Marketing planning templates

Yes — you want the rest of the document to detail out the specifics of the budget, the methods, the goals, and even supporting statistics to justify the budget — but each section so be written as clearly and simply as possible, and use graphs and imagery when appropriate.

Your entire marketing plan maybe pages, but someone should be able to read an executive summary in one page. Estimated Read Time: 8 minutes Share:. This is crazy because there are so many people out there trying to: Sell marketing plans for ridiculous amounts of money. Or make you think you need to go back to college, just to get what you can find for free on the internet. Table of Contents. Enter their info or yours below!

Email Required. First Last. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Notify of. It can give you some of the most sophisticated information about the types of backlinks you or your competitors have, search engine rankings, and much more.

Basecamp is a great tool for team collaboration that has been used for streamlining project management. You can use it to message your team, store and organize project files efficiently, and work better with your team. There are so many data points to gather for your marketing plan and you will need to collaborate with multiple teams in your company. Slack is another great tool for team collaboration.

This is a great design tool for making charts. They have a really easy-to-use drag and drop design interface that allows you to create fancy charts and diagrams for your marketing plan in minutes. Canva is a great graphic design tool for all kinds of design projects. It has a wide range of features that you could use to design amazing graphics and download them for your marketing plan.

There are so many areas of digital marketing and if you want to be really efficient you should make a plan for each one. You can download any of these or save a copy for yourself. This is a really great content marketing plan. It breaks down every process from discovering your ideal customers, to creating their buyer persona template, finding the main challenges that your content could solve, and so on.

This is a really in-depth guide designed for any content marketing out there. It's so simple that you can literally look at the guide and write it all out in Google Docs. This one looks really old school, so if you are a visual learner this one is probably not for you.

But if you want to see a really well-written explanation of every section of a traditional marketing plan, you will get a lot of this example. Download your marketing plan and fill it out, you will get a lot of value out of it. This one is really useful for a quick brainstorming session, especially when working with a remote team. Sumo has some incredible marketing plan templates.

I used one of their templates to grow an Instagram account from k subscribers in 18 months. Creating a video strategy for a brand can be a pretty complex task. You have a bunch of teams, a variety of factors to consider, and it can become a big mess pretty quickly. So, if you want to create a business marketing plan template for a specific project like that, then use this infographic template from Visme to display everything and make it all really easy for the whole team to follow.

So organizing every project into a quick marketing plan infographic can provide a really great way to keep everyone organized. An email list is one of the most powerful tools any business has. It deals less with the content strategy of things and more with specific growth tactics to help you grow your list fast. Hubspot is an incredible software product for any brand and they make incredible templates and comprehensive guides on virtually every aspect of digital marketing email marketing, agile marketing, social media and much more.

This plan outlines every aspect of creating a good email marketing program. Try it, you won't be disappointed. It's one of those marketing roadmaps where you can write out every strategy you want to try and keep track of KPI's. It helps you define your target audience, create your brand strategy, conduct a competitor analysis, and map out a plan to meet your marketing objectives. It even has a SWOT analysis template to help you define your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

This is something that we get asked often. Find out as much information on your audience as you can. Look at the top companies in your industry or niche and the type of content that they are posting. You could quickly get some good ideas from doing a thorough competitive analysis on the various online platforms that you want to post on. It might be that your competitors are using video exclusively, or relying heavily on user-generated content , and that should be the type of content that you should to create as well.

You could also glean the post frequency from your competitors. For example, one of the brands that we were working with wanted to expand into Pinterest. We did a quick analysis and saw that other accounts in their niche were posting 10 pins a day. Now that you know what your competitors are doing, compare that to where you are holding with your current efforts. Next, choose the right social media platforms for your business.

Decide which ones you want to use and for what purposes. It could be that one channel you could use for impressions, and on the other one, you really care about the engagement.

You might find that Pinterest is a perfect platform to get traffic, while Instagram is primarily for sales. It totally depends on the industry, design, content format, and type of business you have.

Once you upload all of your posts into one marketing calendar you can see it all visually, and see your post frequency for each platform. Launch your posts for the next months and see how they do. After 2 months, re-evaluate your progress, double down on the posts that did really well. Here are a few of our favorite social media plan templates.

