your timeline is, or which facet of marketing you’re driving, you’ll need to create a different type of marketing plan. Some different types of marketing plans include, but aren’t limited to:

General marketing plan: A general marketing plan is typically an annual or quarterly marketing plan that details the overarching marketing strategies for the period. This type of marketing plan outlines marketing goals, the company’s mission, buyer personas, unique selling propositions, and more. A general marketing plan lays the foundation for other, more specific marketing plans that an organization may employ. 

Product launch marketing plan: A product launch marketing plan is a step-by-step plan for marketing a new product or expanding into a new market. It helps you build awareness and interest by targeting the right audience, with the right messaging, in the right timeframe—so potential customers are ready to buy your new offering right away. Nailing your product launch marketing plan can reinforce your overall brand and fast-track sales. For a step-by-step framework to organize all the moving pieces of a launch, check out our product marketing launch template .

Paid marketing plan: This plan includes all the paid strategies in your marketing plan, like pay-per-click, paid social media advertising, native advertising, and display advertising. It’s especially important to do audience research prior to launching your paid marketing plan to ensure you’re maximizing ROI. Consult with content strategists to ensure your ads align with your buyer personas so you know you’re showing ads to the right people. 

Content marketing plan: A content marketing plan outlines the different content strategies and campaigns you’ll use to promote your product or service. When putting together a content marketing plan, start by identifying your audience. Then use market research tools to get the best insights into what topics your target audience is most interested in.

SEO marketing plan: Your SEO marketing plan should work directly alongside your content marketing plan as you chart content that’s designed to rank in search results. While your content marketing plan should include all types of content, your SEO marketing plan will cover the top-of-funnel content that drives new users to your site. Planning search engine-friendly content is only one step in your SEO marketing plan. You’ll also need to include link-building and technical aspects in order to ensure your site and content are as optimized as possible.

Social media marketing plan: This plan will highlight the marketing strategies you plan to accomplish on social media. Like in any general or digital marketing plan , your social media strategy should identify your ideal customer base and determine how they engage on different social media platforms. From there, you can cater your social media content to your target audience.  

Related resources

How Asana uses work management for smoother creative production

Build a marketing operations strategy in 4 steps

How Asana uses work management for more impactful campaigns

Marketing vs. advertising: What’s the difference?

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A guide to crafting a compelling marketing plan (with template)

A good marketing plan can work wonders for an organization, but it’s no easy feat to create. As a product manager who works with many talented product marketing managers, a good marketing plan aligns the organization and keeps everyone moving in the same direction.

In this post, we’ll cover how to create a compelling marketing plan (while adding some product manager’s spice to the recipe). The research and discovery behind the writing of this blog included a survey to product marketing experts that I work with. Their feedback and advice is sprinkled throughout the article and helped it more pragmatic and action-driven. As you read, you’ll find some very specific hints and tips from these PMMs who are active in B2B SaaS.

Let’s get started.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a structured guide for a company’s marketing activities across a specific period. It includes market analysis, target demographics, competitive landscape, and a SWOT analysis . The plan outlines clear objectives and strategies across product, pricing, distribution, and promotion, and details action plans, timelines, and key performance indicators for effective implementation and tracking.

Important considerations in a marketing plan

Some of the feedback from the PMMs I surveyed highlight some interesting takeaways about what a good marketing plan needs. Common responses included:

• Clear timeline and deliverables leading to action from the marketing plan
• A breakdown of deliverables per channel and owner that, again, focus on execution
• Focus and clarify the target audience to assist with the right set of actions and channels
• An understanding that a marketing plan needs a clear value proposition and an omnichannel approach . Many people misinterpret a go-to-market plan or a product release plan as a marketing plan. The reality is that a marketing plan is something bigger

Benefits of a marketing plan

There’s no debate that a marketing plan requires a lot of work to craft. There is a lot of research and data to get from various teams to build a compelling plan. The creation is half of the effort, and the actual execution and evaluation require more commitment. According to the survey we conducted specifically for this post, all this effort pays off!

Acts as a compass to measure outcomes

Taking into account the craft work needed and the final plan, measuring and following through on the goals of the marketing plan can drive big value to the company. According to one of the survey answers, a well-crafted marketing plan can fully complement a self-served product funneling the right audience into the product.

Acts as an alignment tool for teams in the company

Considering a cohesive story and the role of product managers in the proper execution of a marketing plan, we are talking about collaboration and coordination of actions. These habits built during the execution and evaluation of the marketing plan can have a lasting effect on the whole company as they are inherited in the day-to-day team collaboration.

What are the steps of a marketing plan?

We can now cut to the chase of this post. The components of a good marketing plan include:

• Executive summary
• Business overview
• Product overview
• Marketing analysis
• Key value proposition
• Marketing plan goals
• Key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Action plan
• Method of analyzing results

Let’s go over them all in detail below.

1. Executive summary

This holds the outline of the marketing plan and a short introduction of what follows. Use this section to share generic information about the business and the specifics of the marketing plan. The executive summary acts as the introduction to the marketing plan.

2. Business overview

This section outlines the company’s business and industry, mission, vision, and any specific marketing branding and styling guidelines to follow. It should act as a compass that the whole marketing plan needs to always keep in mind.

3. Product overview

The product overview is there to provide more clarity, direction, and reminders about the backbone of the marketing plan. With a product overview, all teams acting on the marketing plan have a clear view of what they are actually talking about.

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Product walkthrough

This is a sub-section of the product overview to share the specifics of how the product covered in the marketing plan works. Showcase actual screenshots and flows of the product that relate to the marketing plan. It can offer additional clarity to all involved teams working on the marketing plan.

4. Marketing analysis

The purpose of the marketing analysis section is to define the target audience, go through any market segmentation, and add a SWOT and competitive analysis to the report. In general, all the data from this section will define the marketing direction of the whole marketing plan.

5. Key value proposition

A key value proposition is the approach that your marketing plan will take and ultimately set you apart from the competition. It is important to be bold and specific in your description of the key value proposition. Add information about the marketing strategic direction and the basic story supporting it, and relate the products to the strategy and story of your marketing plan.

6. Marketing plan goals

This portion of the marketing plan follows the shared product overview and key value proposition sections. It highlights the specific goals you hope to achieve with the marketing plan. Make sure to specify both the metrics and timeframe of success for a goal.

7. Key performance indicators (KPIs)

KPIs exist to establish more fine-grained metrics around achieving the marketing plan goals. These metrics are indicators of moving toward the marketing goals and help in the team’s implementation in building the proper action items.

8. Action plan

This is the heart of the marketing plan. Starting from the available budget and key milestones will lead you to the following important subsections within the action plan:

• Marketing strategies and tactics — Describes each specific marketing action and tactics that the marketing team will implement
• Sales strategies and tactics — Describes actions and tactics involving the sales team
• The action plan timeline — Brings all the actions together into an implementation roadmap highlighting dependencies between actions and placing any milestones in the calendar

9. Method of analyzing results

This is where you will measure the impact of your work. In this section, define the tools and events to measure the KPIs and share evaluation standards for each of the metrics.

KPI check-ins are an important part of this section to keep all your KPIs progressing as the marketing plan is put in motion. With this section, all stakeholders should have a clear view of how your defined metrics are evolving along the implementation.

These are the sections of an effective marketing plan. One thing to keep in mind is that you will need to adjust the above sections for your specific use case and needs. There is a chance one or more sections don’t apply to your case and you might need to remove it, but be mindful before you start making cuts to fit your needs. Your marketing plan should tell a consistent story.

Marketing plan template

Based on the steps above, we created a marketing plan template in Google Docs for you to use as your base. In this template, we included more guidelines and descriptions to assist you in writing a compelling marketing plan.

To download the template, go to File > Make a copy :

The importance of telling a story in your marketing plan

The structure detailed above supports a cohesive story. This is very important, as:

• It makes the marketing plan document easy to read and follow
• It makes the key points stand out to the reader
• It leads to a clear conclusion relating to the outcome of all the work needed for the marketing plan

The marketing plan components start from the generic story and steadily dive deeper into the specifics needed for the actual implementation. At the end, you’ll do an evaluation of the actions.

The story structure is something you should strive for when building your action plan. Start from the generic storyline for your target audience and move down into the specifics as your marketing plan unfolds over time.

Tips for tailoring your marketing plan

To properly position your marketing plan on your current needs you need to pay attention to the following aspects.

Provide context to the team reading and executing the marketing plan

Context and information details are vital in defining the differences of a marketing plan approach. Talking about a specific product or line of products means that you should include information about these products in your marketing plan. That information will help build a cohesive and structured story.

Continuously stay close to your audience

Stay close to your audience either through interviews or following their social presence. This part of the marketing analysis will help you define the proper tone, voice, and approach for your marketing plan actions. Pay close attention to how people talk about the product and its landscape. What is the exact language they use? And how are they reacting to the marketing efforts you’ve been doing thus far?

Clearly describe the value proposition

A value proposition differentiates you from the competition. In the marketing plan, share reasoning and ideally, one or two examples of how this value proposition relates to your specific products and audience.

How to create a marketing plan: Advice from experts

As I’ve mentioned, I talked to a number of product marketing professionals and gathered their biggest tips for creating a marketing plan. Here’s what they said:

• Start by understanding the ideal role your marketing team needs to have in your company — Implementing a marketing plan spans many months. It’s a nice journey for the whole company to re-calibrate around what the marketing team’s position is. Having a long-term plan means that teams collaborate and create new habits to follow
• Don’t overthink it. If things are not perfect, you can just improve them later on — Have several iterations of the same content and see what works better. In general, lean towards action and re-adjustments
• Have a compelling story and something that connects emotionally with your target audience — Cultivate empathy and connection to your audience. As shared many times already, a cohesive story that spans from your target audience all the way to how your action plan unfolds strengthens the whole effort
• Keep it practical and actionable — The marketing plan should drive action and not stand as a theoretical essay
• Stay close to measuring the success at each step — As a direct follow-up of the above insight, your measurements will drive further action in the right direction. Crafting of a marketing plan does not stop when it’s put on paper. Keep updating with your findings
• Add all the content needed to aid in a proper execution — Make sure that your marketing plan includes all the components and descriptions that all of the executing teams can use to act more effectively

Conclusion and key takeaways

In this post, we touched upon many aspects of crafting a compelling marketing plan. We shared some insights from product marketing experts in the field and shared some tips to further assist you in creating a compelling marketing plan.

Crafting a compelling marketing plan has a lot of moving parts and needs a big effort. Still, making the decision to create the marketing plan and act on it is a very deliberate decision that requires commitment for the execution too.

Based on the scale of the marketing plan and the feedback from product marketers, the implementation of a properly crafted marketing plan can have a big impact on the company and products involved, so it’s an effort worth investing in.

I want to close this article with the following. In the survey question, “IRL: Is it worth the investment to build a marketing plan?” one of the answers was “Big yes!” 🙂

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How to Create a Marketing Plan for a New Product (2022)

You have developed a new product, hurray! The only problem is that products don’t sell themselves – we need a way to introduce them to our potential audiences. In this article, we will explore different ways of how to create a marketing plan for a new product.

What is a product marketing plan?

A product marketing plan is a map for getting your product out in front of different audiences in the most efficient way possible.

A product marketing plan will help you to conduct market research, find your strengths, explore potential audiences, develop your core marketing messages and choose the right tools for the job. A plan will also keep you on track with different activities you have done and are doing in the future so that you will know what works and what doesn’t.

Now that you know the why’s, let’s start creating the product marketing plan!

1. Know your product

To know where your product stands in the market, we need to start with some research.

Start by answering these questions:

• Example: Our hand sanitizer removes dangerous bacteria from people’s hands and thus reduces the risk of getting sick.
• Example: Our hand sanitizer is easier to apply than most of what is available on the market.
• Example: It’s cheaper, more comfortable to use and smells better .

Depending on your control of the product, we added some advanced ideas that could be useful to you when you start building your product marketing strategy. These include a bit of competition research as well.

When answering these questions, keep your mind open – you could find a unique selling point you didn’t think about before.

• Where will you sell your product?

Will it be sold locally, through an online store or both?

Example: We found out that hand sanitizers are widely available both online and offline. We will try to differentiate from our competitors by only selling hand sanitizers in our online store.

• What is your potential selling price?

Example: We saw hand sanitizers in our size formats be sold between $5 and $15. Because we are trying to be an affordable premium type of product, we will try pricing our hand sanitizer somewhere in the middle.

• What are your costs for producing the product? Are there any other associated costs (shipping etc.)?

If possible, calculate your potential profit margin in different scenarios. This will be crucial when you begin budgeting your marketing efforts.

• How many SKU-s (stock keeping unit) will your product have?

Example: Our product will be sold in 3 different variants.

• Product size

How large is your product? Can you only sell locally or will international selling be a possibility in the future?

• Product durability

How durable is your product? This will affect shipping and handling.

• Consumable or disposable?

Is your product consumable or disposable? Perhaps you could consider a subscription-based marketing strategy?

• Is your product perishable?

Does your product have a long shelf life?

• Are there any specific regulations your product will have to follow?

2. Conduct market research

It’s time to find out how much interest there could be for your new product. There are many ways to conduct market research, but you don’t need to go super-specific on the first go.

You will need to start with some assumptions. For example, if you are selling hair gel for men you could identify how many men there are in the area where you sell, find sales statistics from bigger companies who sell similar products and try to play them out in your numbers.

If you are looking to introduce a new product, you might interview a set number of people to see how they react to your proposition.

To analyze existing needs on the market we could use some tools on the internet. Let’s see what tools we could use to find out more about the potential market size on the  internet .

When researching, keep these 3 things in mind: potential market size, market trend, and seasonality.

• Google Trends

Google Trends  is a great tool to look at different keywords from Google’s perspective. This tool is useful for identifying if your product is in a growing, falling or flat market. It also helps to identify the seasonality of your market.

Check out our guide on how to use Google Trends for market research!

• Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a part of  Google Ads . With this tool, you can see search volumes for different keywords, which could give you some indication and also show signs of seasonality.

https://buzzsumo.com/  is a great tool for seeing what kind of content gets shared around on social platforms. You have to insert a keyword related to your new product to get the information.

3. Define your audience

Now that you know the properties of your product inside-out, it’s time to find out if there’s a good market for it and if so, where.

Let’s start by determining the perfect audiences for your product. Without knowing your audiences, it will be difficult to assess the potential market size.

What is a target audience?

Let’s start by defining what a target audience is.

A target audience is a group of people who share similar behaviors, interests and/or specific demographics. Target audiences are crucial for making marketing strategies, allocating budget, attracting new customers and developing your product.

For example, if you know that your product is mostly used by females, you could try to develop it in a way that is more appealing to women. This is an over-simplification – in reality, you can go much deeper into this topic.

• Find your target audience

Your target audience(s) should be defined by some characteristics like:

This process will be much easier when you already have some data about your buyers. In that case, you could just start from going through the data and identifying who buys your products the most. If you don’t – no worry!

You can make audiences by making logical assumptions about your new product. Some questions that you could ask are:

• Who could be potentially interested in your new product? ( Don’t say “everyone”. Try to go into as much detail as possible. Example: middle-aged women )
• What similar interests do these people have? ( For example, these people could be grouped as “parents”, “students” etc.)
• What topics bind these people together? ( For example, parents might be interested in topics such as “childcare”, “baby food” etc. )

Although these questions only scratch the surface, they could give you some ideas to start developing your target audience(s).

You can find out more about finding target audiences in this wonderful  article  by Hubspot.

• Create a buyer persona (Optional)

The next more advanced step could be to create a buyer persona for your new product.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is the profile of your ideal target customer built on audience research. Buyer persona mainly describes who your perfect customer is, but it can go as deep as illustrating their interests, buying decisions, groups they belong to, etc.

Read more about creating buyer personas in this  article  by Hootsuite.

4. Analyze your competitors

Knowing your competition is crucial to stay in the game. More often than not, analyzing competitors will give you a good hint about market dynamics, promotion strategies, targeted audiences and common themes about what things work to bring more sales. Let’s dive into it!

1. Identify your competitors

To find your competitors you could start by searching the internet using platforms like  Google ,  Amazon  and even  Facebook . If your new product doesn’t classify under the standard categories, try to find the closest similar competing products.

2. Sort your competitors by relevancy

After you have found some companies, it’s time to sort them by importance – which ones are more important to follow and which ones you can occasionally check on.

Easy way to categorize your competitors is to sort them in three categories:

• Primary Competitors:  These are the companies that you are competing with head-on. They are selling similar products and to similar audiences like you. These are the companies that your customers might compare you to ( for example BMW and Volvo) .
• Secondary Competitors:  These are the companies who are selling similar products as you but to a different audience ( for example a brand store that sells clothes vs general store which is also selling clothes, but at a different quality and price level) .
• Tertiary Competitors:  These are the companies which do not sell similar products to you, but they market to a similar audience  (for example if the target audience is “college students”, a company that sells school supplies can be a tertiary competitor to a company which sells clothes for younger people) .

