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

July 24, 2024

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.

To make creating your plan easier, I’ve put together a list of what to include. I’ve also compiled a few different strategic marketing plan templates where you can easily fill in the blanks.

In this article, we’re going to discuss:

Table of Contents

What should a marketing plan include? [Marketing Plan Outline]

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.

Download This Marketing Plan Outline for Free

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:

Business Summary

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:

Company name
Location
Mission statement

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

SWOT Analysis

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.

Business Initiatives

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?

Target Market

Next, consider your target market, or the audience you are trying to reach with your marketing messages. This includes your industries and buyer personas.

Industries

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.

Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer. It focuses on traits like:

Age
Location
Title
Goals
Personal challenges
Pains
Triggering event

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.

Competitive Analysis

Your buyer persona has choices regarding solving their problems, the types of solutions they consider, and the providers that can administer those solutions.

A competitive analysis will detail the companies or brands you’re up against, which should be considered in your marketing strategies.

Consider who your competition is, what they do well, and where the gaps are that you can fill. This can include:

Positioning
Market Share
Offerings
Pricing

Our marketing plan template includes space to list the specific products you compete with. You can also include 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.

Market Strategy

I know what you’re thinking, isn’t this whole plan our marketing strategy? And you’re right to a degree, but this section focuses more on outlining what a brand needs established to go to market.

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

Product
Price
Place
Promotion
People
Process
Physical Evidence

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

But it doesn’t simply list these details.

The market strategy in your marketing plan is where all the pieces come together. Your market strategy describes how your company should present itself in the market, keeping in mind its SWOT, competitors, consumers, and goals.

For 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.”

Budget

When I created my first marketing plan, I confused the marketing budget section with my product’s price and other financials. That’s what “price” in your market strategy is for.

This section describes how much money the business has allotted for the marketing team to pursue the initiatives and goals outlined in the elements above.

Depending on how many individual expenses you have, you may want to itemize your budget for clarity. 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)

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

Marketing Channels

Your marketing plan should also include a list of your marketing channels.

While your company might sell the product using certain ad space, your marketing channels are where you’ll publish the content. This content educates your buyers, generates leads, and spreads brand awareness.

If you publish (or intend to publish) on social media, this is the place to discuss it. (We’ll explore social media marketing plan templates that will help you get more granular a little later.)

Our template focuses on digital platforms (websites and social media), but you can include other mediums, such as newspapers and radio ads, if necessary.

With social media as an example, use the marketing channels section of your marketing plan to map out which social networks you want to launch a business page on. You should also highlight what you‘ll use this social network for and how you’ll measure your success.

If you also have a blog, it might be smart to leverage content marketing tools and repurpose long-form content into smaller social media posts. This helps drive extra traffic to your website and maximize ROI. But be sure to mention it in this section.

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.

Marketing Technology

Last but certainly not least, your marketing plan should include an overview of the tools in your marketing technology (MarTech) stack.

These are the tools that 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, connecting them to a potential ROI for your business is essential.

For each tool, describe what you’ll use it for, and be sure it’s consistent with the strategies you’ve outlined elsewhere in your marketing plan.

For instance, we wouldn’t recommend listing an advertising management tool if you didn’t list “PPC Advertising” under “Marketing Channels.” This may raise eyebrows.

Pro tip: If you’re going for a unified marketing solution that accomplishes many goals, still do your due diligence. Describe all of the ways you’ll use the software and why it’s the best option.

When discussing marketing analytics software, specify what metrics you’ll track with it, why those metrics are necessary, and how it will benefit your overall marketing strategy.

Marketing Plan Timeline

Rolling out a new marketing plan is a big lift. To ensure smooth project progress, create a timeline that maps out each project’s schedule.

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 and what’s up next in the pipeline.

Typically, these plans cover marketing efforts for the entire year, but some companies may operate bi-annually or quarterly.

Once you’ve completed your analysis, research, and goal setting, it’s time to set deadlines for your assignments. From new 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. Then, 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 can 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 must 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, determining its budget, finalizing deadlines, and determining who is working on each task. It also includes mapping 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?

Pro tip: All projects and their deadlines should be in a central location where your team can access them. This may be a calendar like HubSpot’s tool, shared document, or project management tool.

With the outline mentioned above, here’s how you should go about creating your marketing plan.

1. Research, research, research.

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.

2. Define and refine your target audience.

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.

3. Define your SMART goals.

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.

4. Analyze your tactics.

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.

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.

6. Document it.

With all our information in hand, now you need to document it. Next, we’ll talk through three different templates you can follow:

HubSpot’s Free Marketing Plan Template

To help you get started with your marketing plan, HubSpot has a free marketing plan template ( (or marketing planner template):

Download your marketing plan template here.

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:

Business Summary (with SWOT Analysis)
Business Initiatives
Target Market (with buyer personas and competitive analysis)
Market Strategy
Budget
Marketing Channels
Marketing Technology

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.