You can use these to plan your calendar, to better optimize your strategy, and to rock out like the top brands out there. This template is a really great general for all of your needs. Each tab is divided into a grid for all your accounts, performance, audience, marketing goals, and even a SWOT analysis.

It's one of the best social media analysis templates we've ever seen. It's a marketing plan outline that you can use for any marketing channel.

Here's another really great template that you can use for your social media strategy. This is one is from SproutSocial and it helps you breakdown your social media activity by month.

It's not your conventional social media plan. Instead of planning out your posts it helps you divide broader strategies into tasks, similar to a product marketing plan where you plan out the features of your product. You can plan out tasks like mapping out your audience personas, analyze your engagement, or drafting your influencer strategy.

Regardless of which product you sell, there are a lot of different digital marketing channels that you could use. You need a really good digital marketing to determine which marketing channels are best to promote your product. And you need them to create a really good digital marketing plan to strategically execute every channel.

Digital marketing can be summarized into 5D's: digital devices, digital platforms, digital media, digital data, and digital technology. If you want to stay on top of the latest eCommerce strategies and future trends around topics like CRO, SEO, PPC, online marketplaces and eCommerce strategy, then check out the tips of these disruptive eCommerce experts. Bar Gedalyahu, founder of Botim , specializes in a new and exciting field of marketing - Conversational Design.

With 5 years in promoting businesses online, Bar is constantly searching and developing better ways to benefit his clients and their marketing needs. Think about your expectations as an eCommerce user - cross-channel, personal and immediate interaction. Brands are expected to change form and e-meet the user in a much more friendly and interactive manner.

Introducing - Messenger Chatbots, the ultimate tool for brands to become approachable and likable, when done right, of course. This is the new e-world, in which interactive content is truly the king. Who said eCommerce cannot be a fun experience, or even a game? Using chat marketing features, we create fun, non-binding and challenging games within Messenger.

We make customer experiences that make users engage, engage, and engage. During engagement, users provide you with valuable information - thoughts, beliefs, shopping preferences, etc.

Take this data, crunch it, process it, learn from it - create more personal and compelling ads and content, content that over time increases ROI and improves results. This is how you turn a static brand into a marketing beast. This might not come as a surprise, but - people are mostly interested in themselves. How is that related to marketing? Because if that is true than people always - sometimes without knowing much about it - strive to get a better understanding of their personality and experiences.

This is also a significant insight to content marketing, think about it - getting the user's attention means interacting through a personal dedicated message. A message that presents a challenge, that makes you rethink what you know about yourself.

Ever wondered why extensive workout makes your muscles sensitive to injuries? The answer is simple, not using the right equipment to help your body cope with massive training. They reached out to us looking for a chat-based marketing solution to lower marketing costs, segment users by sport types, and then custom-tailor.

Socks, off. To build an ecommerce business you must be able to reach your customers where they are, on Instagram, Google, YouTube, reading a newspaper or checking the weather - marketing is what enables you to do that.

For online marketing to be affective you need a brand promise that is clear, beneficial to the customer and memorable. Strategic story telling is an often missed component in effective paid-media campaigns. That lifts all ROI metrics significantly. To maximize the growth of a business the story needs to make sense to the customer.

First, you must stop people before you can sell them. People are always moving. And online people move like they are on the highway - fast. The first order of business for copy writing an ad, is to find a way to get people to stop and then draw them in with the benefits of your product. Stop them. Then, sell. Harry Winston's website significantly improved on how the business delivered the House of Winston brand promise when we launched their website.

The focus on making the product the hero of the story and how the customer could best experience the amazing jewels and the the ultimate in fine jewelry Harry Winston built its fame on.

On the website or by scheduling a visit - what ever helped the customer the most - that was transformative for Harry Winston online. The fact that SEO story about the Hope Diamond lead to a purchase of over million dollars was extra sweet. Hilary has passionately been working in digital marketing for the last 8 years focusing primarily in paid advertising.

With a developed balance of creative skills and analytical skills she has successfully been able to continually create fresh ways to increase ROI for medium to large b2c and b2b clients. Google Analytics, or some top-level conversion tracking in place not just within the platform that you are advertising. I prefer Google analytics as Google is the largest search engine and can show an accurate picture of what is happening on your site when users come through an ad. But whichever conversion tracking setup you use, there needs to be two one to accurately assess the true value of platform conversions.

For example Facebook even with the IOS changes is still very "liberal" with it's attributing conversions, you need another platform to provide comparison and clarity.