When categorizing your competitors, make sure you track the basic information like:

• Name of the company
• Core products
• Strengths and weaknesses

You can add more tracking points as you conduct your research.

Learn more about in-depth competitor analysis  here .

5. Set Goals

After you’ve analyzed your new product and did some market and competition research, it’s time to determine the goals you want to achieve through your new product marketing plan.

Your marketing goals will set the tone for marketing messages, strategy and budget. The most common method for setting marketing goals is using the SMART system, which means your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

An error many people make in the beginning is setting too broad goals:

• We want to increase sales
• We want to rank number one in Google
• We want to have more website visitors.

Goals like these don’t have a beginning or an ending – they are not specific enough, are difficult to measure and aren’t time-bound. For example, although increasing sales is realistic and attainable, it’s something that should be happening through your marketing activities anyway.

Instead of setting broad goals, you could specify them a bit, for example:

• We want to increase monthly sales revenue by __%
• We want to rank in top 3 on Google for the keyword “best hand sanitizer”, which should bring us around 1500 new visitors each month
• We want to have increase website traffic by 100 monthly visitors

A good resource on setting marketing goals we recommend reading:  How to come up with 2020 marketing goals based on business goals .

6. Develop core marketing messages

Now that you have your goals set, let’s define your core marketing messages which you will use in your marketing strategies. The core marketing message is how you explain your unique value proposition (UVP) to your potential customers. It sets the frame for your strategies, which could be social media advertising, Google Ads, video marketing and so on. Every piece of content you produce should align with your core marketing message. The core marketing message helps you build a recognizable brand voice and gives people something to connect with.

How to develop your core marketing message

• Explain why your product is different and how it can help people.

Try to describe some specific pain points that your product solves for people. Use your competitor research to see how they position themselves and be creative. Find ways to be different and perhaps you can cover some points that your competitors missed in their core marketing message.

• Incorporate stories in your core marketing message

Can you find a way to make your product more personal? Perhaps there is a story as to why you started making your products. For example, some companies include family heritage, secret recipes that have been passed on or some other interesting stories in their core marketing message.

• Don’t make fake promises

Tell people the truth. If there is no basis for miracle benefits that you promise, people will find out eventually. Be as genuine as you possibly can and accurately describe your product.

7. Develop a marketing strategy (game plan)

We have finally arrived at the actionable part of your new product marketing plan! This is the stage where you take your research, market knowledge and start finding ways to reach your marketing goals.

There are countless ways you could reach your potential customers. To keep things from getting too confusing, start by thinking of some categories you could list your ideas under. Since you are selling products, this means you could have 2 different categories, for example,  local marketing strategy  and  international marketing strategy .

For the sake of this example, some ideas for the local marketing strategy could be:

• Participating in different local events;
• Making pop-up stores in malls or places where many people walk by;
• Making locally-focused social media advertisements;
• Writing press releases, content marketing.

Some ideas for your  international marketing strategy  could be:

• Getting your product to Amazon (or other resellers);
• Ranking your website for keywords that describe problems that your product solves;
• Running digital marketing campaigns to sell your product.

 After having these broader topics of what you want to do, you can build out each idea into a roadmap where you will include all the tools and approaches that you will need to implement the idea.

8. Set a budget

The reason we didn’t list the budget before marketing strategy is, that we don’t want to hamper the flow of ideas too early. You might not have a budget for some activities right now, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t put those ideas aside for the future.

We believe the most important things to know when setting a budget for new product marketing activities are  operational costs  and  ROI  (return on investment) needed for justifying the marketing activity cost.

We already know our operational costs from the research we made in the first chapter ( 1. Know your product ) and now it’s time to try to estimate potential ROI different marketing strategies can have.

Sadly, there are no guarantees there, but you can set a minimum ROI needed to keep or leave a marketing strategy. If you know that for example, Google Ads is bringing in a steady 3.0 ROI (for every $1 spent on ads you get $3 in sales), you can calculate what your net profit is and decide if you want to keep advertising there or not.

Keep in mind that on many strategies you could start seeing a return on investment over a longer period (for example branding activities or SEO), so don’t get too eager if you don’t see a return right away. Which brings us to the next point:

9. Tracking progress

Decide on how you will track the progress of different marketing activities. Digital marketing has made our life much easier because we can have all the statistics in numbers – website visitors, online buyers, advertising budget spent per purchase, etc.

We must remember though, that bigger part of marketing still goes on outside of the screens, where it’s not so easy to measure progress and numbers. When doing more traditional marketing, the best way to measure success is by comparing your activities to the sales revenue.

We like to think of marketing as making connections between different things: if you can find a profitable link between marketing activity and an increase in sales, you have already won half of the battle.

10. Set a timeline

Finally, it is crucial to have time boundaries for your activities.

Make a roadmap for when do you want to have your:

• Marketing goals met;
• Set strategies implemented;
• Marketing activities assessed.

Remember, marketing is all about testing and finding the right combinations for your new product.

Good luck with making your new product marketing plan!

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Product Marketing Strategy: The 2024 Complete Guide

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An effective product marketing strategy can be the key to growing your brand, boosting revenue, and unlocking new opportunities. 

Focused on demonstrating the specific values and benefits of a product to your customer, a product marketing campaign can be extremely valuable in both B2B and B2C environments, particularly as customer-centric advertising grows more popular.

Unfortunately, there are still countless people who don’t understand what product marketing actually means. Only around 5% of product marketers are convinced their role is fully understood, even among business leaders. 

Today, we’re going to be defining product marketing, exploring what it can do for your business, and providing top tips on how to use product marketing more effectively. 

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What is Product Marketing Strategy?

Product marketing is the art and science of bringing a product to market. It involves various strategic marketing and sales tactics, as well as long-term lead nurturing, up-selling, and cross-selling techniques. A product marketing strategy is the exact plan a company uses to bring their product to their audience. 

Your strategy will usually include things like figuring out the positioning and messaging you want to link to your product, launching the product, and ensuring customers and salespeople understand what it can do. Strategies can also cover insights into how various teams (production, marketing, sales, and customer support) will work together to drive demand and usage of a product.

While this might sound the same as conventional marketing, product marketing is slightly more focused. 

Part of the “ 7 P’s of marketing ”, product marketing focuses specifically on product, while your other marketing campaigns might focus on people, prices, promotion, place, packaging, and positioning.

Product Marketing Strategy Example

Product marketing is focused on the steps people take to purchase your products, and how you can support people in adopting and using that product. Let’s take a look at a classic example.

Apple is a household name in a highly competitive technology market. To stand out from the crowd, Apple ensures its products are beautifully well-designed, easy to use, and convenient. Apple’s product marketing strategy focuses specifically on the benefits it can deliver to users, rather than just listing the features you can get from each item. 

Apple’s language in virtually every product page and marketing campaign concentrates on telling consumers what they can do, and what they’ll be able to accomplish. Apple tells a narrative with its marketing content which helps the customer imagine the challenges they can overcome.

For another example, look at Billie, a woman’s razor brand well known for the #ProjectBodyHair campaign. This started with a TV campaign that actually showed body hair in women’s razor ads – something which hadn’t been done before. 

The idea for this campaign came from the product team, who researched the market to find out customers didn’t like seeing ads where customers didn’t have body hair. 

Combine this with the rising demand from women to be portrayed realistically in the media, and Billie had an excellent product marketing campaign. In fact, it generated 3.3 billion earned media impressions across 23 countries. 

Why You Need a Product Marketing Strategy

Product marketing strategies are all about understanding your audience’s needs, and positioning your product in a way that grabs attention. Developing the right product for your market and ensuring you present it in a way that captures audience attention is essential for growth.

With a product marketing strategy, you can:

Improve your understanding of your customer: 

Implementing a product marketing strategy requires companies to conduct in-depth research into their target audience. You learn what your customers need to see in your product to determine whether it’s valuable to them, and their lives. 

Understanding why customers gravitate toward your products will help you to create better buyer personas and more relevant campaigns. In other words, you’ll speak your customer’s language. 

Understand your competitors

While you’re building your product marketing strategy, you’ll need to look at your wider market and determine how your product or service is different from other existing options. You can compare your strategy to those of your competitors, and get a better insight into what you’re going up against.

With in-depth competitor research, you’ll be able to differentiate yourself more clearly in your target market and ensure you’re positioned appropriately in your chosen industry. After you’ve assessed your competition, ask yourself:

• How is my product suitable for today’s market?
• How is this product different from competing products?
• Can we differentiate our product even further (with extra features, pricing changes, etc)?

Ensure your teams are on the same page

When you know exactly what makes your product stand out and why customers want it, it’s much easier to give your teams a consistent view of their purpose, and your brand’s mission. With a strong product marketing strategy, you can align your product, sales, marketing, and service teams around a shared understanding of your company’s purpose .

When everyone in your team has a better understanding of the purpose of the product you’re selling and why it’s so beneficial, they’ll be more likely to communicate this information correctly. 

Boost revenue and sales

Ultimately, customers have endless options when it comes to where they can spend their money these days. The only way to ensure they come to you instead of the competition, is to position your product as the best possible option for their needs. 

Building a product marketing strategy that gives you an in-depth understanding of your customers will help you to generate more sales, through more personalized marketing . Remember, around 72% of customers say they expect businesses they buy from to understand them as individuals. 

How to Develop Your Own Product Marketing Strategy

A good product marketing strategy should guide the positioning, promotion, and pricing of your product. With this plan, you should be able to take your product from the “development” stage, all the way through to launch with a clear vision. Here’s how you can get started. 

Step 1: Get to Know Your Product’s Target Audience

A strong product marketing strategy begins with a deep knowledge of your target audience. You’ll need to define a specific target audience and create a buyer persona to help you understand the pain points, expectations, and requirements of that client. 

The more information you can include in your personas, the better. You’ll need to know where your target customer comes from, what kind of issues they’re facing, why they might want your product, and even how much they earn on a regular basis. The more data you have, the more you’ll be able to ensure all the aspects of your product marketing strategy are targeted to the right person.

Step 2: Conduct market research

After you’re done with your customer research, the next step is figuring out where your product is positioned in the context of the wider market. Look at the other products similar to yours that exist in the current market. What exactly can these products offer?

Perform a full analysis of each item, thinking about:

• What your product can do better
• What your competitor’s product does well
• Whether people are happy with the product, or what their overall response is

Answering these questions will help you to choose a position for yourself in your chosen market. 

Step 3: Determine your positioning and messaging

With this knowledge of your target audience and your competition, you’ll be able to start investing in positioning and messaging strategies. Positioning involves thinking about where your product exists in the market in the context of other brands and solutions. 

For instance, is your product one of the cheapest on the market, or one of the most expensive? Do you offer the widest selection of features, or a specific focus on customer service your customers love? The positioning you discover will help you to determine what you need to emphasize in your messaging (such as excellent service, or low prices). 

Some of the questions you’ll need to answer when developing your positioning and messaging include:

• What makes this product unique?
• Why is this product better than our competitors?
• Why is our product ideal for our target audience?
• What will our audience get out of this product they can’t get elsewhere?
• Why should customers trust and invest in our product?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you should be able to create an elevator pitch that describes everything someone would need to know about your product in an exciting, compact way. 

Step 4: Create your go-to-market strategy

Now it’s time to think about how you’re going to bring your product to customers. 

Identify which personas you’re going to be targeting with your product, and how you’re going to be capturing their attention with your messaging strategy.  Think about how you’re going to price your product, and what kind of methods you’re going to be using for selling. For instance, do you want to sell through distributors or direct to customers?

You can also use this stage to consider the kind of marketing methods you’re going to use, like social media marketing, or content campaigns. At this stage, you can utilize a graphic design maker for compelling visual content across your marketing campaigns.

As you choose marketing automation and sales strategies, also select KPIs you’ll want to measure as you progress to see whether your product marketing strategy is successful. 

Brief your sales and marketing leaders on your go-to-market strategy and ensure they have all the resources they need to do their job, such as advertising tools, product samples, brand guidelines, and go-to market strategy templates . 

Step 5: Launch, monitor, and optimize

Finally, you’ll be ready to launch your product. There are two aspects to the “launch” for most companies. Internal launches involve introducing everyone in your team to your product’s main benefits and features, which you’ll need to do before anything else.

External launches mean bringing your content to market through the various advertising and sales channels you chose above. Remember to monitor the performance of your campaign by tracking the KPIs you’ve set. These KPIs might include:

• Number of trial or demo sign-ups
• Lead to customer rates
• Product usage levels
• Customer engagement score
• Net Promoter score
• Feature adoption and engagement
• Usage of assets
• Upsells and cross-sells

Setting Your Own Product Marketing Strategy

While product marketing can seem like a complicated process at first, it’s something that becomes easier the more you work at it. 

A good product marketing strategy can be an essential part of ensuring your new product is a success with your target market. The more time you spend on your marketing strategy, making sure you understand your audience, their needs, and your position in the market, the more likely you are to see a significant return on investment from your products. 

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What’s a Product Marketing Plan: Insights for Product Strategy

Head of Marketing in Jelvix with 5+ years in setting and achieving marketing goals related to overall company revenue. Valery has strong management and analytical skills . She is challenged with creating a strong marketing strategy, managing the marketing team, organizing business processes within the department.

When companies roll out applications or websites to the market, they present new products to the audience. As developers, we are naturally more focused on the technical aspect of the process , but we had to acquire marketing expertise to keep in the loop. No matter how perfect the codebase is, all the effort goes wasted if the product is not promoted correctly.

In this article, we’ll walk you through our experience of planning product marketing – the process of rolling out a product to the market and selling it to the end-user. We’ll talk about creating strategies, scheduling activities, building positioning, and communicating advantages. 

• Everything Starts with a Product Marketing Plan

Product marketing is a long process that begins long before releasing the product, and it never really stops. If the company doesn’t have a determined plan, things will go south very quickly. Hectic promotional activities drain out budgets, are difficult to track, and the team cannot organize their work properly. 

To organize product marketing, you need a marketing plan. It’s a document where the team and stakeholders describe the roadmap for organizing, executing, and measuring marketing activities for product promotion. The focus on the product and its quality is the main difference between product marketing vs marketing . 

A product marketing plan sets the objectives for promotion and describes ways to achieve them. It’s usually limited within a given period – all marketing plans have to be rewritten or revised at some point. Undoubtedly, the marketing team experts are prominent in the process, but it’s better to involve designers and developers in software development.

• The Difference Between a Product Marketing Plan and a Product Marketing Strategy

Words like ‘ plan ’ and ‘ strategy ’ are often used together or even interchangeably, which creates confusion. You might be wondering if you have a strategy or you need a plan – or vice versa. You need both, and it’s best to approach them from different angles. 

What is a Product Strategy

A product strategy is a singular vision you have for the product. It’s a set of product values, selling propositions, and primary goals. The product marketing strategy is broad – it describes values and priorities rather than sets particular benchmarks. 

• The strategy defines your team’s long-term product vision ;
• The strategy doesn’t have to be revised as often as a marketing plan should be;
• The strategy is singular: you shouldn’t have many methods, you only need one. With plans, you can follow several of them, provided that they describe different aspects of promotion;
• The strategy is more or less set in stone: while you occasionally make changes to a marketing strategy, they should be rare. Once you define product strategy , it’s best not to rewrite it back-and-forth. The strategy sets the foundation for all product marketing, so it has to be stable. 

The marketing strategy is much briefer than a marketing plan. Several pages are enough to describe the main business goals and values. There’s no need to assign deadlines, responsible people, or devise metrics. It’s a bird-eye view document, not a guideline. 

• Product Marketing Plan Definition

A product marketing plan describes specific actions that should be taken to achieve the main objectives set in the strategy. If the strategy answers the “why” questions, the strategic marketing plan belongs in the realm of “how.” 

Unlike the strategy, the product marketing plan is a medium or short-term document. It should be regularly revised and edited – because your audience and market evolve all the time. The document itself is more detailed and longer. It holds all the main organizational aspects of the marketing process and aims to provide answers to common questions. 

• The marketing plan defines methods for reaching customers . The document describes the  of marketing activities used during the promotion ( direct marketing , digital marketing , event marketing , content marketing , and others). Each of these types has its subtypes, which need to be described, too.
• The marketing plan describes involved marketing mediums (website, SMM , advertising, organic search, etc.). Channels used for communication paid/free mediums and schedules – are all featured in the plan.
• A marketing plan has a section dedicated to tracking and measuring . The strategic goals are broken down into smaller objectives. How can you know if the aim has been reached? The plan specifies tangible KPIs and benchmarks for each of them. 
• A marketing plan describes the team’s involvement. What roles are needed to cover these responsibilities? Is the current team composition enough to reach the objectives? The plan answers these questions and assigns specific duties to each team member.

