Without planning, marketing can get messy. It’s hard to estimate budget for projects, hiring, and outsourcing over the course of a year — especially if you don't have a marketing plan, email schedule, or social media marketing plan template.
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A marketing plan is a roadmap that businesses like yours use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period.
The marketing plan outline we discuss will help you create an effective plan that easily generates buy-in from stakeholders.
Marketing plans can get quite granular depending on your industry and how big your digital presence is. This is true whether you're selling to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B).
Despite these nuances, here are the essentials I’ve found should be present in every marketing plan or marketing planner template:
In a marketing plan, a business summary is exactly what it sounds like — a summary of the organization.
It gives all stakeholders a refresher on your company before delving into the more strategic components of your plan. It also gives them something easily accessible to refer to if they have questions during their review.
At a minimum, most business summaries include:
Our marketing plan outline also includes information on marketing leadership, which is especially helpful for companies with large marketing teams.
Your marketing plan's business summary should also include a SWOT analysis. This summarizes your business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).
Creating a SWOT analysis is an important strategic exercise (and call me a marketing nerd, but I find it fun). It gives everyone involved a clear picture of the environment your business is working in and how it is doing within it.
It’s like a quick therapy or wellness check-up for business. You see where you’re at and perhaps even get to vent a bit before taking steps to improve things.
Including a SWOT in your marketing plan reminds readers of what circumstances are being considered in your strategy.
Pro Tip: In my experience, it’s good to have stakeholders from every section of the business contribute to creating your SWOT analysis so that nothing is overlooked.
To become truly accurate, it requires thorough market research, data analysis, and competitive analysis.
Revisit your SWOT every time you work on your marketing plan, as your audience and competition will inevitably evolve.
What is your marketing team working on? What do you want to work on?
Document them in your marketing plan under business initiatives. This section sets the tone for the rest of the document and its strategies.
Be careful not to get bogged down by big-picture company initiatives (i.e., opening a new location in X city or recruiting new talent via the Y platform), which you'd normally find in a business plan.
This section should outline the projects specific to marketing. You‘ll also describe those projects’ goals, which will be measured.
Every initiative should follow the SMART framework for goals — meaning they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
For example, a broad goal might be, “Increase my Facebook following.” But a SMART version could be, “Increase my Facebook following by 30% by June.” See the difference?
Next, consider your target market, or the audience you are trying to reach with your marketing messages. This includes your industries and buyer personas.
If you’re B2B, you’ll want to include a description of the industries your customers typically work in or those where your products or services are used. If you’re B2C, you can disregard this section.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer. It focuses on traits like:
It’s a more specific characterization of your target market or the types of people you want to work with.
This section of your marketing plan should just be a brief summary of your greater buyer persona document to remind readers who your initiatives are speaking to.
Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.
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Click this link to access this resource at any time.
With the outline mentioned above, here’s how you should go about creating your marketing plan.
The first step in creating a marketing plan is conducting market research. This is where I gather all the data and insights to complete SWOT and competitor analyses.
Additionally, I need a good picture of the current market. How do I compare to my competitors? What are they missing? What can I offer that'll give me a competitive advantage? Doing a competitor analysis can help.
Answering questions like this should help you figure out what your customer wants, which brings us to step number two.
Who are you trying to market to? Who buys your product or service?
If your company already has buyer personas, this step means you should review and refine your
current personas. But if you don't, you should create one.
Your buyer persona should include demographic information such as age, gender, and income, as well as 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 three.
My mother always used to tell me, “You can't go somewhere unless you have a road map.”
For someone geographically challenged, like me, that was literal advice. But it can also be applied metaphorically to marketing.
You can't improve your ROI unless you know your goals.
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.
Before you start any tactic, write them out. Then, you can begin to analyze which tactics will help you achieve that goal. That brings us to step number four.
What tactics will help you achieve your goals? What are the right channels and action items to focus on?
This is where you figure that out.
If your goal is to increase your Instagram followers by 15% in three months, your tactics may include hosting a giveaway, responding to every comment, and posting three times a 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). This brings us to step number five.
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.
With all our information in hand, now you need to document it. Next, we’ll talk through three different templates you can follow:
To help you get started with your marketing plan, HubSpot has a free marketing plan template ( (or marketing planner template):
Who’s it right for?: Anyone! But especially businesses whose marketing efforts are focused online.
What I like: The template is an easy-to-use, editable word document. It opens automatically in Microsoft Word (or your word processing software of choice), and you can click right into each field to make changes.
It also includes all of the essential elements we discussed earlier:
While focused on digital methods, it can be easily edited to include more methods like traditional media as well.
Let’s take a look at what each section may look like completed using the template.
Include your company name, a list of the individuals responsible for enacting the different stages of your plan, and a brief mission statement.
This is where you document what your business is focusing on from a marketing perspective. They are the projects that every other strategy feeds into.
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.
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.
As you may have gathered, a marketing plan covers a lot of information, but it doesn’t have to be a long document. And frankly, sometimes you don’t want it to be.
When you have to share information with busy stakeholders or need information at a glance, a one-page marketing plan can be the right solution.
Marketing agency Llama Lead Gen has a free one-page PDF template that includes everything we discussed earlier.
Who’s it right for?: This is a great solution for small businesses that want to organize their thoughts, businesses just getting off the ground, or any organization just looking for a quick “cheat sheet” on their marketing plan.
What I like: It also includes a one-page template for summarizing your customer journey and buyer personas.
Like all good things, creating a marketing plan takes a lot of time and effort. If you're strapped for time or short-handed, give our new AI-powered Marketing Plan Generator a try.
This tool simplifies yearly planning by asking prompted questions to help guide your process.
Who’s it right for? Businesses short on time or those new to creating marketing plans need something to get them started and use as a jumping-off point.
What I like: Once you input all the information, the tool will produce a table (shown in the image below) that you can use to guide your processes.
It includes your company marketing priorities and suggests other relevant initiatives based on the goals you enter.
How to get the most out of the generator: Our AI marketing plan generator does a lot of formal formatting for you, but the quality it delivers is only as good as the information you give it to work off. Before you use the generator, sit down and flesh out your:
These are all things the tool will ask you about, and it’s better to give them some thought than just make it up at that moment.
Pro Tip: If the tool doesn’t seem to work as planned, clear your browser's cache or access it in incognito mode. That should do the trick.
Marketing is a broad umbrella that covers specialties like email marketing, content marketing, and search engine marketing.
In the next sections, we will break down three of the most common strategy-specific marketing plans you may need:
We will also share templates to help you create them.
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, on the other hand, is a focused plan to help achieve those goals.
For example, if your marketing initiative is to generate more qualified boost revenue at your clothing store, your marketing campaign may be a sale called the “Summer Sale Spectacular.”
A marketing campaign template should include the following key components:
Pro Tip: HubSpot has a free editable template with all of these elements for you. Let’s go a little deeper into each of them. We’ll also share examples of what these sections may look like in the template.
Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.