You can't improve performance without a clear picture of how you are doing with your current efforts. A paid marketing technique that I have implemented across all my accounts both paid search and paid social and always seen improvement in ROI are complex remarketing funnels that push the user from a cold lead to a warm lead and ready to purchase.

For social I particularly ensure that users aren't seeing the same ad for more than a week before they see a different ad with different messaging.

This approach prevents ad fatigue and usually increases conversion rates. The day when marketers got away with "salesy' ad copy is long over.

In order to drive conversions ad copy needs to be engaging and directly tied to the audience being targeted or keywords being targeted.

Users are looking for conversational language, messaging that resonates with their goals, beliefs, and values. More and more with the changes in society users are becoming focused on connecting with brands before they purchase. This is positive for brands as it means more likely the user will be a life-time customer, however there is a greater challenge to get that message across in an engaging manner than ever before, that is why remarketing is imperative.

Over the last couple years and particularly through COVID I partnered with an Ecommerce gift store in managing both paid search and paid social. COVID was difficult for a lot of businesses, especially for the brands that didn't already have an online presence, and those who did, competition increased greatly.

She is an expert in sustainable scalable global growth, cross border solutions, data architecture and supply chain management. In addition to her role within Fifty Six, Katelyn currently serves as a member of Chief, a private invite-only network built to drive more women into positions of power and keep them there, and volunteers in her local community in New York City through Send Chinatown Love and Rotary International in Chinatown District Outside of work, Glass enjoys spin class, traveling around the world, a great margarita on the rocks, true crime podcasts, and reading as much fiction as she can get her hands on.

My preferred partner is Flow. With tools like Flow. Localization, localization, localization. A successful Google strategy in the US would necessarily yield to a successful strategy in South Korea, where Naver is preferred. Far too often I see brands simply scale their marketing strategy by taking what has worked in the US and rolling it out to other markets and be disappointed in the results. Regardless of how serious your brand voice is, make sure to keep it light and conversational.

For customers to engage with your content, it needs to be engaging. Plain and simple. Here in the states I always recommend keeping it short and simple whereas in places like France customers like to see longer form content and tend to engage with more verbose content.

Nicolas is a young, newly emerging marketer living and working in Japan while pursuing his first title as a professional mahjong player for Nihon Pro Mahjong Kyokai. He loves PPC, automation, and task management. Be on the lookout for it! If we are talking about scaling, then Zapier is my go-to solution. Zapier allows marketers to automatize proven and true marketing routines with little to no code involved, connecting dozens of different marketing apps and workflows, providing the necessary systems to manage your business as you grow bigger.

It's a win-win, as you get to use the time that you save with Zapier to further find ways to grow your business. Prince was driving with her kids when suddenly they saw a llama farm next to a gas station on the way; that made them get off the highway and stop to feed the llamas, while at it filling up on gas and grabbing snacks from the gas station.

So my advice is, find your llama and apply it to your ads. Stand out, think outside the box! Speak the language of your audience. Not just the same tongue, but the same language. While I love automation, I still craft most of my copy manually for every single demographic group. Is there any slang or inside joke your audience uses? See if you can include it in your copy for extra engagement.

It's all in the research. I am particularly proud of our ongoing promotion work at ZenMarket proxy shopping service for Japanese goods. We have dramatically grown our loyal customer base and doubled our sales every year for the past three years, and counting! We're soon expanding to even more additional languages. In , Austen started his Marketing career in college when his Marketing professor, who owned an agency, started feeding him clients that didn't have the budget to work with his agency.

Austen took the creative lead and started building websites, running paid ads, and growing their online presence with the power of Social Media. From helping businesses with social media management, lead generation, and online sales, to graphic design work, building websites, and writing content, Austen took his knowledge of sales and marketing to help businesses small and large, utilize the power of the Internet to generate growth.

Other than utilizing the insane reach and measurability that paid advertising has to offer, a must have tool would be a one click upsell app like Zipify.

One technique that will almost always drive your highest ROI is retargeting. With Facebook retargeting, we can segment out those that abandoned their cart, send them a targeted ad with a simple coupon code, and we'll be able to capture a good chunk of those people to not only finish their purchase, but add more to their order now that they have a discount code! Ad copy that targets specific pain points for your targeted audience, and gives them a reason to justify their purchase.