Both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan are necessary to build transparent promotion. If you only have a product roadmap (and no strategy), you won’t be able to move further once you’ve completed the short-term goals. You might choose the wrong direction for future campaigns, canceling the results of the previous ones. 

Reasons to Create a Product Marketing Plan

Creating a product marketing plan has many tangible benefits for the company. As software developers, we have often been amazed at how critical the impact of a marketing plan is. Working with businesses with a clear promotional plan is more comfortable because we understand the audience we are working for. 

From the very beginning of software development , a good marketing plan makes a difference. The further the project moves along, the more noticeable this impact becomes. Here are just some of the benefits of preparing a marketing plan early on.

• Specify a Vision for Your Product

The marketing plan, first and foremost, helps the team to understand the product. As everybody works on figuring out how to cater to the visitors of an app or a site, they are motivated to ask new questions – and look for answers. More often than not, the process of writing a plan uncovers critical problems with a business model or gets the team to reconsider features that are essential to users. 

One of the reasons why product marketing managers like to deal with marketing aspects early on in the discovery is that it saves from unnecessary fixes. We can spot design errors while they are still at the conceptual level – rather than firmly integrated into the codebase.

• Define and Communicate Your Mission

It’s enough to look at the latest tech news to see that all recent successful startups have some kind of a mission. It’s even better if this mission is genuine – this way, the team will attract users long-term and keep the team from burning out.

These days, building a tech product without a mission is a lost cause. The competition is too tough, and users start choosing by objective characteristics (design, functionality, usability) and integral values and purpose.

Developers also prefer working on projects with a clear mission – otherwise, you’ll have trouble recruiting new people later on. Having a mission is a must – and building marketing strategies and plans is a way to refine it.

• Outline What You Want to Accomplish

Business owners often think that if they only roll out their innovative projects, users will recognize their benefits. However, in most cases, users aren’t nearly attentive to details, and even great functionality goes unnoticed. The boom that business owners hope for just doesn’t come. 

To avoid this scenario, you need to be aware of your goals. How many users exactly do you want to attract within the first day of the launch? How many early adopters do you need before the product is rolled out? How should your marketing evolve with time? All these questions are tied to design and development, which is why it’s best to answer them beforehand.

• Describe Your Ideal Client

A standard rule of marketing is: you can’t cater to all audiences. To stand out from the competition, you need to know who you are talking to. The wider the audience, the harder it will be to earn your place under the sun. Massive campaigns need bigger budgets, and you need to understand if that’s the strategy your product should be taken.

This is why we always ask our clients about the expected reach of the product. Distinguishing between local, nationwide, and international markets are important even for educated tech stack choice.

Then, you need to specify what fields you expect to cover – this will also affect not only marketing but also the development team’s architectural decisions. Analyzing these aspects in a marketing plan helps you build a better product and gain recognition.

• Track Your Progress

When you are preparing to release the product, the workload usually increases – both in the marketing and the development departments. It’s a crucial time for making the last preparations. When responsibilities pile up, getting sidetracked becomes easy – unless you have a clear roadmap in place. 

Establishing a marketing plan early on helps you make sure that your priorities don’t shift, no matter how stressful the environment is. It’s also a guideline for the team – they don’t need to consult management on every detail and can use the plan instead. 

The Structure of a Product Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a document that provides a full perspective on the product’s market, audience, competitors. It’s an honest description of advantages, disadvantages, risks, and opportunities. 

For a plan to be clear and correct, it should start from a macro-analysis of the industry and gradually zoom in to smaller aspects. Such a structure allows you to prioritize the most important things and properly introduce marketing objectives to your team. Let’s take a look at the must-have elements of a marketing plan (you can add new chapters later on). 

• Marketing Audit

The first section is dedicated to analyzing the business climate. You need to be well-acquainted with long-term conditions that your product and team will be continuously facing. To get full information, you need these key elements of a marketing plan . 

The analysis of the macroeconomic environment: PESTEL

The PESTEL framework analyses relevant macroeconomic factors that will influence your product marketing. It analyzes the factors that are usually out of your control and simply have to be dealt with. Without a PESTEL analysis, you risk to miss out on crucial governmental legislation or ignore a key social aspect. 

The PESTEL framework’s driving forces and the approach to each of them are described in the table. 

After this analysis, you will have a profound understanding of the microenvironment around your product. This evaluation has to be honest – if the market isn’t living its best days, you need to be open to recognizing these objective challenges.

• Analyzing the Microeconomic Environment: Market, Competitors, Customers

When you were performing the macroanalysis, you didn’t look in-depth into particular fields. This is what we are going to do at this stage. Rather than evaluating the entire climate, we’ll stop specifically at your niche. You can do it manually or use strategy plan software (especially for large datasets ). 

• Customer Research

Customer research is an analysis of your target audience , its needs, behaviors, and segments. We always recommend our clients to perform this one at the very beginning of the project. There’s no point in building functionality if your users don’t need it. Customer research is the pillar not only of marketing but of the entire product lifecycle. 

Types of customer research

• Demographics : at first, focus on tangible demographic characteristics of your future users – age, gender, income, social status, and employment. These characteristics will provide you with a general understanding of the audience.
• Behavioral analysis : the next step is to research the audience’s needs and motivations. Why would future users download your app or visit the site? What are their main and secondary reasons? This information will be used to select marketing channels and prepare materials.
• Field experiments . You can monitor the way your target audience behaves in places they often visit. For instance, if you are building a product for freelancers, you can observe them in coffee shops or co-working spaces. 

Customer research can be quantitative and qualitative. You can ask closed questions, where users need to give ‘Yes/No’ answers or evaluate something from 1 to 10. At some point, you’ll need more details – this is where open interviews come in. They give more information but can’t be measured easily. Combining both methods is the best approach to getting clear yet detailed insights.

• Competitive Analysis

When you perform a competitive analysis of the product, you are focused on the characteristics of the product itself and the marketing strategies that competitors use. The goal is to understand competitive benefits, positioning, advantages, disadvantages, identify marketing strategies, and sales opportunities. 

How to write a competitive analysis?

Your first competitive analysis won’t be a definite one. Just like with any sections of the plan, you’ll have to revisit your analysis. To get the basic picture, start with these simple 10 steps.

• Define your main competitors : even in saturated fields where there are hundreds of competitors, you still need to narrow this list to 5-10 main ones. These are companies that develop a product that’s most similar to yours or cater to the same audience.
• Explore the competitive products . Test services offered by competitors, analyze their functionality and design.
• Define their main marketing strategies . What are the main challenges and methods used to promote products? Is it direct marketing, digital marketing, content marketing, email marketing, or something else? Choose 2-3 options.
• Research competitive content strategies . Their content shows the way they present their company and the product. How often do they publish content? What do they focus on? How is the work described in promotional materials?

Taking a look at the competitive marketing strategy will help you refine your strong points and avoid their mistakes. 

SWOT analysis is a great summary of everything you’ve learned while making the software marketing strategy . The overview of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (that’s what SWOT stands for) can be performed for a company, market, and competitors. 

SWOT-analysis lets you see real business opportunities from everything you researched up till now. 

Building a Marketing Strategy

At this point, you are sufficiently informed about the ways to build a marketing strategy for your product. Let’s take a look at best practices and most common pitfalls. These tips apply to different types of products – from software strategy to fast-moving consumer goods.

Goals that your team will be pursuing during the marketing process. These are tangible benchmarks within the marketing plan for a new product . 

Examples of marketing objectives

• Promoting new products : it’s the main goal of the marketing strategy. Regardless of the marketing activity that you are doing, the new product’s promotion should lie in the core.
• Establishing a digital presence : preparing promotional platforms – the website, social media accounts – is a typical goal for new product marketing strategies. Frequently create ads on your social media platform to bolster your digital presence, as a crucial aspect of new product marketing strategies involving promotional platforms.
• Increasing awareness with content marketing : making and distributing useful content about your product field to build a trusted image is an important content marketing objective.
• Customer acquisition : marketing strategy focused on getting new clients should also specify channels through which the company plans to reach this audience. 
• Customer retention : another goal is to retain existing clients with loyalty programs, support, and communication activities. 

Other marketing goals can include creating a memorable brand identity, changing product positioning, reaching a new niche, etc. 

• Strategies for Reaching Marketing Goals

To reach the described marketing goals, teams need to pursue one by many strategies working simultaneously. Let’s see which strategies we can use to reach the goals described above. 

• For promoting new products – product marketing strategies. Steps for building a community around a new product, developing metrics and benchmarks to evaluate success. Product marketing strategies take specific product advantages and the process of selling them to a user. 
• For establishing a digital presence – a digital transformation strategy. We have an extended guide to digital transformation that covers both analytical and practical aspects of the process – take a look. Spoiler: to make thing s easier, use business strategy software . 
• For increasing awareness – communication strategies. Contain the list of main communication channels, activities, conditions (when, where, how), and a description of audiences that will receive the message. 
• For customer acquisition – customer strategies. The list of challenges, goals, and activities for getting in touch with new customers. We usually start with analyzing ways in which competitors attract new clients and see what methods we can apply. 
• For positioning – positioning product service strategy . Determining target customers, competitive frame (what differentiates us from competitors), and defining the value proposition. We start by analyzing which rational and emotional product value .
• Planning Implementation

Once you are done with devising a marketing strategy, you need to plan the implementation. The two most important aspects to consider are the marketing mix as well as plans and budget.

• Establishing a Suitable Marketing Mix

A marketing mix is activities used by the team to promote the product. It incorporates the four crucial marketing implementation aspects ( 4P ) – Price, Product, Promotion, Place. When you define these clearly, you are ready for action. 

Price refers to the pricing strategy and product’s value that will be offered to the customer. To determine price, you need to analyze the product’s production cost, supply, demand, expectations, and additional expenses. Economic and political regulations also play an important part.

Product : you need to define the standards that your product should respond to before it’s rolled out. It’s essential to align your price and product quality before you start investing in the promotion. 

Place refers to your main points of sale . For starters, they can be physical or digital – shops, delivery offices, or e-commerce stores, social media pages, etc. 

Promotion : finally, you can establish ways you will be using to attract customers to your point of sales. It can be done via advertising, digital marketing, PR, commissions, direct contacts, event marketing, and other methods. 

• Creating a Marketing Budget

When you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and ways of getting there, it’s time to check your plans’ feasibility. The first and most important step is to draw a precise estimate for your solution marketing budget .

Take into account your revenue

It’s one of the oldest ways of calculating the marketing budget, and though it might not be a good idea for all businesses, it will still work magic for some. You determine the percentage than you’d like to dedicate to marketing and keep investing amounts that correspond to this number. Of course, the need for marketing differs depending on the company’s reputation and size. 

• New companies (1-5 years) should allocate 20% of revenue to the marketing budget.
• Businesses that have been active for more than five years allocate about 10-15% for marketing.
• B2B businesses can use about 5-10% on marketing. 
• Analyzing Competitors

You can analyze how much competitors spend on marketing to understand your approximate budget. Of course, there’s no way to know the exact figures from public ones. It’s best to find inside sources that could give you more precise information – but that’s not always possible. 

• Analyze platforms where competitors post advertising. By finding how much the ads on these platforms cost, you can estimate the budget for paid advertising. 
• Investigate the reach of their target ads. You can pay attention to the statistics of their promoted posts. Analyze the reach and activity; you can understand their approximate target settings. 
• Start from Your Goals

The most precise and commonly used way of planning marketing budgets is to start with objectives. It’s flexible, easy, and doesn’t require insider information.

• Take a look at the objectives of your marketing strategies and define the most important ones. 
• Define monetary gains that you will be able to achieve once these goals are accomplished. The more profitable and feasible the objective is, the safer it is to invest in it.
• Consult experts on your objectives and marketing mix. Often, business owners have unrealistic expectations from certain marketing channels and misallocate budget.

Learn more about how to write a Software Development Project Plan .

• Your Next Actions: Marketing Process

Let’s summarize everything we discussed in a final checklist. If you want to promote your product, where should you start? What are actionable things that you could do right now to gain visibility? Well, there are 6 steps (we mainly use our experience with marketing for software companies, but these tips are quite universal). 

Analyze the market : perform all analysis described in this article – from research to strategy building – particularly pay attention to PESTEL and SWOT analysis – the pillar documents for planning a marketing strategy. 

Determine your target audience : start by looking into the demographic characteristics of your users. The next step is to identify their behavioral factors: habits, wants, needs, challenges, fears, etc. Don’t forget to confirm your assumptions by interviews, focus group activities, and observation.

Develop positioning and message : write statements for mission, vision, values. Analyze what your competitors stand for and how your message is different from theirs. Add existing insights about your audience – how and why would they resonate with your message?

Choose a pricing strategy : after evaluating your product value and qualities of the market, you can choose a justified price. Don’t forget that you can change pricing later. But the business model should overall be stable. 

Develop a promotion strategy : break your promotional activities into pre-launch, during launch, and post-launch stages. Timing is crucial when it comes to planning marketing – you need to know what activities come first. Also, create sales guides and promotional strategies – like the ones we discussed above. 

Evaluate your plan and activities’ success : determine KPIs and benchmark values to indicate the project’s failures or successes. The most common metrics are:

• sales volume: the number of product units that were sold in a given timeframe;
• market penetration rate: the number of customers that bought your product vs customers who purchased competitive one or didn’t purchase;
• NPS ( Net Promoter Score ): the percentage of clients that recommend your company to clients and give it high evaluation rates;
• ROI ( Return of investment ): final profit vs the amount invested. The higher is your ROI, the better is the campaign doing (it also means your budget allocation was correct). 

With these metrics, you will get a tangible picture of campaigns’ success and understand what can be improved. If your metrics show unfavorable situations, you might have to change your marketing plan and strategy or adjust your resources (team, budget, product marketing tools, etc.). 

Of course, the success of your product marketing doesn’t depend on marketing activities alone. There’s something that’s even more important – and that’s the product itself. The right product finds its uses faster because it’s quickly promoted by organic means – media exposure, word of mouth, etc. This is why you might first want to consult experts in your field who can evaluate your product quality and suggest proactive changes. 

If you want to release a digital product, you can get in touch with our development and product management team. We will take a look at your existing product or build one from scratch. Our team is happy to share product development and management expertise.  

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• Content Marketing
• Brainstorming

How to Write a Product Marketing Plan [Template & Example]

Learn about effective product marketing strategies for both consumer entertainment and B2B industries. A long-term plan that spreads the budget over time can help keep your brand fresh in people’s memories until they need your product/service. Elements of a successful marketing plan include market research, competitive analysis, KPI tracking, and budgeting. Email marketing is still effective when personalized with compelling subject lines and value-driven content. Finally, understand the difference between planning and strategy to give your company the best possible chance of winning in its chosen field.

How Do You Plan a B2B Product Launch?

There is a lot of hype and stress associated with product launches in the marketing world.

Launches are crucial for consumer entertainment products such as movies, novels, and video games.

Consumer entertainment products face competition from alternatives, such as going on vacation or on dates.

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is different from consumer entertainment marketing.

Only 5% of B2B prospects will be on the market for a similar solution to yours at any given quarter.

Spending all your budget on launch may not be effective because it only targets a small group of people who may forget about your product later on.

Recency is important in B2B marketing – reaching prospects when they’re ready to buy, even if it’s not during launch or this quarter/half-year/year.

A long-term marketing plan (1-2 years) that spreads the budget over time can help keep your brand fresh in people’s memories until they need your product/service.

Freshening people’s memory through consistent advertising can increase their likelihood of considering you when they have a need.

Buying behavior for B2Bs differs from buying behavior for consumer goods

What Is a Product Marketing Plan?

The video is about creating a product marketing plan.

A product marketing plan sets goals for promotion and ways to achieve them within a given period.

A product strategy is a high-level plan that describes what a company hopes to accomplish with its product and how it plans to do so.

A product marketing plan describes specific actions that should be taken to achieve the key objectives set out in the strategy.

The structure of a product marketing plan starts from macro analysis of the industry and gradually zooms into smaller aspects.

Must-have elements of a marketing plan include: Marketing audit, microeconomic environment, customer research, competitive analysis, SWOT analysis, marketing strategy, KPIs tracking and budgeting

Customer research includes demographics, behavioral analysis, and field experiments.

Competitive analysis involves defining competitors’ products/marketing strategies/content strategies

The marketing strategy focuses on the traditional four Ps of marketing (product price promotion).

Jelvix provides world-class enterprise software engineering design and technology consulting services

What Are the Steps to Create a Marketing Plan?

Marketing is essential for any business that wants to succeed.

A marketing plan helps understand the business, clarify goals, and keep everyone on the same page.

