Marketing Plan Template: Where to Start?

Great products always coexist with successful marketing. To get awesome business results you should care of a solid marketing plan that will precisely outline how you’re going to make money.

A well-defined marketing plan is the background of all your marketing activities. Don’t save time on creating a decent plan and an effective marketing strategy template and you will definitely benefit from your efforts.

What is a marketing plan template?

A marketing plan template is a formal document that contains the details about how you’re going to execute your marketing strategy. The marketing plan is created for a specific period of time and clearly describes the current situation and future plans of a product.

What are the typical marketing plan template elements?

• Brief summary

This should be a small and summarized version of the plan. All relevant components are briefly described here. Marketers should always keep in mind that executives often have not enough time to read the full document. That is why the efficient summary reflects the full picture immediately.

• Mission statement

A mission statement describes all marketing activities and covers the basic business questions: what, why and for whom do you want to do? Each business step and activity should be based on the defined mission statement. Actually, this statement should be used to double-check your approach if you start wondering if you’re moving in the right direction.

• Marketing objectives

This point is about what current marketing objectives you persecute. What are the current challenges that your company face? This stage also includes competitors’ analysis and SWOT analysis.

• Analysis of the current situation

The situation analysis covers your product or service in general, evaluates the USP (Unique Selling Proposition), best industry practices, etc.

• Market targeting

This stage is dedicated to what market your product is trying to target. This about all the industries that you sell your product to.

Proper targeting is the background for successfully running of a marketing campaign. To know more about your target market, you should study the companies work within your target market, how you can reach them, what are their current needs, etc.

• Buyer Personas

To dive deeper into the market, you have to find out who will actually buy your product.

Create a buyer persona is a process to understand it that includes defining which people work in your target market. Your buyer persona template can be used to pinpoint your first personas. Typically, it consists of a name and photo, background info, goals, challenges and problems, personas values and buying decisions.

• Pricing

Pricing strategy is the key to generating profits. Typically this strategy is defined based on costs, competitors data, skimming strategy, market penetration and bundling different products to increase the provided value while setting a higher price.

• Distribution and promo strategy

A distribution plan determines how you will deliver your product.

Distribution channels should be aligned with the product, so you need to pay attention to the following questions: What is the best distribution channel for your product? Why is it preferable over others? What are the costs related to distributing? How this distribution channel influence on delivery time?

After defining the distribution channels, you need to define the message that should provide to your buyer personas and choose suitable promotion channels to acquire new customers. There are many of them: blogs, publicity, PR channels, Search Engine Marketing, social ads, offline ads, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, bizdev channels, viral marketing, sales, affiliate programs, offline events, community building, and so on and so forth.

• Initial budgeting

Budgeting is always a complicated objective. It can be created based on the last year’s spendings or built from scratch.

Planning budget, you should consider all costs of your distribution and promo activities. List them and assign spendings, keeping in mind the working hours of your coworkers.

How to organize a sample marketing plan?

• Start with the goals
• Conduct research
• Define your product strategy
• Determine KPIs and measurement methods
• List all tactical steps

A marketing plan is a roadmap

A marketing plan can be defined and visualized as a roadmap showing all the steps you need to take to get those positions.

Yeas, you may easily reflect your marketing plan example using a powerful roadmap functionality.

Working with all marketing stages, you will quickly realize that any separate initiative or a global strategy should be detailed and well scheduled. It’s crucial to visualize ideas at the start.

Your marketing roadmap visualizes all marketing issues and helps to track each step. It also assists in avoiding distrustful questions from the top management.

The truth is: marketing tasks without clear visualization have low chances to succeed.

A strategic tool for marketers

As a clear action plan, a marketing roadmap describes the main stages and activities, as well as the means of achieving them. A marketing roadmap can include global long-term strategies and smaller tasks, simple to execute.

For example, these marketing initiatives can be easily planned with Hygger marketing roadmap:

• Building a social media strategy
• Planning a viral marketing project
• Scheduling a new product launch campaign
• Participation in the industry exhibition
• Optimization of conversion rates
• Planning a rebranding campaign
• Testing new content
• Partners cross-promo campaigns, etc.

How to visualize s marketing plan with a Hygger roadmap?

Hygger allows marketers to cooperate with product managers and be synchronized in terms of all the joint activities. To get started with the roadmap, you need to do the following:

• Set the goals. The roadmap should start with a clear plan and key goals for all team members.
• Create a group
• Add all scheduled tasks
• Clarify their timeline, setting the beginning and completion of each task
• Add members to the group
• Add tasks from other boards if needed
• Share the roadmap with other team members or stakeholders

Marketing plan template examples

As you can see, creating a marketing plan does not look as scary as it might have been, however, this process requires thoughtfulness and hard work.

Now, it’s time to strengthen this knowledge with some relevant examples. Here are some worthy ones:

• Sample Marketing Plan by Palo Alto Software
• Content Marketing Strategy Example by Buffer

…and the examples for those who prefer visual insights:

• 5- steps marketing plan example, applied to a photography studio:

• A clearly explained example of creating a content marketing plan:

• Social media marketing plan example

Ready to start with your marketing plan? So what are you waiting for?