Behaviorally, people buy emotionally and justify rationally, so you must express how you're helping them solve their problem. A fitness and supplements brand. Not only did we reach our goal but we blew it out of the water.

Volkin is a serial entrepreneur, public speaker, Army veteran, and author of 5 books one bestseller. He has built and sold 4 companies. As a marketing leader, he helps entrepreneurs launch and scale businesses that maximize freedom with time-leveraged business models and no revenue ceiling.

Volkin has a tremendous track record of driving company growth and brand awareness through the implementation of strategic, cross-channel eCommerce marketing campaigns. I suggest Systeme. Systeme is similar to ClickFunnels, just easier to use and half the price.

It also has other features like the ability to sell or giveaway courses to educate your customers. Other features like dropshipping, blog posts, evergreen webinars and email marketing make Systeme.

My not so obvious technique is running a contest on paid media, grab their email address through that contest then take them through your sales cycle through your email. The giveaway in the contest has to be a product they can immediately identify with like an Apple Watch or Macbook.

Graphics are great at converting ads but the real secret sauce is to get people to read your ad in the first place. That is where copywriting comes in. Great copywriting starts with truly understanding your core audience and then understanding what they will react to.

We are all exposed to hundreds of ads a day, to get your audience to react you really have to test many different aspects of ad copy. Remember, ads are usually an interrupter of what people are doing. So you have to interrupt their scrolling FB, catch their attention, then get them to take the next step. By understanding what will get their attention and create an action for them, you need to test many variants.

It may not be just one ad that wins and there even may be seasonal fluctuations. You should create a spreadsheet of all the variants you want to test. I have been helping Platinum LED Therapy Lights for a couple years and am proud at the continued growth they have made. We have been successfully hitting many aspects of marketing, from SEO to paid ads to influencer outreach and more.

Each contributes to their success and each now provides a predictable revenue stream each month. Our approach was to master one marketing channel, get that running well, then move on to another marketing channel and repeat. Each time we add a marketing channel we are brining the knowledge we learned from the previous one to maximize success. She started her career at a media agency taking care of clients such as Nike, Lufthansa, or Unilever.

Throughout her career, she was leading marketing teams in different industries such as online gaming or lifestyle mobile apps. For about 2 years now she is working as a freelancer helping startups grow. A properly working conversion tracking tool. This might sound quite obvious to professionals but it's essential for a successful business.

Without data, it is practically impossible to make just the right decisions and grow. This is step zero. When you have your tracking sorted out, find a tool that helps you with customer engagement and loyalty. You probably invest a lot of money into acquiring a customer so you want to get the most out of it. I think it's all about understanding data attribution. Meaning going beyond last click attribution. You need to understand your customers' touchpoints and their impact on your revenue.

Based on that you can decide which paid channels to focus on and which ones to discontinue. That way you can fully take advantage of your invested money. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. You know you have a good ad-copy if it's perfectly tailored to your target audience and they respond to it the way you expected.

This means you should speak your customers' language and choose images that are appealing to them. If you do your research before jumping into creating your ad these shouldn't be a problem for you. It's important to remember that your own personal taste and style don't necessarily match your customers'.

So it is best not to take your own taste as a reference. Also, remember to always include a call-to-action! Several projects come to my mind but I'm most proud of the results I achieved for an Austrian brand for baby slings. We found a way to combine the online and offline world. This tactic worked out excellent as we were able to accelerate our online sales. I think to grow it's important to be creative, to try out new ways and techniques, and invest in long-term strategic steps. Hailey is a search engine marketing expert, a chef-in-training and a San Francisco resident.

GrowthBar - it's the best way to spy on your competitors and see what marketing tactics are working for them. You can use it to find the best keywords to target, hone in on the right backlink strategy and much more. I would say that it's crucial for any eCommerce business to have a really good SEO tool and really get a handle on their search rankings. We've used SEO to scale dozens of eCommerce businesses with success.

So many marketers think of Facebook ads as the best source of traffic, and that totally depends on the business that you're running. For us, we focused on writing high-quality content and optimizing it to rank on the major search engines.