A marketing plan should consist of short- and long-term goals, target audience description, and high-level strategies/tactics.

Researching the market and competition is crucial before creating a marketing plan.

Identifying target customers allows for more informed and tailored marketing strategies.

Specific numbers should be included when outlining marketing goals in order to measure progress effectively.

Laying out a clear strategy from start to finish with specific dates or deadlines can help teams stay on track.

Budget considerations must be detailed beforehand as marketing can be costly with hidden expenses

Visme offers various templates for different industries such as restaurants, real estate, content companies, etc., making it easier to create a personalized plan quickly.

Infographics are an effective way of presenting information that people are more likely to retain than text alone.

How Do You Create a Go-to-Market Strategy?

“Go to market” or “go to market strategy” is a term used by many people with different meanings.

Marketing strategy and go-to-market strategy are often used interchangeably, but they are actually different.

The marketing strategy focuses on who to sell to and what to sell, while the go-to-market strategy focuses on how the organization will market offerings for success.

The go-to-market strategy impacts all functions within an organization.

It is important not to try and do everything in a go-to-market strategy, but rather to focus on the core issues for success.

A product roadmap should be created that highlights a product’s evolution, extensions, and entry into new markets.

Market background documents should accompany any offers added to the roadmap with relevant pricing, competitive positioning, etc.

The sales process must be clearly communicated in complex B2B sales with attention to titles/roles and concerns/issues/challenges faced by each role/title

Distribution strategies must be outlined, including direct sales force versus indirect channels such as e-commerce sites or channel partners (enabling/delivery).

Communication within/outside organizations about partner choices is critical to success.

How to Make Professional Email Templates?

Email marketing is still effective and personalized.

Tighter spam restrictions create an opportunity for authentic email marketing.

Click Magnets are short, conversational messages that rely heavily on a call-to-action to pique curiosity or trigger microcommitments.

Long-form storytelling emails build brand loyalty and provide opportunities to overcome objections in the reader’s inbox.

Fire sales emails offer discounts, strong reasons why, and scarcity to make quick sales for a limited period of time.

Soap Opera emails use serialized storytelling to create valuable touchpoints and strong connections with the audience, but require a thoughtful planning and storyboarding process.

The choice of email template should fit your brand voice and audience while nurturing your list with value and love.

A compelling subject line is crucial to getting readers to open your email.

Short emails have the power to garner clicks, but leave little room for customer objections or pre-framing a sale.

Long-form emails take time to write well, but can lead to higher conversion rates if they are powerful, engaging, skimmable, and format-friendly paragraphs.

How to Write Product Marketing Plan

The product marketing plan template is available for free as a Word document.

Start by considering the desired outcomes and primary goal of your marketing plan, including quantitative outcomes and deadlines.

Include secondary goals related to humanitarian efforts or brand awareness.

Define your target market, focusing on behavioral and motivational variables rather than demographics.

Identify sub-segments within your target market, such as current customers versus infrequent users.

Don’t forget to consider target partners and key influencers in your marketing strategy.

Determine your value propositions based on benefits, features, competitor benefits, and unique selling points (USPs).

Choose from seven marketing strategies: price, incentives/promotions, distribution channels, communication strategies (e.g., landing pages), product features/add-ons/services/warranties/guarantees/branding

Implement the plan with a calendar that aligns all aspects of demand generation/content/social media/SEO optimization/testing/measuring success/responding quickly to changing conditions

Download the one-page product marketing template from the link in the description for easy use

What Are 10 Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business?

The speaker will provide 10 marketing tips, tactics, and strategies to help businesses grow.

The framework provided will guide businesses in generating new customers, leads, sales, and campaigns.

The Framework is a proven and strategic path that has been replicated many times over the past 10 years.

The first step is to start with the offer, either by finding people to sell it to or making something to solve their problems.

Goals are important but don’t need to be specific; they should be a guiding light for your campaign.

The target market is perhaps the most important element in all marketing because customers buy it when they feel understood.

Demographic details (age, gender), geographic details (location), and psychographic details (values) make up your ideal customer avatar (ICA).

Miracle miseries are things that make up the two different areas of your target market: fears/problems/pains/frustrations (miseries) and desires/wants/hopes/dreams/aspirations/pleasures (miracles).

Marketing materials should be created with these factors in mind so that they resonate specifically with your target market rather than trying to appeal to everyone in general.

Businesses should constantly evolve and adapt their marketing strategy based on data feedback from analytics/metrics while keeping their offer at the heart of everything they do.

Product marketing refers to activities and strategies undertaken to promote and sell a specific product or service. It focuses on understanding the target market, positioning the product effectively, and communicating its value to potential customers. Product marketing plays a crucial role in a company’s overall marketing and sales efforts.

Key product marketing objectives include:

Market Research and Analysis: Conduct market research to gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and behavior. This involves studying market trends, competitor analysis, and identifying target customer segments.

Product positioning and differentiation: Defining a unique selling proposition (USP) for the product and positioning it in the market to differentiate it from competitors. This includes identifying the product’s key features, benefits, and target audience.

Messaging and Value Proposition: Develop clear and compelling messaging that highlights the product’s value proposition and resonates with the target audience. This involves crafting persuasive and impactful product descriptions, taglines, and marketing messages.

Product Launch: Planning and executing the launch of a new product or a significant update to an existing product. This includes creating launch strategies, coordinating cross-functional teams, developing marketing materials, and ensuring a successful market introduction.

Pricing and Packaging: Determining the optimal pricing strategy for the product based on market dynamics, competitor pricing, and perceived customer value. In addition, define packaging and bundling options that align with customer preferences and market demand.

Sales Enablement: equipping the sales team with the necessary tools, resources, and training to effectively sell the product. This involves creating sales collateral, product guides, FAQs, and training sessions to ensure the sales team has a deep understanding of the product’s features and benefits.

Marketing campaigns: Develop and implement marketing campaigns to generate awareness, drive demand, and promote the product to the target audience. This may involve various marketing channels, such as digital advertising, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and events.

Customer Feedback and Insights: Collect customer feedback, monitor customer satisfaction, and analyze user behavior to identify areas for improvement and uncover opportunities for product enhancements or new features.

Product Lifecycle Management: Managing the product throughout its life cycle, from introduction to retirement. This includes monitoring market trends, evaluating competition, regularly updating products, and making decisions about product enhancements, line extensions, or discontinuation.

Effective product marketing requires a deep understanding of the product, the target audience, and the competitive landscape. It involves working with cross-functional teams such as product management, sales, and marketing to ensure a coordinated approach to positioning, messaging, and promotion. By effectively communicating the value and benefits of the product, product marketing aims to drive customer adoption, increase sales, and contribute to the overall success of the product on the market.

Related posts:

• How to Write a Marketing Action Plan: Step-by-Step Guide
• How to Create an Annual Marketing Plan [with Template]
• How to Create a Channel Marketing Plan: Template & Example
• How to Create a One-Page Marketing Plan [Free Template]

5 Steps to Create an Outstanding Marketing Plan [Free Templates]

Published: January 04, 2024

Do you take a good, hard look at your team's marketing strategy every year?

You should. Without an annual marketing plan, things can get messy — and it's nearly impossible to put a number on your budget for the projects, hiring, and outsourcing over the course of a year if you don't have a plan.

To make your plan's creation easier, we've put together a list of what to include in your plan and a few different planning templates where you can easily fill in the blanks.

To start, let's dive into how to create a marketing plan and then take a look at what a high-level marketing plan has inside.

In this article, we're going to discuss:

• What a High-Level Marketing Plan Includes

How to Create a Marketing Plan

• Marketing Plan Templates You Can Use
• Simplified Marketing Plan Template
• Plus — Social Media Plan Templates

Free Marketing Plan Template

Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

• Pre-Sectioned Template
• Completely Customizable
• Example Prompts
• Professionally Designed

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Fill out this form to access a free marketing plan template.

Marketing plan outline.

Download This Marketing Plan Outline for Free

The above marketing plan outline will help you create an effective plan that easily generates buy-in from stakeholders and effectively guides your marketing efforts.

Marketing plans can get quite granular to reflect the industry you're in, whether you're selling to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B), and how big your digital presence is. Nonetheless, here are the elements every effective marketing plan includes:

1. Business Summary

In a marketing plan, your business summary is exactly what it sounds like: a summary of the organization. It's essential to include this information so that all stakeholders, including your direct reports, learn about your company in detail before delving into the more strategic components of your plan.

Even if you’re presenting this plan to people who’ve been in the company for a while, it doesn’t hurt to get everyone on the same page.

Most business summaries include:

The company name

Where it's headquartered

Its mission statement

Our marketing plan outline also includes information on marketing leadership, which is especially helpful for companies with large marketing teams.

2. SWOT Analysis

Your marketing plan's business summary also includes a SWOT analysis , which covers your business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s essential to include this information so you can create targeted strategies that help you capitalize on your strengths and improve upon your weaknesses.

In my experience, you need a lot of patience when doing a SWOT analysis; it requires market research and competitive analysis to become truly accurate. I tend to revisit this section periodically, adjusting it as I discover more information about my own business and competition.

3. Business Initiatives

The business initiatives element of a marketing plan helps you segment the various goals of your department. Be careful not to include big-picture company initiatives, which you'd normally find in a business plan. This section should outline the projects that are specific to marketing. You'll also describe the goals of those projects and how those goals will be measured.

Every initiative should follow the SMART method for goal-making . They should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, a broad goal might be something like, "Increase my Facebook following." But a SMART-ified version of this goal could be, "Increase my Facebook following by 30% by June." See the difference?

4. Customer Analysis

In this part of the marketing plan outline, you get plenty of space to share all the data you collected during your market research . If your company has already done a thorough market research study, this section of your marketing plan might be easier to put together. Either way, try to do your research before synthesizing it in a shareable document like this one.

Ultimately, this element of your marketing plan will help you describe the industry you're selling to and your buyer persona . A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer, focusing on traits like:

Personal challenges

Triggering event

5. Competitor Analysis

Positioning

Market share

Our marketing plan template includes space to list out the specific products you compete with, as well as other facets of the other company’s strategy, such as their blogging efforts or customer service reputation. Keep this part of your plan simple — your full competitive analysis should be done separately. Here are a few competitive analysis templates to get started.

6. Market Strategy

Your market strategy uses the information included in the above sections to describe how your company should approach the market. 

For instance, when I'm filling out this section, I always pull insights from my SWOT analysis, my competitive analysis, and my general market research. This helps me write targeted, effective descriptions of my strategies.

Here's an example: if you found that one of your competitors employs stronger social media marketing strategies , you might add "We'll post 3 times per week on our social media profiles" under "Promotion."

In our full-length marketing plan outline, the market strategy section contains the "seven Ps of marketing" (or the “ extended marketing mix ”):

Physical Evidence

(You'll learn more about these seven sub-components inside our free marketing plan template, which you can download below.)

When I created my first marketing plan, I made the mistake of confusing the marketing budget section of my plan with my product's price and other financials.

Here's a better way to think of this section: it should describe how much money the business has allotted the marketing team to pursue the initiatives and goals outlined in the elements above.

Depending on how many individual expenses you have, you should consider itemizing this budget by what specifically you'll spend your budget on. Example marketing expenses include:

Outsourcing costs to a marketing agency and/or other providers

Marketing software

Paid promotions

Events (those you'll host and/or attend)

Knowing the budget and doing analysis on the marketing channels you want to invest in, you should be able to come up with a plan for how much budget to invest in which tactics based on expected ROI. From there, you'll be able to come up with financial projections for the year. These won't be 100% accurate but can help with executive planning.

Remember: Your marketing plan only includes a summary of the costs. We recommend keeping a separate document or Excel sheet to help you calculate your budget much more effectively. Here’s a marketing budget template to get started .

8. Marketing Channels

Your marketing plan should also include a list of your marketing channels. While your company might promote the product itself using certain ad space, your marketing channels are where you'll publish the content that educates your buyers, generates leads, and spreads awareness of your brand.

If you publish (or intend to publish) on social media, this is the place to talk about it. Use the Marketing Channels section of your marketing plan to map out which social networks you want to launch a business page on, what you'll use this social network for, and how you'll measure your success on this network.

Part of this section's purpose is to prove to your superiors, both inside and outside the marketing department, that these channels will serve to grow the business.

Businesses with extensive social media presences might even consider elaborating on their social strategy in a separate social media plan template.

9. Marketing Technology

Last, but certainly not least, your marketing plan should include an overview of the tools you'll include in your marketing technology (MarTech) stack . These are the tools that will help you achieve the goals you outlined in the previous sections. Since all types of marketing software usually need a generous investment from your company’s leadership, it’s essential to connect them to a potential ROI for your business.

For each tool, describe what exactly you’ll use it for, and be sure that it’s a strategy that you’ve mentioned elsewhere. For instance, we wouldn't recommend listing an advertising management tool if you didn’t list “ PPC Advertising ” under “Marketing Channels.”

• Conduct a situation analysis.
• Define your target audience.
• Write SMART goals.
• Analyze your tactics.
• Set your budget.

1. Conduct a situation analysis.

The first step I take when creating a marketing plan is conducting a SWOT analysis. It helps me uncover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing my business.

Additionally, I need a good picture of the current market. How do I compare to my competitors? Doing a competitor analysis can help.

In doing so, I can identify the gaps (and opportunities) in a competitor's approach. What are they missing? What can I offer that'll give me a competitive advantage?

Answering questions like this should help you figure out what your customer wants, which brings us to step number two.

2. Define your target audience.

If your company already has buyer personas , this step might just mean you have to refine your current personas.

But if you don't have a buyer persona, you should create one. To do this, you might have to conduct market research.

Your buyer persona should include demographic information such as age, gender, and income. However, it will also include psychographic information such as pain points and goals. What drives your audience? What problems do they have that your product or service can fix?

Once you have this information written out, it'll help you define your goals, which brings us to step number three.

3. Write SMART goals.

My mother always used to tell me, "You can't go somewhere unless you have a road map." Now, for me, someone who's geographically challenged, that was literal advice.

However, it can also be applied metaphorically to marketing. You can't improve your ROI unless you know what your goals are.

After you've figured out your current situation and know your audience, you can begin to define your SMART goals .

SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This means that all your goals should be specific and include a time frame for which you want to complete them.

For example, your goal could be to increase your Instagram followers by 15% in three months. Depending on your overall marketing goals, this should be relevant and attainable. Additionally, this goal is specific, measurable, and time-bound.

Before you start any tactic, you should write out your goals. Then, you can begin to analyze which tactics will help you achieve that goal. That brings us to step number four.

4. Analyze your tactics.

At this point, you've written down your goals based on your target audience and current situation.

Now, you have to figure out what tactics will help you achieve your goals. Plus, what are the right channels and action items to focus on?

For example, if your goal is to increase your Instagram followers by 15% in three months, your tactics might include hosting a giveaway, responding to every comment, and posting three times on Instagram per week.

Once you know your goals, brainstorming several tactics to achieve them should be easy. That said, you may not be able to pursue every tactic on your list (unless you have an unlimited budget, which, if so, jealous ) — which brings us to step number five.

5. Set your budget.

Before you can begin implementing any of the ideas that you've come up with in the steps above, you have to know your budget.

For example, your tactics might include social media advertising. However, if you don't have the budget for that, then you might not be able to achieve your goals.

While you're writing out your tactics, be sure to note an estimated budget. You can include the time it'll take to complete each tactic in addition to the assets you might need to purchase, such as ad space.

Now that you know how to create your marketing plan, let's dive into creating a marketing campaign outline that will help you reach the goals outlined plan.

Marketing Plan Timeline

Rolling out a new marketing plan is a big lift. To make sure things are running smoothly with all of your projects, you'll want to create a timeline that maps out when each project is happening.

A marketing plan timeline allows your team to view all projects, campaigns, events, and other related tasks in one place — along with their deadlines. This ensures everyone on your team knows what’s due, when it’s due, and what’s up next in the pipeline. Typically these plans cover marketing efforts for the entire year, but some companies may operate on a bi-annual or quarterly basis.

Once you’ve completed your analysis, research, and set goals, it’s time to set deadlines for your assignments. From new blog posts and content initiatives to product launches, everything will need a deadline. Take into account any holidays or events taking place over the course of the year.

While setting deadlines for the entire year may seem daunting, start by estimating how long you think each task will take and set a deadline accordingly. Track the time it actually takes for you to complete similar types of projects. Once you’ve completed a few of them, you’ll have a better idea of how long each takes and will be able to set more accurate deadlines.

