How to write a marketing plan?

By Vicky Clapham

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is the roadmap underpinning your marketing activity. It’s a clear, structured document on how you will organise, execute and track your marketing activities to meet your wider business objectives.

Many businesses who have a marketing plan base them on between 12 months and 3 years. Given the volatile market over the last few years, a 6-month-12month plan is a great way to start focusing your marketing activity.

How is a marketing plan different to a marketing strategy?

The terms are often used interchangeably but an easier way to look at it is a marketing strategy is the approach used to meet a specific goal or vision for your marketing activity. Whereas a marketing plan is what bring together the detail, insight, aims, objective, strategy and tactics for a specific period of time.

Let’s take an example of a company who is launching a new gift card.

A 12-month marketing plan is developed with identified target markets, and a good understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Clear objectives are developed to raise awareness of the gift card and drive the desired purchases with specific timeframes and numbers assigned. The marketing strategy chosen to do this is based on a mix of push and pull strategies to get the gift card in front of the targeted audience, literally pushing it in in front of them, and also attracting customers to find out more about the gift card by drawing them to it. This would include tactics including paid advertising, a press release to targeted media, a social media campaign, competitions and a leaflet drop to inform local residents. Time frames and resources are assigned to each tactic, with evaluation techniques and KPIs agreed to measure effectiveness.

Creating your own marketing plan in 10 steps

1 . Determine your businesses USP and mission statement

The first step of your marketing plan should be to determine your business’s USP and your mission statement, and values.  Ensure the foundations are in place so you know the basis on which you are building the plan on:

What do you and what pain points/need are you addressing?
What sets you apart?
What do you want to achieve?

2. Now determine your target market.

Who is it you want to reach? Which target markets are the most lucrative? Identifying your customers and creating accurate customer personas based on age, sex, demographic, likes/dislikes etc means you can target your marketing strategies to talk directly to them. Understand their pain points. Focusing on 1 or two primary target markets will give focus to your marketing activities.

3. Have a clear positioning statement

This is a concise description made up of four parts that set out how you want your target market to perceive your brand. Here’s a template guide:  

i.e [Your brand] provides [your offering/benefit that makes you better than competitors] for [your customers] who [customer needs] because [the reason why your customers should believe you are better than competitors].

4. Next up, competitor analysis

Looking at market leaders and competitors in your field helps understand what works well, and where the gaps are to help you to determine more effective strategies.

5. Create a SWOT analysis

Analysing your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is a great way to understand areas to maximise and what to work on. You can use these to determine effective marketing strategies, whilst also understanding what could hinder them.

6. Set your SMART Objectives

Now you understand how your business can play to its strengths, you can set clear, specific and measurable marketing objectives that will help you achieve your wider business goal. Only have a couple of objectives so you can focus on activity, whether they are related to sales, awareness, enquiries or market share.  

7. Strategy

Once you have laid the foundations of your marketing plan set your marketing objectives, you can determine the marketing strategy you will use to achieve them and the position you want in the marketplace e.g. You want to position yourself as a premium brand in the market, raising awareness with a high-end push-based marketing strategy heavily focused on a multi-channel paid advertising campaign.

8. Tactics

Once you know the strategy, you can look at how we can achieve it by looking at the different marketing tactics you can use. If you were looking at paid advertising, you could look at a creative campaign promoted via digital outlets such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads, TV or radio advertising, or media advertising in targeted press/online publications.

If social media is going to play a key part in your marketing plan, you’ll need to consider how you’ll plan the content to keep up momentum which could lead to a separate content plan document.  

You should also consider the 7 P’s of marketing when looking at this section. Creating a table of the 7Ps – Product, Price, Promotion, People, Place, Process Physical Evidence and highlighting how your service/product adds value to the customer for each element of the marketing mix, is a good way to focus your marketing messaging and activity to underpin your core objectives and values.  

9. Define your marketing budget and resources

Now you have your strategy and tactics, attributing timeframes, budget and resource is essential. Even if you plan to do no paid advertising you must still allocate time and recourses to create and distribute the content.

10. Measure and evaluate

To know if you’re making progress with your marketing activity, it’s important to regularly evaluate your activity. Having some Key Performance Indicators – whether related to sales, website visits, social engagement, enquiries etc, these should have a mechanism and timeframe assigned to review and evaluate progress. If something isn’t generating results, stop and review. It might be related to the copy, the execution or the tactic might not be the right one for your target market.

Putting it into practice

Once you have the basis of a marketing template and filled in the detail, don’t just toss it in a file never to be seen again. It is a live document that will need to be amended and reviewed throughout the year. Get into the practice of reviewing it monthly to see how the different elements are working. Is there a new tactic to add? Maybe networking has become a key channel to market your business you’d not considered before? Or podcasting has become a new channel to develop relationships and target particular markets?

Your detailed marketing plan should be at the forefront of all your marketing activities, once you start implementing your strategy and the tactics, refer back to it and analyse what things work well and what don’t well for your business.
Having a benchmark is key and by having a plan you will have focus and accountability that can avoid wasting time and money, and ultimately help you grow your business.  

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