We then monetized it with affiliate marketing, and voila! We now have a really great source of passive income. So don't focus all your time on ads, think outside the box, look at all your options and then decide. Robert has also applied his expertise to enterprise brands such as Woolworths, Air New Zealand, and Samsung during his tenure at Dentsu and Publicis. I believe a must-have tool would have to be Google Analytics - it's important to have a one-source-of-truth platform to go to for your traffic, revenue and to have an accurate pulse of your business.

This isn't a new tool but there are functions, dashboards, and insights that not many marketers access. Most don't even feed in their Facebook Ad cost data. Our team uses a concept called Single Purpose Campaigns in which we treat each audience or layer of the audience as it's own individual campaign or line item.

Meaning that we are able to be more personalized in our messaging and controlled on our costs and targeting. It's something I've gathered during my time working on one of the world's top airline brands. They had segmented each one-way route, each language, each promotion as an individual campaign. Ultimately creating and managing 's to 1,'s of campaigns and extracting every dollar to get a 50x return.

A killer ad copy is more about how it addresses the user. We first need to know what the user's intent is. For Google Search, it's rather easy to understand their intent if you segmented campaigns properly. By understanding this, any level of personalization can be considered Killer Ad Copy.

We've worked with brands during this tough COVID period, helped them pivot, and come out the other side stronger. We worked with this boutique small business called the New Grocer who had previously had a business that did Lunch Meal Preparations for School Kids whose Parents didn't want their kids to eat the food there.

The New Grocer was born to help the suppliers maintain their revenue source and for the chefs at the meal prep company to retain their jobs as Schools were closed. Introducing new product lines and many pivots to value proposition. Ultimately we were able to retain jobs and keep their business alive. The bulk of his experience has been in early-stage start-ups, either as a founder or as an early hire. Any online store must have a Google Search Brand campaign for its brand name terms and domain name, including misspellings.

Your brand search is your most sacred and even if you organically rank for 1, your competitors could be bidding on your brand terms, and also this is a game of real estate. Taking the 1 and 2 spots makes you a winner.

They will eventually go away from this practice which you protect your brand real estate. Depending on the type of products a Google Search Generic term campaign should also be in place. Google Display is a great opportunity to increase brand presence to highly targeted audiences. Consumer Intent marketing is the most powerful audience and next up is remarketing. If you have a brick and motor, Google My Business is the single most important thing you can do, and be sure to link it to Google Ads and while you are at it link Google Ads to Google Analytics and Google Merchant Center.

Connect merchant center to your online store software to create a feed so that you can enable Google Shopping Ads. Leverage Consumer Intent Marketing audience building and really take the time to think about your ideal customer, what their needs are, what websites they will visit during research for related products or items that together with what you sell. Calls to action! Short and sweet. Users need to be told exactly what to do.

There is too much clutter to have them guessing what you want to do. Call Now. View Products Now. Hire a creative writer to proof all your ads. Do this on a regular basis. Encompass this client was running Google Ads for years. They sell parts for repairs, appliances, and they have millions of items. They had a very high daily volume and almost every customer has the potential for multiple repeat purchasing. I was able to use their Google Analytics to create an all user audience from the last days.

Serving ads through Google Display reminded old customers to come back to Encompass. The immediately generated sales on day one and to this day is one of their top campaigns in conjunction with Remarketing.

Kristina Adel is a Customer Relations Coordinator at Velour Beauty , one of the most luxurious eye-centric beauty brands that also sell in Sephora and Ulta. Her expertise lies in content creation, copywriting and e-commerce as she is passionate about helping every customer have the best experience with the brand. Kristina loves conveying brand stories that generate demand and achieve success. Every tool has a place in your toolbox but without data, any step you take becomes just a guess.

Microsoft Clarity is an amazing free tool business can implement to start studying heat maps, view customer recordings and much more. Such data will then form a foundation for the next optimization steps that will drive conversion and sales. It may sound obvious but a strong segmentation of your customers is key. Everyone expects a personalized experience that is tailored to their specific needs.

Building automated email funnels for these specific groups will take some work off your shoulders as you focus on other goals.

I like using Retention Science for this as its AI technology makes product recommendations and timings super simple. Connecting those audiences with your Facebook and Google Ads is also a massive plus. It can very interesting to see how one word changes the results. Also make you to check for the main keywords on Google trends and listen to what your customers are saying in reviews and on social media.