For each project, you’ll want to build in time for:

• Brainstorming : This is the first phase where your idea comes to life in a project outline. Decide what you want to achieve and which stakeholders need to be involved to meet your goal. Set a due date and set up any necessary meetings.
• Planning : This can include determining the project’s scope, figuring out how much budget will be allocated for it, finalizing deadlines and who is working on each task. Map out any campaigns needed for each project (social media, PR, sales promotions, landing pages, events, etc.).
• Execution : This third phase is all about your project launch. Decide on a date to launch and monitor the progress of the project. Set up a system for tracking metrics and KPIs.
• Analysis : In this final phase you will analyze all of your performance data to see whether or not your marketing efforts paid off. Did you meet your goals? Did you complete your projects on time and within budget?

All projects and their deadlines should be in a central location where your team can access them whether that’s a calendar like HubSpot's tool , shared document, or project management tool.

One-Page Marketing Plan Template

As demonstrated above, a marketing plan can be a long document. When you want to share information with stakeholders or simply want an overview of your plan for quick reference, having a shorter version on hand can be helpful. A one-page marketing plan can be the solution, and we’ll discuss its elements below.

Include your company name, list the names of individuals responsible for enacting the different stages of your plan, and a brief mission statement.

2. Business Initiatives

3. Target Market

Outline your target audience(s) that your efforts will reach. You can include a brief overview of your industry and buyer personas.

This is an overview of the money you’ll spend to help you meet your marketing goals. Create a good estimate of how much you'll spend on each facet of your marketing program.

5. Marketing Channels

List the channels you’ll use to achieve your marketing goals. Describe why you're using each channel and what you want to accomplish so everyone is on the same page.

Free Marketing Plan Template [Word]

Now that you know what to include in your marketing plan, it's time to grab your marketing plan template and see how best to organize the six elements explained above. The following marketing plan template opens directly in Microsoft Word, so you can edit each section as you see fit:

Download your marketing plan template here .

Marketing campaign template.

Your marketing plan is a high-level view of the different marketing strategies you’ll use to meet your business objectives. A marketing campaign template is a focused plan that will help achieve those marketing goals.

A marketing campaign template should include the following key components:

• Goals and KPIs: Identify the end goal for each of the individual campaigns you’ll run and the metrics you will use to measure the results of your campaign when it ends. For example, conversion rates, sales, sign-ups, etc.
• Channels: Identify the different channels you’ll use to enact your marketing campaign to reach your audience. Maybe you run a social media campaign on Twitter to raise brand awareness or a direct mail campaign to notify your audience of upcoming sales.
• Budget : Identify the budget you’ll need to run your campaign and how it will be distributed, like the amount you’ll spend on creating content or ad placements in different areas. Having these numbers also helps you later on when you quantify the success of your campaign, like ROI.
• Content: Identify the type of content you’ll create and distribute during your campaigns—for example, blog posts , video ads, email newsletters, etc.
• Teams and DRIs: Identify the teams and people that will be part of enacting your marketing plan from start to finish, like those responsible for creating your marketing assets, budgets, or analyzing metrics once campaigns are complete.
• Design: Identify what your marketing campaigns will look like and how you’ll use design elements to attract your audience. It’s important to note that your design should directly relate to the purpose of your campaign.

Digital Marketing Plan Template

A digital marketing plan is similar to a marketing campaign plan, but, as the name suggests, it’s tailored to the campaigns that you run online. Let’s go over the key components of a digital marketing plan template to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

• Objectives: The goals for your digital marketing and what you’re hoping to accomplish, like driving more traffic to your website . Maybe you want to drive more traffic to your website, or
• Budget : Identify how much it will cost to run your digital marketing campaign and how the money will be distributed. For example, ad placement on different social media sites costs money, and so does creating your assets.
• Target audience: Which segments of your audience are you hoping to reach with this campaign? It’s essential to identify the audiences you want to reach with your digital marketing, as different channels house different audience segments.
• Channels: Identifies the channels that are central to your digital marketing campaign.
• Timeline: Explains the length of time your digital campaigns will run, from how long it should take to create your assets to the final day of the campaign.

Many people use social media in their digital campaigns, and below we’ll discuss some ideas you can use for inspiration.

Social Media Marketing Plan Templates

As your marketing department grows, so will your presence on social media. And as your social media presence grows, so will your need to measure, plan, and re-plan what types of content you want to publish across each network.

If you're looking for a way to deepen your social media marketing strategy — even further than the marketing plan template above — the following collection of social media marketing plan templates is perfect for you:

Download 10 social media reporting templates here .

In the above collection of marketing plan templates, you'll get to fill in the following contents (and more) to suit your company:

• Annual social media budget tracking
• Weekly social media themes
• Required social media image dimension key
• Pie chart on social media traffic sorted by platform
• Social media post calendar and publish time

Below, let's review the social media reporting templates, and what you'll find in each one.

1. Social Media Questions

This template lists out questions to help you decide which social media management platform you should use.

What We Like

Once you know what social media tactics you're going to implement in your marketing plan, it's time to figure out what channels are right for you. This template will help you do that.

2. Facebook Live Schedule

If Facebook Live is one of the marketing tactics in your plan, this template will help you design an editorial calendar. With this template, you can organize what Facebook live's you want to do and when.

Once you've decided on dates, you can color-code your FB calendar and coordinate with your editorial calendar so everyone can see what lives are running in relation to other campaigns.

3. Instagram Post Log

Are you going to begin using Instagram regularly? Do you want to increase your following? With this template, you can organize your Instagram posts, so everyone on your team knows what posts are going live and when.

This is more than just a content calendar. You can use this doc to collaborate with your team on messaging, landing pages linked in your bio, and campaign rollouts.

4. Paid Social Media Template

With this template, you can organize your annual and monthly budget for your paid social media calendar.

With this spreadsheet, all you need to do is plug in your numbers and the formulas will do the works for you. I recommend using this in conjunction with your marketing plan budget to make sure you are not overspending and funds are allocated appropriately.

5. Social Media Audit

Conducting a social media audit? You can use this template to help you gather the right analytics. Tracking the results of your marketing efforts is key to determining ROI.

Use this template to track each of your campaigns to determine what worked and what didn't. From there, you can allocate funds for the strategies that deliver the results you want.

6. Social Media Editorial Calendar

With this template, you can organize your social media editorial calendar. For example, you can include social media posts for each platform, so your team knows what's going live on any given day.

This calendar makes it easy to track activity across every social media platform, since each platform is assigned a specific color. 

7. Social Media Image Sizes

With this template, your team can have the latest social media image sizes handy. This template includes image sizes for all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Having a resource like this readily available for your team ensures that everyone is on the same page regarding image sizes and prevents delays.

8. Social Media Marketing Proposal

With this template, you can create an entire social media marketing proposal. This will outline the social media goals, the scope of the work, and the tactics that you plan to implement.

This proposal functions as more of a deep dive into the marketing channel section of your marketing plan. It's relatively straightforward and contains all the essential sections of a proposal.

9. Social Media Reporting Template

With this template, you'll gain access to a slide deck that includes templates for social media reporting.

If you plan to implement social media in your marketing plan, these reporting templates can help you track your progress. If using the social media audit above, you can add all of your data here once it's been collected.

10. Hashtag Holidays

If you're going to lean into social media in your marketing plan, you can use hashtag holidays to generate ideas.

These holidays are a great way to fill out your social media publishing schedule. With this template, you'll get a list of all the hashtag holidays for the year. Once you've come up with content ideas, you can add them to your social media calendar.

Simple Marketing Plan Template

Of course, this type of planning takes a lot of time and effort. So if you're strapped for time before the holidays, give our new Marketing Plan Generator a try.

This tool simplifies yearly planning by asking prompted questions to help guide your process. You’ll be asked to input information about:

Try our free Marketing Plan Generator here .

• Your annual marketing mission statement, which is what your marketing is focused on for the year.
• The strategy that you’ll take with your marketing throughout the year to accomplish your marketing goals.
• Three main marketing initiatives that you’ll focus on during the year (i.e., brand awareness or building a high-quality pipeline) metrics you’ll use to measure your success.
• Your target goals for those marketing initiatives like generating 100 leads per week.
• Marketing initiatives that are not aligned with your current strategy to stay focused on your goals and activities that will help you be successful.

Once you input all information, the tool will spit out a table (as shown in the image below) that you can use to guide your processes.

Pro Tip: If the tool doesn't work, clear your browser's cache or access it in incognito mode.

Start the Marketing Planning Process Today

The best way to set up your marketing plan for the year is to start with quick wins first, that way you can ramp up fast and set yourself (and your team) up to hit more challenging goals and take on more sophisticated projects by Q4. So, what do you say? Are you ready to give it a spin?

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Create a Detailed Marketing Plan With 6 Effective Templates

Want to make costly marketing errors and waste time and resources? Start without a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is not only an essential part of your business plan, but it is the roadmap that will provide your team focus and direction in all their marketing efforts.

A good marketing plan is backed by research and facts. Below, we’ve covered the steps you need to follow when creating a marketing plan that will help you attract potential customers to your product and services and convince them to buy.

Understand Your Current Market and Market Position

Set your smart marketing goals, outline your marketing processes, set a budget for your marketing activities.

• Marketing Strategies and Tactics

Advanced Strategies for Experienced Marketers

Ready to create your own marketing plan.

Pricing, promoting and creating brand messages , all depend on your current market and your position in it.

When understanding your current market position, there are a few things that you need to look into;

Understand Your Product

This is where you look into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with your product.

With your team and a SWOT analysis , this will take only a few hours. Once you understand your product in terms of these four areas, it’ll be easier to understand your market position.

To create a SWOT analysis template for Marketing Plan:

• Define your objective.
• Gather relevant information.
• Use a SWOT analysis template.
• Analyze strengths (internal factors).
• Evaluate weaknesses (internal factors).
• Identify opportunities (external factors).
• Assess threats (external factors).
• Analyze results and look for insights.
• Develop strategies based on findings.

Understand Your Customer

Everything – from what words you use to communicate your message to what marketing channels you use to promote your product – depends on who your customer is.

How old are they? Are they employed? What are their interests? While you need both quantitative and qualitative data on your customers, you can collect them via email surveys, direct interviews, questionnaires, and research.

Using the data you collect, create several user personas based on user segments. You can refer to these whenever you are developing a marketing strategy.

To create a buyer persona template for Marketing Plan:

• Research your target audience.
• Define key characteristics.
• Give the persona a name and image.
• Describe background and demographics.
• Detail goals and motivations.
• Outline challenges and pain points.
• Document preferred channels and information sources.
• Capture buying behavior and decision-making process.
• Add additional relevant details.
• Create a visual template for easy reference.
• Validate and update regularly.

Understand Your Competitors

This is where you identify your top competition, assess their strengths and weaknesses and analyze their marketing strategies in the market. The information you collect can be used to build effective strategies to improve your competitive advantage.

Once you conduct research, gather and analyze data on your competitors, you’d be able to understand whether you are a leader or a follower in the market.

To create a competitor analysis template for Marketing Plan:

• Identify key competitors.
• Determine evaluation criteria.
• Gather information.
• Create a table or spreadsheet.
• Analyze each competitor.
• Compare and contrast.
• Identify competitive advantages.
• Make strategic decisions.
• Update regularly.

Understand Your Brand Positioning

Your brand position is how you want your customers to perceive your brand. In order to determine this, you need to

• Know what your customer wants. The target market research you did earlier will help you with this.
• Understand what your brand’s capabilities are. Again refer to the SWOT analysis you did of your product.
• Understand how your competitors are positioning their brands in the market. You can figure this out with the help of the competitor analysis you did earlier.

Hence, your brand positioning should resonate with your consumers, can be delivered by you and should be different from that of your competitors. Keep these in mind when you are setting your marketing goals.

The Brand Asset Scorecard

Compare your brand with the average brands in the market by scoring each of the following five brand asset categories using a 20-point scale with a maximum possible score of 100. This way you can derive a score that indicates the relative strength of your brand against your competitors.

To create a brand asset scorecard template for Marketing Plan:

• Identify brand assets.
• Define evaluation criteria.
• Determine rating scales.
• Evaluate brand assets.
• Calculate scores and summarize.
• Identify improvement areas.
• Set action plans.
• Regularly review and update.

Now that you know where you stand in the market, it’s time to define your marketing goals. They are the only way to measure the success of the effort your marketing team is putting in.

Based on your current performance and your marketing objectives, your goals might change, but make sure that they align with the SMART goal criteria .

To create a SMART marketing goal template for Marketing Plan:

• Start with a specific objective.
• Make it measurable with clear metrics.
• Ensure it’s achievable with the allocated resources.
• Check if it’s relevant to business goals.
• Set a time-bound deadline.
• Document in a template.
• Review and track progress regularly

Once you know the goals you want to achieve, you can easily outline the steps that you need to take to accomplish them.

With a process map or flowchart , you can map the tasks you need to complete in order to achieve each of your goals. Once you’ve diagrammed your strategy, you can share it with your team and analyze whether the process needs to be improved or not.

Whether it is to run a social media campaign or to get an ad published in a newspaper, you need to spend money.

Now that you have identified the tasks/ steps you need to take, figure out how much money you’ll have to spend on each activity and where you’d take the money from. Having planned how you spend money earlier will help you keep track of your finances.

Before winding up, let’s also take a look at popular marketing strategies and tactics you can use and implement along with a marketing plan.

Different marketing strategies and tactics may be more effective depending on your industry, target market, and business goals. It’s important to regularly assess the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives, make any necessary adjustments, and monitor results. Here are some examples of marketing strategies and tactics commonly used by businesses.

• Target Market Segmentation

Based on demographics, psychographics, or other relevant factors, divide your overall market into smaller, more manageable categories. Customize your marketing messaging and strategies to engage and effectively reach each category.

Content Marketing

To attract and engage your target audience, produce and distribute relevant material, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, or whitepapers. Focus on delivering helpful information, resolving issues, and building your reputation as an industry expert.

Social Media Marketing

Use well-known social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn to promote your goods or services, build brand awareness, and interact with your audience. To achieve your marketing objectives, combine organic posts with sponsored adverts, influencer partnerships, and community engagement.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Increase the visibility of your website and online content by optimizing it. To increase your website’s visibility and organic traffic, conduct keyword research, provide high-quality content, optimize meta tags and descriptions, and develop quality backlinks.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Run targeted internet advertising where you only pay when someone clicks on them on search engines (like Google advertising) or social media platforms (like Facebook Ads). For your campaigns to be as effective as possible, set specified budgets, target keywords, demographics, or interests, and keep an eye on them.

Email Marketing

Create an email list of prospective or current clients and send them targeted, customized emails. To cultivate leads, promote conversions, and increase customer loyalty, use email newsletters, promotional offers, product updates, or automated drip campaigns.

Influencer Marketing

To promote your business or products, collaborate with influential individuals or popular social media personalities in your industry. These influencers can create content, share reviews, or endorse your offerings, helping you reach their dedicated audience and increase brand awareness.

Referral Programs

You can encourage your current clients to recommend your company to their friends, relatives, or coworkers by providing rewards or incentives. Create referral programs that give discounts, exclusive access, or loyalty points to both the referrer and the new consumer.

Event Marketing

Participate in or organize trade exhibitions, conferences, events, or webinars that are relevant to your field. These events provide opportunities to network, showcase your products, share knowledge, and generate leads.

Personalization and Customer Segmentation

Tailor your marketing messages and offers to individual customers or specific customer segments based on their preferences, behavior, or purchase history. Deliver personalized experiences across numerous channels by utilizing customer data, analytics, and marketing automation tools.

Advanced strategies require a deep understanding of your target audience, extensive data analysis, and ongoing experimentation. To ensure optimal performance and maintain an edge over the competition, it’s critical to regularly assess the outcomes, iterate, and change your methods.

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Tailor personalized marketing campaigns to specific high-value accounts, using personalized content, targeted advertising, and outreach to engage and convert them.
• Marketing Automation: Streamline marketing processes with automation tools, automating tasks, nurturing leads through personalized workflows, and leveraging data and analytics to deliver targeted content and offers.
• Predictive Analytics: Use large datasets and machine learning to gain insights into future customer behavior, enabling data-driven decisions, anticipating needs, and personalizing marketing efforts effectively.
• Retention Marketing: Focus on retaining existing customers through personalized communication, loyalty programs, exclusive offers, proactive customer support, and targeted upselling or cross-selling campaigns.
• Omnichannel Marketing: Create a seamless customer experience across multiple channels, integrating online and offline marketing efforts for consistent messaging and customer interactions.
• Data-driven Personalization: Utilize customer data and advanced segmentation to deliver highly personalized experiences, tailoring marketing messages, recommendations, and offers based on individual behavior and demographics.
• Influencer Relationship Management: Build long-term relationships with influencers and thought leaders, collaborating beyond one-off campaigns for continuous brand exposure and audience engagement.
• Customer Advocacy Programs: Encourage satisfied customers to become brand advocates through incentives for sharing positive reviews, referrals, or user-generated content, leveraging their influence and social proof.
• Account-Based Retargeting: Combine ABM principles with retargeting strategies, using personalized ads and email campaigns to engage key accounts that have shown interest but have not converted.
• Experimental Marketing: Take calculated risks and experiment with innovative tactics, channels, or technologies to discover unique growth opportunities, such as virtual reality experiences, chatbots, voice search optimization, or emerging social media platforms.