Your customers already know the best keywords you should use in your copy. Every small business managed to successfully shift their brick-and-mortar stores online and continue their entrepreneurial journeys. Slava has 10 years of experience doing online marketing with the last 5 focusing on paid ads. He helps local and international brands find customers online and optimize their funnels for higher conversion rates. Currently, he is working with medium-sized businesses and managing over 1.

They will get your customers to spend more before they checkout. That will allow you to increase marketing spends and scale further than before.

You need to follow up with users who sign up to get them to buy for the first time if they are non-customers, or buy more if they are existing customers. Everyone is busy nowadays, and to scale one must always be on a customer's mind to increase conversion rate. A not so obvious paid media technique would be to use all the available bidding strategies that the platform you're using provides.

For killer ad copy you need to make sure that the first sentence already has intrigued your customer - every business is different, but I personally love to start my copy with a question… e. The campaign has been running for about 11 months now and it keeps being extremely profitable.

Drew has worked in the digital advertising space for over 5 years and started out as an intern for several marketing agencies after college which how he fell in love with the space. After graduating college in with a Bachelors' degree in Marketing, Drew worked for several large ad agencies on Fortune clients before going off on his own in Since then Drew has helped many ECommerce brands both large and small start out and grow in the space across digital advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook.

The first and most important tool for any eCommerce brand is the platform itself. As a marketer, you have various choices at your disposal for reaching new customers. First, you need to know which type of marketing channels are possible and how they deliver results.

Channels like search paid, and email gives access to the best marketing strategies for ROI. Focus on tactics within these channels because they can produce short and long-term profits. These digital or online channels cover strategies like email marketing, search engine optimization SEO , and pay-per-click PPC advertising. Several aspects can learn how successful your advertising will be. The way ads are distributed may have improved, but the rules for good advertising copywriting have continued the same.

While digital marketing has started up new channels and new challenges for people seeking to advertise their businesses, ad copy will still make or break your campaign. But you must make it clear that your content will help them answer one of their top challenges. Advertising copy specifically refers to the words in your ads and the right words can create a big difference in how your ad is received and the results it achieves.

We went from standard to smart campaigns and continue to build out more search campaigns for different topics and brands. Obviously, not all of it is paid ads related but shows the power of how one channel affects another and another.

Originally a mechanical engineer David felt he hit the ceiling in his career. He took a leap of faith and after 8 years has curated a dedicated marketing team that is now A-List Me. His focus is on providing e-commerce brands value by working with influencers. He has helped thousands of brands accomplish their goals and exceed expectations!

We have several tools in place to accelerate influencer campaign planning. Service Marketing Plan Template. What Is a Marketing Plan? Pro tip: Save time by using one of the free marketing templates above as a start. Step 1: Build Your Marketing Plan Outline A marketing plan outline allows you to structure your plan in a way that makes sense with the product or service you are delivering, and can also serve as a table of contents for your finalized plan.

Step 3: Perform a Situational Analysis Your marketing strategy will not be as effective without a clear picture of the overall health of your business. SWOT Analysis This method is one of the most commonly used tools for analyzing the internal strengths and weaknesses of a business, as well as the external opportunities and threats.

One way to home in on your core competencies is to gather feedback from your team by asking the following questions: What are our greatest strengths as a company? What are our greatest strengths as a team? What makes our product offerings better than that of our competitors?

What makes us the best in our industry? Step 5: Define Your Goals Are you trying to raise brand awareness? Measurable: Determine key metrics you will use to track progress. Achievable: Ensure you have the capabilities and resources needed to reach your goals. Relevant: Verify that the marketing goals support the overall mission and vision of the business.

Time-Oriented: Set milestones and deadlines for goals to stay on track. What key elements of our product or service should potential customers know about? What will motivate potential customers to choose us over our competitors?

How is our business positioned in the industry? What is our year-to-date YTD growth? How can we best align our marketing plan with our overall business objectives so they support each other? Look at the customers you already have: Find out who is already buying your products, and look for mutual interests, preferences, and pain points among those buyers to build customer profiles.

Dive in deeper on returning customers, and those that are bringing in the most business, so you can strategize ways to target more buyers with shared characteristics. Another effective way to gain insight into your customer base is to collect information from them by way of focus groups, surveys, research, or simply asking for feedback.

Learn more about customer profiles, and use a free customer profile questionnaire template to get started. Use this information to find niche markets or opportunities your competitor may be missing out on. Examine your products and services: Take each product or service offering and list out the key benefits they provide, and then detail how each of those benefits solve a specific problem. Use that information to identify who is most likely to have the problem those benefits provide a solution for, and then create a list of those people.

Figure out what the demographics of each buyer looks like e. Then, identify how your target persona will find your product, what will motivate them to buy it, how they will use it, and how it fits in with his or her lifestyle. Learn more about target personas, and download a free persona worksheet template to get started.

This is the stage where a business invests its resources to make potential customers aware of the products and services it offers. Consideration: Prospective buyers are considering the various solutions available to solve their problem, and need to be convinced that they need to make a purchase in order to solve it. This is the stage where a business conveys in great detail the benefits the customer will receive after using the product, and how it is better than what the competition is offering.

Intent: Prospective buyers are convinced that they need to make a purchase to solve their problem, and begin to compare alternatives. This is the stage where a business reassures the customer that the product offered makes the most sense out of all the alternatives from an emotional, financial, or lifestyle perspective.

Purchase: Prospective buyers have made their decision on which company they will purchase the product from. Even if the buyer chooses your product, the process does not end here. The goal of your business is to develop a relationship with the customer to increase brand loyalty, and to find upsell opportunities based on purchase history. Repurchase: Buyers need to renew a perishable product e. The goal of your business is to foster the relationship with the customer by offering incentives to repurchase and to increase brand evangelism.

An effective way to use content to retain customers is through email marketing campaigns. Find email workflow tips, examples and free templates to get started on developing your strategy. Determine the 4Ps of your marketing mix. As you develop your strategy, refer to the following 4Ps of your marketing mix: Product: This refers to the tangible good or intangible service that you are offering as a solution to meet the needs of the customer.

Emphasizing the UVP and differentiating your product in the market are the first steps to setting yourself apart and positioning your brand. Price: This refers to the price your customer is expected to pay for the product. Understanding the perceived value e.

Researching the price competitors are offering for similar products or alternatives is a great place to start. Promotion: This refers to the communication aspect of your marketing strategy. Getting the word out about your product is the best way to raise awareness about your brand, with methods including press releases, trade shows, event marketing, and advertising.

Place: This refers to the place where customers can purchase your product. Will you sell exclusively online? Will customers need to come to a physical location?

The marketing channels you will use to get the product from producer to customer e. Make a list of action items, and then come up with an estimated budget for each item based on marketing, distribution, and promotional expenses.

Prioritize your needs before your wants. Whatever is leftover after your needs are fulfilled, funnel those funds toward your wants. Invest in areas with higher return on investment ROI e. Step 9: Conduct Financial Projections This segment of the plan shows the financial projections you have determined to be relevant to the project based on the research you have completed for your marketing plan.

Common financial data to add to your marketing plan include the following: Forecasts sales and expenses Break even analysis Financial requirements 3 year financial projections Income statement Cash flow statement Balance sheet Find a free sales forecast template, financial projections template, and other templates to prepare your financial data by checking out this page with free startup plan, budget and cost templates.

Determine your key performance indicators KPIs : Define measurable marketing metrics and connect them to your established goals in order to track progress.

Establish a baseline: Understand and document how your business is currently performing so you have something to compare future performance results to. Define your benchmarks: Acquire data about your competition and industry to develop standard measurements that indicate how you stack up against the competition. Decide which tools and platforms to implement: The results you analyze are only as good as the methods you use to track them.

Find a work management platform that provides real-time visibility into project status and performance so you have the ability to make timely, data-driven decisions. Schedule meetings to evaluate results and determine where opportunities lie. Come to each meeting prepared by using a free meeting agenda template. Take inventory of your content and compile a list of the top performers. Compare the results of that content to your standards of performance to see if they align, and to identify what can be improved upon.

In this article, you can choose from plus content marketing templates , including a content inventory template, to help you plan and execute your content marketing strategy. When performance improves, identify what contributed to it and allocate resources accordingly. Step Write the Executive Summary Although the executive summary is placed at the beginning of your marketing plan, it is the final step to be completed.

This section summarizes all the key takeaways from each segment of the marketing plan, and should ultimately answer each of the following questions: What are the overall business objectives?

How do your marketing goals align with the business objectives? Which products or services will you market? Who is your target audience? What resources will you leverage e.

What gives you a competitive advantage? What problems are you solving?