A marketing plan doesn’t necessarily need to contain hundreds of pages. What is important is that it provides your marketing team the roadmap to get started.

Make use of the visualization techniques we looked at when discussing each step to make things clearer to your team.

And don’t forget to share your ideas on how to create a marketing plan with us.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

FAQs About Marketing Plans

• Provides direction: It helps align marketing activities with business goals, ensuring all efforts work cohesively towards achieving desired outcomes.
• Increases efficiency: By defining objectives, strategies, and tactics in advance, it helps prioritize tasks, allocate resources effectively, and minimize wasted efforts.
• Facilitates decision-making: A marketing plan provides a framework for evaluating different marketing opportunities, making informed decisions, and adjusting strategies based on market conditions.
• Enhances focus and accountability: It sets clear targets, timelines, and responsibilities, allowing team members to stay focused and accountable for executing the marketing plan.

While the components of a marketing plan can vary, here are some common key elements:

• Executive Summary
• Market Research and Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Marketing Objectives
• Implementation Timeline
• Budget Allocation
• Measurement and Tracking Metrics
• Risk Assessment and Contingency Plans

To measure and track the effectiveness of a marketing plan, consider the following approaches,

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define relevant KPIs such as sales revenue, website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, social media engagement, or email open rates.
• Analytics and Tracking Tools: Utilize web analytics tools, CRM systems, social media analytics, or email marketing software to gather data and insights on customer behavior, campaign performance, and ROI.
• Regular Reporting and Analysis: Review and analyze the collected data regularly to evaluate the success of marketing activities, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions for adjustments or optimizations.
• Limited Resources: Insufficient budgets, time, or manpower can hinder the execution of planned marketing activities.
• Competitive Landscape: Competitors' actions or market dynamics may require adjustments to the planned strategies.
• Changing Consumer Behavior: Shifts in consumer preferences, trends, or technologies may demand adaptability and flexibility in marketing approaches.
• Measurement and Analysis: Difficulties in accurately measuring and attributing the impact of marketing activities to business outcomes.
• Internal Alignment: Ensuring that the marketing plan is well-communicated and aligned with other departments within the organization.

Addressing these challenges requires flexibility, ongoing monitoring, agility, and effective communication within the marketing team and across the organization.

More Related Articles

Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

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Marketing is an often misunderstood profession. Peers often stereotype marketing with massive budgets, loosey-goosey timelines, haphazard tactics, high-profile influencers, and Snapchat filters. In reality, modern marketing plans are more complex and orchestrated than a Premier League-winning football team.

Businesses have big goals to hit and fine margins to walk—and they need realistic, yet imaginative, marketing plans to make it happen. Sure, bigger companies can spend all willy-nilly hiring Taylor Swift for a commercial op and dropping a quarter million on Facebook advertising, but small businesses and startups have to get downright strategic with every dollar they spend.

If your business is trying to stretch every penny, you’ve come to the right place. This article will show you how to create a marketing plan in 2023 that actually works with a down-to-earth budget. We’ve included step-by-step actions, outlines, examples, and more to give you everything you need to take an idea to the market with laser precision.

Table of Contents

What is a marketing plan?

How to create a marketing plan

Marketing plan template

Marketing plan example

Marketing Plan FAQs

What is a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a documented roadmap for how you plan to drive awareness, sales, signups, attendance, or other marketing initiatives. It outlines your KPIs, budget, and timeline, dictating everything from the critical milestones to the nitty-gritty to-do items.

Marketing plans come in all shapes and sizes. You could build an overarching marketing plan to document and guide your entire department’s annual goals and strategies for the upcoming year. Or you might create a marketing plan detailing the launch strategy for the brand-new product release coming out next quarter. Big plans can even include small plans, just like an adorable collection of Russian nesting dolls.

Plans can be short, long, fat, or thin—just remember what your plan is trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to pitch an idea to a team of venture capitalists or a local bank, you might need a chunky document with accompanying spreadsheets and financial figures. However, if you’re trying to communicate the plan to your marketing team leads, you’ll want to skip straight to the point with tactics, deadlines, and deliverables.

Regardless of your use case, the next section will give you the building blocks you need to create a marketing plan that works.

How to Create a Marketing Plan

This section will show you the 7-step process to creating a marketing plan. Plans are fluid and versatile, so we don’t recommend filling out one of these with pen and paper—get your eraser ready because a marketing plan is never perfect from the get-go.

Here’s an overview of the 7-step process:

• Establish Your Marketing Goal
• Identify Your Audience and Competitors
• Set Your Marketing Budget
• Determine Your Deadline(s)
• Pick Your Marketing Channels and Tactics
• Outline the To-Do List and Make Assignments
• Track Performance and Review Analytics

Don’t worry too much about making it all nice and pretty right now. Later, you can use our provided marketing outline to copy, paste, and format a more articulated version for widespread distribution. For now, just focus on hashing out each section and answering the thought-provoking questions.

1. Establish Your Marketing Goal

Define exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to drive more sales? How much? What about recurring customers? How many? Do you need to increase brand awareness? To whom and by how much?

Work out the details of what you want to accomplish, why, and how you’re going to measure it. Establish your KPIs early on to measure the success of your marketing campaign. You’ll refer to these numbers throughout the rest of your marketing plan, so get specific.

For example, how many website visitors you’re trying to drive will affect your marketing budget, deadlines, and tactics. And if you’re targeting a specific demographic, you may need to engage different marketing teams to use the appropriate channels and messaging.

Fine-tune your marketing goal so that you can communicate it simply in a single sentence. For example: “The goal is to drive 25,000 key decision-makers to the new product page by the end of October with a limited marketing budget of $75,000.”

2. Identify Your Audience and Competitors

Explain who this campaign is targeting. If you’ve already built out your buyer personas, you’ll just plug in the persona appropriate to this campaign. However, if this is your first time thinking long and hard about your target audience, really get to know the person you’re marketing to.

Depending on your product, industry, and market, you’ll want to know demographics like:

• Marital status

These details help you identify a broad audience, but you’ll want to narrow it down with psychographics.

Psychographics dig deeper . They cover your audience’s:

• Influencers
• Shopping behaviors

Demographics explain the “who,” while psychographics explain the “why.”

Think about if you were trying to sell a baseball glove. How you market that glove is going to be very different depending on the buyer. Are your messaging and channels targeting a college athlete, recreational youngster, mom, dad, or low-income family? It’s hard to know what to say and how to say it unless you know who you’re talking to.

Don’t just gloss over this section. Without a target audience, you’ll be blindly throwing darts at a board—sure, some plans might work out, but it’ll come down less to strategy and more to sheer luck. A target audience and replicable formula make your success a science and not a game of Russian roulette.

Once you’ve identified your audience, you need to figure out who’s also targeted the same people. Competition research is a way to understand who you are up against for eyeballs, SEO rankings, and influence, but it also can serve as an opportunity to fill gaps in our needs that your competitors are missing.

One easy way to do this is to look at comment sections or reviews of similar companies in your industry. Look for:

• Frequent complaints about product design.
• Consistent issues with customer service.
• Ads or branding language that falls flat.
• If the competitor hasn’t made a product their customers are asking for.

By identifying your competitor’s weaknesses or gaps their missing with their customers, you’ll have a treasure trove of marketing copy to use in order to differentiate your business from the pack.

3. Set Your Marketing Budget

Marketing plans need budget constraints. Without a cap, plans could hypothetically include:

• 60-second Super Bowl commercial
• Cristiano Ronaldo as a celebrity endorser
• Billboard advertisements along the entirety of Route 66

For most startups, that’s just not a possibility.

And it’s not where the magic happens. Powerful marketing plans turn tiny marketing budgets into impressive ROI. They prioritize the right channels, messaging, and tactics to stretch every dollar to the max.

Decide beforehand how much budget you’ll need to allocate to meet the goals you set in Step 1. When push comes to shove, you may need to throw additional money at the campaign later to get it across the finish line, but stay strong and do your best to create a marketing plan that works with the budget constraints.

Tight on budget but full on creativity? Check out our Small Business Marketing Guide: From Scratch to Success .

4. Determine Your Deadline(s)

Deadlines create the boundaries to your marketing campaign—you can’t have a plan without them. No deadlines mean there’s a never-ending period to achieve your objective, and it’s probably not a good idea to have a 20-year free pass to accomplish that sales goal you set.

Set your deadline. Be realistic, but also be ambitious. The faster you achieve this goal, the faster you can move on to the next one—and each progressive goal should be moving your business forward.

Establish the final deadline for achieving your primary KPI. Then, set the necessary milestones along the journey. For example, you might set milestones for launching different aspects of your campaign, such as hosting 4 webinars, publishing 10 supporting blog posts, or earning a callout in 2 prime news outlets.

Finally, set the start date for when you’ll need to get the ball rolling to meet your deadlines. Don’t assume it’s ASAP—you might have a few weeks to get your ducks in a row instead of immediately heading off into a chaotic marketing battle.

5. Pick Your Marketing Channels and Tactics

This is arguably the funnest part of creating a marketing plan. This is the step where you get to choose the channels, tactics, and deliverables. The right channels and tactics will vary depending on your audience and product or service, but here are the most popular ones to consider:

• Email Marketing: Email marketing is one of the tried-and-true tactics of the digital marketing world. It generates an average ROI of $40 for every $1 invested —you can’t get much more bang for your buck than that. (Check out our complete email masterclass to learn how to conquer this lucrative channel.)
• Social Media Marketing: Whether you’re running organic strategies or targeted paid campaigns , social media marketing is an excellent modern-day tactic for reaching consumers where they’re most comfortable: Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, or TikTok.
• PPC Marketing: Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing lets you run advertising campaigns on search engine pages and other websites across the internet. It’s a competitive way to get your content in front of the right eyeballs.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing paired with a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is a long-term tactic that can drive organic traffic (read: free) to your website for years to come.

And do you know what all these channels have in common? They each give you the ability to monitor your results and track your progress to prove if a channel is worth your time and money. Unlike traditional outbound advertising and its estimated impressions and influence, you know exactly what you’re getting with these digital marketing strategies.

6. Outline the To-Do List and Make Assignments

Here’s where you get into the nitty-gritty of your marketing plan. Step 6 is where you’ll outline everything that needs to get done:

• Launch meeting
• Recurring meetings and syncs
• Creative assets
• Promotional channels
• Post-mortems

And that’s just the start. Outline everything that needs to happen to make your plan a reality. Once you know what needs to happen, it’s time to start making assignments. Someone needs to be responsible for every deliverable.

Here’s where you may run into roadblocks. You may discover that your creative team is overwhelmed and won’t be able to handle the creative requests until later, or you may find that other email campaigns or social media advertisements are the top priority.

If that’s the case, go back to Step 4 to revisit your timeline. Make adjustments to ensure there’s bandwidth available to make your marketing plan a reality.

7. Track Performance and Review Analytics

No marketing plan will go off without a hitch. That’s why you need your ear to the ground to understand what’s working. Through analytic tools, you can understand if your marketing plan’s target audience, messaging, or creative needs adjusting. Thankfully, most digital tactics allow you to do this on the fly.

Make sure you familiarize yourself with these basic marketing analytics tools:

• Facebook Ads Manager
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Semrush or Ahrefs for SEO

For more on analytics, read our marketing metrics guide .

Marketing Plan Template (Copy/Paste)

Marketing Plan Template: [Name of Project]

Marketing Plan Example (Filled Out)

Here’s a fake content marketing plan example for a fictitious shoe company.

Marketing Plan Template: [Project Zeus Running Collection]

Marketing Goal Drive $200,000 in sales for the new Zeus running collection within the first 4 months of launch day.

Target Audience The primary audience is 35 to 50-year-old male recreational runners who tend to run 30-40 miles a week at an average page of 8:00-10:00 minutes per mile. They’re not overly competitive, but they like to race 5K and 10K races occasionally throughout the year and are always trying to beat their personal best. Many have experienced mild injuries over the last few years that the Zeus Running Collection can help alleviate.

Marketing Budget We have a budget of $40,000 for the initial launch period. If we can prove out the Zeus Running Collection, we’ll allocate additional budget after the first 4 months.

• Launch Day: June 1
• Marketing Assets Ready to Go: May 28
• Pre-Launch Teaser: May 24
• Creative Assets Finished: May 21
• Product Beta Tester Reviews Submitted: May 10
• Written Content Creation Period: April 12 – May 7
• Enlist Beta Testers: April 12
• Project Kickoff Meeting: April 5

Marketing Tactics

• Social Media Marketing: Target runners on Instagram and Facebook with paid ads featuring our endorsed runner racing in the shoe.
• Email Marketing: Email existing customers with a 15% off discount code on the new Zeus Running Collection. Email prospects with a link to the product breakdown page with a code for free shipping.

Responsibilities and Assignments

• Lizzy K: Creative assets
• Mark B: Blog post announcement + product page
• Spencer S: Beta tester outreach
• Larry G: Email and social media marketing campaigns
• Carly M: Project manager

Do I need to write a marketing plan for everything?

As stated earlier, marketing plans can come in all shapes and sizes. But that doesn't mean you need one for every single Facebook ad or whitepaper your team creates. The best marketing plans serve as a source of truth for your team to reach a goal. Within the marketing plan, you should have enough wiggle room to adjust your strategy and tactics. Marketing is an art and science, so there are bound to be surprises once you start executing your plan.

How do I know if my marketing plan is a success?

One of the most common mistakes marketers make is creating a seemingly perfect marketing plan and then going off script as soon as there's a sign of trouble or distraction. Using the SMART goal method (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound) is a simple way to ensure your marketing plan is applicable. Every marketing plan should be a success, whether you hit your goal or not, because you'll learn something new about your customer, tactics, and business throughout the process.

Who should make a marketing plan?

If you're reading this article, ideally you. A marketing manager or marketing team member typically writes marketing plans, but marketing strategy should start at an enterprise level. The more people understand the marketing plan for your business, the more you can work together (not in silos) to achieve a common goal. You'll see this happen in larger organizations where the marketing team works plan that the product or sales team have no idea about.

Plan It Out—Make It Happen

Every great campaign starts with an even better plan. Don’t leave your startup’s success up to chance—give it all the thought and attention you can.

With the right plan in place, you won’t be crossing your fingers on launch day or during the quarterly review. You’ll be sitting confidently, knowing that everything is running according to plan.

Need a high-level plan for your startup? We got you covered with our free content marketing training .

About Jesse Sumrak

Jesse Sumrak is a writing zealot focused on creating killer content. He’s spent almost a decade writing about startup, marketing, and entrepreneurship topics, having built and sold his own post-apocalyptic fitness bootstrapped business. A writer by day and a peak bagger by night (and early early morning), you can usually find Jesse preparing for the apocalypse on a precipitous peak somewhere in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

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How To Create an Effective Marketing Plan for Your Business

Behind every successful company is a well-designed marketing plan.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategy a business develops and implements to sell products or services. The marketing plan defines the target audience and how to reach it best, sets goals, establishes the price for products and services, outlines tactics, and shows how the company will measure its marketing efforts.

Even though marketing plans don’t always produce immediate results, they are still a crucial component of a business plan and are worth considering.

A well-designed and effective marketing plan can reveal opportunities for a business. This can be through creating new audience segments, a change in pricing strategy, or differentiation from the competition .

The right marketing plan can help your business reach new heights.

A typical marketing plan includes:

• A summary of your advertising and marketing goals
• The current state of your business’s marketing
• A timeline for completing the tasks within your strategy
• KPIs (key performance indicators) you will track
• An overview of your target market and customers’ needs
• The methodology you’re using to evaluate the strategy’s performance

Why does your business need a marketing plan?

Often, a marketing plan is a missing link between business strategy  and marketing execution.

If you feel that you are trying many different things on an ad hoc basis without knowing which ones are working, then it is clear that you need a plan.

Here are some of the benefits of creating a marketing plan for your small business:

• Understanding:  A thorough analysis of current market conditions and  where your company stands can help you identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses and potential new markets.
• Focus and Alignment:  It is easy to lose your sense of direction without a plan. A marketing plan ensures your marketing goals are aligned with your business’s mission, vision, and goals . A marketing plan keeps you motivated and on track so you don’t get sidetracked.
• Coordination:  A working document of your marketing strategy facilitates collaboration between management, the marketing team, and the entire company. You can facilitate team collaboration with a tool like Canva Docs .
• Informed decisions: Planning can prevent you from making rash decisions if difficult circumstances arise.
• Max Value:  A cohesive marketing plan amplifies the value of every campaign.

How to create a marketing plan

Detailed marketing plans outline the  strategies  and specific actions your marketing team will take to reach your marketing goals.

If you created a business plan , you probably already have a section on marketing in that plan. But that section will be a high-level summary. You’ll need to expand it to create an effective marketing plan.

The following tips are starting points and best practices that will guide you in creating a comprehensive and effective marketing plan for your small business:

1. Start with an executive summary

The executive summary usually appears at the beginning of your marketing plan. It summarizes your business and the key takeaways from your marketing strategy. It should also outline your marketing objectives and demonstrate how campaigns are tied together.

An executive summary should also provide a quick overview of your company. Here, readers are introduced to the company’s objectives, marketing successes, and plans for the future.

A typical executive summary would include the following:

• Simplified marketing goals
• Milestones/achievements of the company
• Future projects or plans
• Relevant facts about your brand

Executive summaries are meant to pique interest in your marketing plan and excite people to read it.

Lastly, your summary helps set the tone for your marketing plan. Think carefully and select the tone that best reflects your brand.

2. State your mission, vision, and values

Reviewing your company’s values, vision, and mission before starting marketing is a good idea. Your marketing plan becomes more meaningful when you put all the information in perspective.

In short, this section should answer why you do what you do.

This section aims to inform anyone who reads your marketing plan about your company’s overall goal. This will enable them to understand your marketing goals, activities, and future objectives.

3. Identify your target market

To write an effective marketing plan, you must first identify and understand your niche. Make sure you know the specific demographic you are aiming to reach.

This will help you pinpoint and nail your marketing from the get-go if you know your best customers. You will waste a lot less time and money and convert more leads by targeting your advertising campaigns and using the right messaging ,

A buyer  persona  represents your ideal customer .

Including information about your buyer personas, such as age, gender, and income, is helpful. Don’t forget to include behavioral and psychographic data, such as pain points and goals.

Ultimately, you’re trying to answer the following questions: What motivates  your audience? What problems do they have that your product or service can solve?

If your company already has buyer personas, this step might mean you need to refine them.

Some businesses might have several types of target customers. As such, it is typical to create more than one buyer persona.

Ultimately, when you outline your buyer personas, you can segment your marketing campaigns properly and create marketing materials that are more likely to influence and resonate with them.

All this knowledge will help you create a compelling positioning statement , a unique selling proposition , and a  strong brand .

You can outline the traits of your ideal customer by including the following:

The more you know about your customer, the more capable you are of giving them the best experience.

4. Research your competitors

Whatever your product or service, there is always competition for your target market.

It is rare for small business owners to  study their competitors  in depth or to identify companies outside their industry that have just as much ability to attract customers.

You can devise strategies by understanding your competitors’ competitive advantages and how they might respond to your offerings.

By identifying competitors, you can differentiate your business by providing consumers with what your competitors may lack.

As part of your market research, you can also conduct a SWOT analysis of your competitors . Learn what they are doing, what works for them, and how you can improve.

Consider looking into the following aspects when researching your competitors:

• Leaders and marketers at their company
• Financials and growth of the company
• Products or services they are best known for
• Social media marketing strategy
• Check their top-performing blog posts

5. Establish accurate benchmarks and metrics

You can’t plan for your business’s future if you don’t know where it stands today. Increasing R.O.I. (return on investment) is impossible unless you know your goal.

Having baselines will allow you to monitor your progress. This will also allow you to analyze what worked and what didn’t to build a more robust strategy.

Determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) you will use to track and measure each marketing campaign element.

The indicators will assist you in communicating your progress to your business partners or investors. They will also aid you in determining whether or not your marketing efforts are yielding the desired results.

6. Determine your marketing goals

Marketing goals drive your marketing plan. They are the highest level of your strategic thinking . Ideally, you establish these goals after identifying problems and opportunities.

In general, these objectives will have a financial or communication focus and may include the following:

• Maximizing sales revenue or volume
• Lead generation
• Improving customer satisfaction
• Raising  brand awareness
• Transforming customer perceptions
• Increasing  customer retention

Clearly defining your goals will help you measure them effectively. That said, all of your marketing objectives should meet the following SMART criteria:

Be clear about what you want to accomplish. It is essential to clearly define the goal to ensure everyone is on the same page.

A quantifiable objective makes it easy for you to measure your progress. Decide what data will be used to measure the goal and how it will be collected.

It is essential to keep your goals realistic to remain motivated to achieve them. Setting lofty goals is fine, but you should break them down into smaller chunks to make them more manageable.

Goals must be aligned with the company’s mission—set goals for a purpose, not just to accomplish something. When determining whether a goal is relevant, deciding on the critical benefit to the organization is crucial.

Each goal should have a deadline. There isn’t much point in setting a goal without a deadline. How can you assess whether something was a success or failure? This is why S.M.A.R.T. goals include a due date. Although this doesn’t mean all the work is done, you can evaluate the endeavor and set new goals.

7. Identify your marketing channels and choose your marketing tactics

With more  marketing channels , selecting the best one for your business can be challenging.

Study all of your marketing options, including traditional and digital methods . The more you know about these tactics, the easier it will be to choose the ones most suitable for your business and to build effective marketing funnels .

Among the most popular digital marketing channels are:

Search engines

Nearly half of all online shoppers begin their research with a search engine. Including link-building outreach and optimizing for local SEO   in your marketing plan will enable you to reach people when they’re actively searching for your products and services.

Social media

90% of social media users have communicated with a brand due to their social media presence, and 53.6% of the population uses social media. Every type of consumer is on some  social media platform, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, so social media is essential to a business’s marketing strategy.

It may seem overwhelming to consider all the possibilities but take the time to concentrate on the sites that will generate the most significant benefit for your business.

Email marketing remains an effective and popular choice for small businesses. Companies can use email marketing techniques in many ways, including newsletters, promotional campaigns, and transactional emails.

Consumer behavior has changed due to the popularity of smartphones and tablets. Because people carry these devices with them almost wherever they go, companies seek to implement marketing strategies to reach their customers through their mobile devices .

Many businesses are trying to figure out how to make contextually relevant ads appear when people watch or read content on their devices. Contextual targeting helps companies make ads more relevant, increasing response rates and ad recall.

Having a well-rounded marketing mix is essential, giving yourself plenty of time for these channels to pay off and reach critical mass and leaving room for trial and error.

Algorithms primarily power digital marketing. Algorithms may help businesses provide personalized experiences to users, but any algorithm changes can quickly render marketing plans useless.

An eCommerce business must have a diverse media strategy to survive in this highly dynamic market. By driving traffic through SEO , email, and media coverage, we’re less vulnerable to a single tech platform unfavorably changing its algorithm.

Some of these channels and tactics will be challenging for you to execute without some expert help. For example, suppose you’re starting a business in the United Kingdom. In that case, you might look at United Kingdom marketing agencies that can help you define proper tactics for channels where you have little or no experience. Similarly, you’ll want to identify agencies in the U.S. (including those that specialize in the channels you care most about) if you’re building a marketing plan for the U.S. market.

8. Set your budget

A marketing budget describes how much money the business has allotted to the marketing team to pursue the initiatives and goals they have listed and identified.

When you draft the plan and evaluate your course of action, note the estimated cost, assets, and time required to achieve the stated goals; this will help when it comes time to set the actual budget.

Additionally, setting a marketing budget will ensure you don’t lose sight of the financial aspect of things during execution and implementation.

Even if your marketing team uses many free channels and platforms, preparing for “hidden” costs is best.

Depending on how many individual expenses you have, it might make sense to itemize this budget based on the specific things you intend to pay for.

Here are some examples of marketing expenses:

• Outsourcing  marketing costs to a marketing agency or other provider
• Application software for marketing
• Paid promotions
• Events (the ones that you will host and attend)

9. Establish guidelines for tracking and reporting

It would be best to conclude your marketing plan by explaining how you plan to track or measure your results. Standardizing tracking results across your team will save you time and frustration in the long run.

In this section, you can go as in-depth as you like. However, here is a minimum set of guidelines for tracking results you can start working with:

• What you are tracking
• How you are tracking
• How often you are tracking

Marketing plans require a lot of effort. To create an effective strategy, you must dig deep into your target market’s competitive research, audience data, and research channels.

Remembering that marketing plans are not set in stone is also important. As your business grows and evolves, so should your marketing plan.

But if you have the fundamentals down, you are more likely to achieve your business goals if you create an effective marketing plan.

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How to create a business plan: examples & free template.

This is the ultimate guide to creating a comprehensive and effective plan to start a business . In today’s dynamic business landscape, having a well-crafted business plan is an important first step to securing funding, attracting partners, and navigating the challenges of entrepreneurship.

This guide has been designed to help you create a winning plan that stands out in the ever-evolving marketplace. U sing real-world examples and a free downloadable template, it will walk you through each step of the process.

Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or launching your very first startup, the guide will give you the insights, tools, and confidence you need to create a solid foundation for your business.

Table of Contents

How to Write a Business Plan

Embarking on the journey of creating a successful business requires a solid foundation, and a well-crafted business plan is the cornerstone. Here is the process of writing a comprehensive business plan and the main parts of a winning business plan . From setting objectives to conducting market research, this guide will have everything you need.

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary serves as the gateway to your business plan, offering a snapshot of your venture’s core aspects. This section should captivate and inform, succinctly summarizing the essence of your plan.

It’s crucial to include a clear mission statement, a brief description of your primary products or services, an overview of your target market, and key financial projections or achievements.

Think of it as an elevator pitch in written form: it should be compelling enough to engage potential investors or stakeholders and provide them with a clear understanding of what your business is about, its goals, and why it’s a promising investment.

Example: EcoTech is a technology company specializing in eco-friendly and sustainable products designed to reduce energy consumption and minimize waste. Our mission is to create innovative solutions that contribute to a cleaner, greener environment.

Our target market includes environmentally conscious consumers and businesses seeking to reduce their carbon footprint. We project a 200% increase in revenue within the first three years of operation.

Overview and Business Objectives

In the Overview and Business Objectives section, outline your business’s core goals and the strategic approaches you plan to use to achieve them. This section should set forth clear, specific objectives that are attainable and time-bound, providing a roadmap for your business’s growth and success.

It’s important to detail how these objectives align with your company’s overall mission and vision. Discuss the milestones you aim to achieve and the timeframe you’ve set for these accomplishments.

This part of the plan demonstrates to investors and stakeholders your vision for growth and the practical steps you’ll take to get there.

Example: EcoTech’s primary objective is to become a market leader in sustainable technology products within the next five years. Our key objectives include:

• Introducing three new products within the first two years of operation.
• Achieving annual revenue growth of 30%.
• Expanding our customer base to over 10,000 clients by the end of the third year.

Company Description

The Company Description section is your opportunity to delve into the details of your business. Provide a comprehensive overview that includes your company’s history, its mission statement, and its vision for the future.

Highlight your unique selling proposition (USP) – what makes your business stand out in the market. Explain the problems your company solves and how it benefits your customers.

Include information about the company’s founders, their expertise, and why they are suited to lead the business to success. This section should paint a vivid picture of your business, its values, and its place in the industry.

Example: EcoTech is committed to developing cutting-edge sustainable technology products that benefit both the environment and our customers. Our unique combination of innovative solutions and eco-friendly design sets us apart from the competition. We envision a future where technology and sustainability go hand in hand, leading to a greener planet.

Define Your Target Market

Defining Your Target Market is critical for tailoring your business strategy effectively. This section should describe your ideal customer base in detail, including demographic information (such as age, gender, income level, and location) and psychographic data (like interests, values, and lifestyle).

Elucidate on the specific needs or pain points of your target audience and how your product or service addresses these. This information will help you know your target market and develop targeted marketing strategies.

Example: Our target market comprises environmentally conscious consumers and businesses looking for innovative solutions to reduce their carbon footprint. Our ideal customers are those who prioritize sustainability and are willing to invest in eco-friendly products.

Market Analysis

The Market Analysis section requires thorough research and a keen understanding of the industry. It involves examining the current trends within your industry, understanding the needs and preferences of your customers, and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

This analysis will enable you to spot market opportunities and anticipate potential challenges. Include data and statistics to back up your claims, and use graphs or charts to illustrate market trends.

This section should demonstrate that you have a deep understanding of the market in which you operate and that your business is well-positioned to capitalize on its opportunities.

Example: The market for eco-friendly technology products has experienced significant growth in recent years, with an estimated annual growth rate of 10%. As consumers become increasingly aware of environmental issues, the demand for sustainable solutions continues to rise.

Our research indicates a gap in the market for high-quality, innovative eco-friendly technology products that cater to both individual and business clients.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis in your business plan offers a comprehensive examination of your company’s internal and external factors. By assessing Strengths, you showcase what your business does best and where your capabilities lie.

Weaknesses involve an honest introspection of areas where your business may be lacking or could improve. Opportunities can be external factors that your business could capitalize on, such as market gaps or emerging trends.

Threats include external challenges your business may face, like competition or market changes. This analysis is crucial for strategic planning, as it helps in recognizing and leveraging your strengths, addressing weaknesses, seizing opportunities, and preparing for potential threats.

Including a SWOT analysis demonstrates to stakeholders that you have a balanced and realistic understanding of your business in its operational context.

• Innovative and eco-friendly product offerings.
• Strong commitment to sustainability and environmental responsibility.
• Skilled and experienced team with expertise in technology and sustainability.

Weaknesses:

• Limited brand recognition compared to established competitors.
• Reliance on third-party manufacturers for product development.

Opportunities:

• Growing consumer interest in sustainable products.
• Partnerships with environmentally-focused organizations and influencers.
• Expansion into international markets.
• Intense competition from established technology companies.
• Regulatory changes could impact the sustainable technology market.

Competitive Analysis

In this section, you’ll analyze your competitors in-depth, examining their products, services, market positioning, and pricing strategies. Understanding your competition allows you to identify gaps in the market and tailor your offerings to outperform them.

By conducting a thorough competitive analysis, you can gain insights into your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to develop strategies to differentiate your business and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Example: Key competitors include:

GreenTech: A well-known brand offering eco-friendly technology products, but with a narrower focus on energy-saving devices.

EarthSolutions: A direct competitor specializing in sustainable technology, but with a limited product range and higher prices.

By offering a diverse product portfolio, competitive pricing, and continuous innovation, we believe we can capture a significant share of the growing sustainable technology market.

Organization and Management Team

Provide an overview of your company’s organizational structure, including key roles and responsibilities. Introduce your management team, highlighting their expertise and experience to demonstrate that your team is capable of executing the business plan successfully.

Showcasing your team’s background, skills, and accomplishments instills confidence in investors and other stakeholders, proving that your business has the leadership and talent necessary to achieve its objectives and manage growth effectively.

Example: EcoTech’s organizational structure comprises the following key roles: CEO, CTO, CFO, Sales Director, Marketing Director, and R&D Manager. Our management team has extensive experience in technology, sustainability, and business development, ensuring that we are well-equipped to execute our business plan successfully.

Products and Services Offered

Describe the products or services your business offers, focusing on their unique features and benefits. Explain how your offerings solve customer pain points and why they will choose your products or services over the competition.

This section should emphasize the value you provide to customers, demonstrating that your business has a deep understanding of customer needs and is well-positioned to deliver innovative solutions that address those needs and set your company apart from competitors.

Example: EcoTech offers a range of eco-friendly technology products, including energy-efficient lighting solutions, solar chargers, and smart home devices that optimize energy usage. Our products are designed to help customers reduce energy consumption, minimize waste, and contribute to a cleaner environment.

Marketing and Sales Strategy

In this section, articulate your comprehensive strategy for reaching your target market and driving sales. Detail the specific marketing channels you plan to use, such as social media, email marketing, SEO, or traditional advertising.

Describe the nature of your advertising campaigns and promotional activities, explaining how they will capture the attention of your target audience and convey the value of your products or services. Outline your sales strategy, including your sales process, team structure, and sales targets.

Discuss how these marketing and sales efforts will work together to attract and retain customers, generate leads, and ultimately contribute to achieving your business’s revenue goals.

This section is critical to convey to investors and stakeholders that you have a well-thought-out approach to market your business effectively and drive sales growth.

Example: Our marketing strategy includes digital advertising, content marketing, social media promotion, and influencer partnerships. We will also attend trade shows and conferences to showcase our products and connect with potential clients. Our sales strategy involves both direct sales and partnerships with retail stores, as well as online sales through our website and e-commerce platforms.

Logistics and Operations Plan

The Logistics and Operations Plan is a critical component that outlines the inner workings of your business. It encompasses the management of your supply chain, detailing how you acquire raw materials and manage vendor relationships.

Inventory control is another crucial aspect, where you explain strategies for inventory management to ensure efficiency and reduce wastage. The section should also describe your production processes, emphasizing scalability and adaptability to meet changing market demands.

Quality control measures are essential to maintain product standards and customer satisfaction. This plan assures investors and stakeholders of your operational competency and readiness to meet business demands.

Highlighting your commitment to operational efficiency and customer satisfaction underlines your business’s capability to maintain smooth, effective operations even as it scales.

Example: EcoTech partners with reliable third-party manufacturers to produce our eco-friendly technology products. Our operations involve maintaining strong relationships with suppliers, ensuring quality control, and managing inventory.

We also prioritize efficient distribution through various channels, including online platforms and retail partners, to deliver products to our customers in a timely manner.

Financial Projections Plan

In the Financial Projections Plan, lay out a clear and realistic financial future for your business. This should include detailed projections for revenue, costs, and profitability over the next three to five years.

Ground these projections in solid assumptions based on your market analysis, industry benchmarks, and realistic growth scenarios. Break down revenue streams and include an analysis of the cost of goods sold, operating expenses, and potential investments.

This section should also discuss your break-even analysis, cash flow projections, and any assumptions about external funding requirements.

By presenting a thorough and data-backed financial forecast, you instill confidence in potential investors and lenders, showcasing your business’s potential for profitability and financial stability.

This forward-looking financial plan is crucial for demonstrating that you have a firm grasp of the financial nuances of your business and are prepared to manage its financial health effectively.

Example: Over the next three years, we expect to see significant growth in revenue, driven by new product launches and market expansion. Our financial projections include:

• Year 1: $1.5 million in revenue, with a net profit of $200,000.
• Year 2: $3 million in revenue, with a net profit of $500,000.
• Year 3: $4.5 million in revenue, with a net profit of $1 million.

These projections are based on realistic market analysis, growth rates, and product pricing.

Income Statement

The income statement , also known as the profit and loss statement, provides a summary of your company’s revenues and expenses over a specified period. It helps you track your business’s financial performance and identify trends, ensuring you stay on track to achieve your financial goals.

Regularly reviewing and analyzing your income statement allows you to monitor the health of your business, evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies, and make data-driven decisions to optimize profitability and growth.

Example: The income statement for EcoTech’s first year of operation is as follows:

• Revenue: $1,500,000
• Cost of Goods Sold: $800,000
• Gross Profit: $700,000
• Operating Expenses: $450,000
• Net Income: $250,000

This statement highlights our company’s profitability and overall financial health during the first year of operation.

Cash Flow Statement

A cash flow statement is a crucial part of a financial business plan that shows the inflows and outflows of cash within your business. It helps you monitor your company’s liquidity, ensuring you have enough cash on hand to cover operating expenses, pay debts, and invest in growth opportunities.

By including a cash flow statement in your business plan, you demonstrate your ability to manage your company’s finances effectively.

Example:  The cash flow statement for EcoTech’s first year of operation is as follows:

Operating Activities:

• Depreciation: $10,000
• Changes in Working Capital: -$50,000
• Net Cash from Operating Activities: $210,000

Investing Activities:

•  Capital Expenditures: -$100,000
• Net Cash from Investing Activities: -$100,000

Financing Activities:

• Proceeds from Loans: $150,000
• Loan Repayments: -$50,000
• Net Cash from Financing Activities: $100,000
• Net Increase in Cash: $210,000

This statement demonstrates EcoTech’s ability to generate positive cash flow from operations, maintain sufficient liquidity, and invest in growth opportunities.

Tips on Writing a Business Plan

1. Be clear and concise: Keep your language simple and straightforward. Avoid jargon and overly technical terms. A clear and concise business plan is easier for investors and stakeholders to understand and demonstrates your ability to communicate effectively.

2. Conduct thorough research: Before writing your business plan, gather as much information as possible about your industry, competitors, and target market. Use reliable sources and industry reports to inform your analysis and make data-driven decisions.

3. Set realistic goals: Your business plan should outline achievable objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Setting realistic goals demonstrates your understanding of the market and increases the likelihood of success.

4. Focus on your unique selling proposition (USP): Clearly articulate what sets your business apart from the competition. Emphasize your USP throughout your business plan to showcase your company’s value and potential for success.

5. Be flexible and adaptable: A business plan is a living document that should evolve as your business grows and changes. Be prepared to update and revise your plan as you gather new information and learn from your experiences.

6. Use visuals to enhance understanding: Include charts, graphs, and other visuals to help convey complex data and ideas. Visuals can make your business plan more engaging and easier to digest, especially for those who prefer visual learning.

7. Seek feedback from trusted sources: Share your business plan with mentors, industry experts, or colleagues and ask for their feedback. Their insights can help you identify areas for improvement and strengthen your plan before presenting it to potential investors or partners.

FREE Business Plan Template

To help you get started on your business plan, we have created a template that includes all the essential components discussed in the “How to Write a Business Plan” section. This easy-to-use template will guide you through each step of the process, ensuring you don’t miss any critical details.

The template is divided into the following sections:

• Mission statement
• Business Overview
• Key products or services
• Target market
• Financial highlights
• Company goals
• Strategies to achieve goals
• Measurable, time-bound objectives
• Company History
• Mission and vision
• Unique selling proposition
• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Pain points
• Industry trends
• Customer needs
• Competitor strengths and weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Competitor products and services
• Market positioning
• Pricing strategies
• Organizational structure
• Key roles and responsibilities
• Management team backgrounds
• Product or service features
• Competitive advantages
• Marketing channels
• Advertising campaigns
• Promotional activities
• Sales strategies
• Supply chain management
• Inventory control
• Production processes
• Quality control measures
• Projected revenue
• Assumptions
• Cash inflows
• Cash outflows
• Net cash flow

What is a Business Plan?

A business plan is a strategic document that outlines an organization’s goals, objectives, and the steps required to achieve them. It serves as a roadmap as you start a business , guiding the company’s direction and growth while identifying potential obstacles and opportunities.

Typically, a business plan covers areas such as market analysis, financial projections, marketing strategies, and organizational structure. It not only helps in securing funding from investors and lenders but also provides clarity and focus to the management team.

A well-crafted business plan is a very important part of your business startup checklist because it fosters informed decision-making and long-term success.

Why You Should Write a Business Plan

Understanding the importance of a business plan in today’s competitive environment is crucial for entrepreneurs and business owners. Here are five compelling reasons to write a business plan:

• Attract Investors and Secure Funding : A well-written business plan demonstrates your venture’s potential and profitability, making it easier to attract investors and secure the necessary funding for growth and development. It provides a detailed overview of your business model, target market, financial projections, and growth strategies, instilling confidence in potential investors and lenders that your company is a worthy investment.
• Clarify Business Objectives and Strategies : Crafting a business plan forces you to think critically about your goals and the strategies you’ll employ to achieve them, providing a clear roadmap for success. This process helps you refine your vision and prioritize the most critical objectives, ensuring that your efforts are focused on achieving the desired results.
• Identify Potential Risks and Opportunities : Analyzing the market, competition, and industry trends within your business plan helps identify potential risks and uncover untapped opportunities for growth and expansion. This insight enables you to develop proactive strategies to mitigate risks and capitalize on opportunities, positioning your business for long-term success.
• Improve Decision-Making : A business plan serves as a reference point so you can make informed decisions that align with your company’s overall objectives and long-term vision. By consistently referring to your plan and adjusting it as needed, you can ensure that your business remains on track and adapts to changes in the market, industry, or internal operations.
• Foster Team Alignment and Communication : A shared business plan helps ensure that all team members are on the same page, promoting clear communication, collaboration, and a unified approach to achieving the company’s goals. By involving your team in the planning process and regularly reviewing the plan together, you can foster a sense of ownership, commitment, and accountability that drives success.

What are the Different Types of Business Plans?

In today’s fast-paced business world, having a well-structured roadmap is more important than ever. A traditional business plan provides a comprehensive overview of your company’s goals and strategies, helping you make informed decisions and achieve long-term success. There are various types of business plans, each designed to suit different needs and purposes. Let’s explore the main types:

• Startup Business Plan: Tailored for new ventures, a startup business plan outlines the company’s mission, objectives, target market, competition, marketing strategies, and financial projections. It helps entrepreneurs clarify their vision, secure funding from investors, and create a roadmap for their business’s future. Additionally, this plan identifies potential challenges and opportunities, which are crucial for making informed decisions and adapting to changing market conditions.
• Internal Business Plan: This type of plan is intended for internal use, focusing on strategies, milestones, deadlines, and resource allocation. It serves as a management tool for guiding the company’s growth, evaluating its progress, and ensuring that all departments are aligned with the overall vision. The internal business plan also helps identify areas of improvement, fosters collaboration among team members, and provides a reference point for measuring performance.
• Strategic Business Plan: A strategic business plan outlines long-term goals and the steps to achieve them, providing a clear roadmap for the company’s direction. It typically includes a SWOT analysis, market research, and competitive analysis. This plan allows businesses to align their resources with their objectives, anticipate changes in the market, and develop contingency plans. By focusing on the big picture, a strategic business plan fosters long-term success and stability.
• Feasibility Business Plan: This plan is designed to assess the viability of a business idea, examining factors such as market demand, competition, and financial projections. It is often used to decide whether or not to pursue a particular venture. By conducting a thorough feasibility analysis, entrepreneurs can avoid investing time and resources into an unviable business concept. This plan also helps refine the business idea, identify potential obstacles, and determine the necessary resources for success.
• Growth Business Plan: Also known as an expansion plan, a growth business plan focuses on strategies for scaling up an existing business. It includes market analysis, new product or service offerings, and financial projections to support expansion plans. This type of plan is essential for businesses looking to enter new markets, increase their customer base, or launch new products or services. By outlining clear growth strategies, the plan helps ensure that expansion efforts are well-coordinated and sustainable.
• Operational Business Plan: This type of plan outlines the company’s day-to-day operations, detailing the processes, procedures, and organizational structure. It is an essential tool for managing resources, streamlining workflows, and ensuring smooth operations. The operational business plan also helps identify inefficiencies, implement best practices, and establish a strong foundation for future growth. By providing a clear understanding of daily operations, this plan enables businesses to optimize their resources and enhance productivity.
• Lean Business Plan: A lean business plan is a simplified, agile version of a traditional plan, focusing on key elements such as value proposition, customer segments, revenue streams, and cost structure. It is perfect for startups looking for a flexible, adaptable planning approach. The lean business plan allows for rapid iteration and continuous improvement, enabling businesses to pivot and adapt to changing market conditions. This streamlined approach is particularly beneficial for businesses in fast-paced or uncertain industries.
• One-Page Business Plan: As the name suggests, a one-page business plan is a concise summary of your company’s key objectives, strategies, and milestones. It serves as a quick reference guide and is ideal for pitching to potential investors or partners. This plan helps keep teams focused on essential goals and priorities, fosters clear communication, and provides a snapshot of the company’s progress. While not as comprehensive as other plans, a one-page business plan is an effective tool for maintaining clarity and direction.
• Nonprofit Business Plan: Specifically designed for nonprofit organizations, this plan outlines the mission, goals, target audience, fundraising strategies, and budget allocation. It helps secure grants and donations while ensuring the organization stays on track with its objectives. The nonprofit business plan also helps attract volunteers, board members, and community support. By demonstrating the organization’s impact and plans for the future, this plan is essential for maintaining transparency, accountability, and long-term sustainability within the nonprofit sector.
• Franchise Business Plan: For entrepreneurs seeking to open a franchise, this type of plan focuses on the franchisor’s requirements, as well as the franchisee’s goals, strategies, and financial projections. It is crucial for securing a franchise agreement and ensuring the business’s success within the franchise system. This plan outlines the franchisee’s commitment to brand standards, marketing efforts, and operational procedures, while also addressing local market conditions and opportunities. By creating a solid franchise business plan, entrepreneurs can demonstrate their ability to effectively manage and grow their franchise, increasing the likelihood of a successful partnership with the franchisor.

Using Business Plan Software

Creating a comprehensive business plan can be intimidating, but business plan software can streamline the process and help you produce a professional document. These tools offer a number of benefits, including guided step-by-step instructions, financial projections, and industry-specific templates. Here are the top 5 business plan software options available to help you craft a great business plan.

1. LivePlan

LivePlan is a popular choice for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features. It offers over 500 sample plans, financial forecasting tools, and the ability to track your progress against key performance indicators. With LivePlan, you can create visually appealing, professional business plans that will impress investors and stakeholders.

2. Upmetrics

Upmetrics provides a simple and intuitive platform for creating a well-structured business plan. It features customizable templates, financial forecasting tools, and collaboration capabilities, allowing you to work with team members and advisors. Upmetrics also offers a library of resources to guide you through the business planning process.

Bizplan is designed to simplify the business planning process with a drag-and-drop builder and modular sections. It offers financial forecasting tools, progress tracking, and a visually appealing interface. With Bizplan, you can create a business plan that is both easy to understand and visually engaging.

Enloop is a robust business plan software that automatically generates a tailored plan based on your inputs. It provides industry-specific templates, financial forecasting, and a unique performance score that updates as you make changes to your plan. Enloop also offers a free version, making it accessible for businesses on a budget.

5. Tarkenton GoSmallBiz

Developed by NFL Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton, GoSmallBiz is tailored for small businesses and startups. It features a guided business plan builder, customizable templates, and financial projection tools. GoSmallBiz also offers additional resources, such as CRM tools and legal document templates, to support your business beyond the planning stage.

Business Plan FAQs

What is a good business plan.

A good business plan is a well-researched, clear, and concise document that outlines a company’s goals, strategies, target market, competitive advantages, and financial projections. It should be adaptable to change and provide a roadmap for achieving success.

What are the 3 main purposes of a business plan?

The three main purposes of a business plan are to guide the company’s strategy, attract investment, and evaluate performance against objectives. Here’s a closer look at each of these:

• It outlines the company’s purpose and core values to ensure that all activities align with its mission and vision.
• It provides an in-depth analysis of the market, including trends, customer needs, and competition, helping the company tailor its products and services to meet market demands.
• It defines the company’s marketing and sales strategies, guiding how the company will attract and retain customers.
• It describes the company’s organizational structure and management team, outlining roles and responsibilities to ensure effective operation and leadership.
• It sets measurable, time-bound objectives, allowing the company to plan its activities effectively and make strategic decisions to achieve these goals.
• It provides a comprehensive overview of the company and its business model, demonstrating its uniqueness and potential for success.
• It presents the company’s financial projections, showing its potential for profitability and return on investment.
• It demonstrates the company’s understanding of the market, including its target customers and competition, convincing investors that the company is capable of gaining a significant market share.
• It showcases the management team’s expertise and experience, instilling confidence in investors that the team is capable of executing the business plan successfully.
• It establishes clear, measurable objectives that serve as performance benchmarks.
• It provides a basis for regular performance reviews, allowing the company to monitor its progress and identify areas for improvement.
• It enables the company to assess the effectiveness of its strategies and make adjustments as needed to achieve its objectives.
• It helps the company identify potential risks and challenges, enabling it to develop contingency plans and manage risks effectively.
• It provides a mechanism for evaluating the company’s financial performance, including revenue, expenses, profitability, and cash flow.

Can I write a business plan by myself?

Yes, you can write a business plan by yourself, but it can be helpful to consult with mentors, colleagues, or industry experts to gather feedback and insights. There are also many creative business plan templates and business plan examples available online, including those above.

We also have examples for specific industries, including a using food truck business plan , salon business plan , farm business plan , daycare business plan , and restaurant business plan .

Is it possible to create a one-page business plan?

Yes, a one-page business plan is a condensed version that highlights the most essential elements, including the company’s mission, target market, unique selling proposition, and financial goals.

How long should a business plan be?

A typical business plan ranges from 20 to 50 pages, but the length may vary depending on the complexity and needs of the business.

What is a business plan outline?

A business plan outline is a structured framework that organizes the content of a business plan into sections, such as the executive summary, company description, market analysis, and financial projections.

What are the 5 most common business plan mistakes?

The five most common business plan mistakes include inadequate research, unrealistic financial projections, lack of focus on the unique selling proposition, poor organization and structure, and failure to update the plan as circumstances change.

What questions should be asked in a business plan?

A business plan should address questions such as: What problem does the business solve? Who is the specific target market ? What is the unique selling proposition? What are the company’s objectives? How will it achieve those objectives?

What’s the difference between a business plan and a strategic plan?

A business plan focuses on the overall vision, goals, and tactics of a company, while a strategic plan outlines the specific strategies, action steps, and performance measures necessary to achieve the company’s objectives.

How is business planning for a nonprofit different?

Nonprofit business planning focuses on the organization’s mission, social impact, and resource management, rather than profit generation. The financial section typically includes funding sources, expenses, and projected budgets for programs and operations.

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