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Blog Marketing What is a Marketing Plan & How to Create One [with Examples]

What is a Marketing Plan & How to Create One [with Examples]

Written by: Sara McGuire Oct 26, 2023

A marketing plan is a blueprint that outlines your strategies to attract and convert your ideal customers as a part of your customer acquisition strategy . It’s a comprehensive document that details your:

• Target audience:  Who you’re trying to reach
• Marketing goals:  What you want to achieve
• Strategies and tactics:  How you’ll reach your goals
• Budget:  Resources you’ll allocate
• Metrics:  How you’ll measure success

In this article, I’ll explain everything you need to know about creating a marketing plan . If you need a little extra help, there are professionally designed marketing plan templates that’ll make the process much easier. So, let’s ditch the confusion and get started!

Click to jump ahead:

What is a marketing plan?

How to write a marketing plan .

• Marketing plan v.s. business plan
• Types of marketing plans

9 marketing plan examples to inspire your growth strategy

Marketing plan faqs.

A marketing plan is a report that outlines your marketing strategy for your products or services, which could be applicable for the coming year, quarter or month.  

Watch this quick, 13-minute video for more details on what a marketing plan is and how to make one yourself:

Typically, a marketing plan includes:

• An overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals
• A description of your business’s current marketing position
• A timeline of when tasks within your strategy will be completed
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) you will be tracking
• A description of your business’s target market and customer needs
• A description of how you will measure the performance of the strategy

For example, this marketing plan template provides a high-level overview of the business and competitors before diving deep into specific goals, KPIs and tactics:

Learning how to write a marketing plan forces you to think through the important steps that lead to an effective marketing strategy . And a well-defined plan will help you stay focused on your high-level marketing goals.

With Venngage’s extensive catalog of marketing plan templates , creating your marketing plan isn’t going to be hard or tedious. In fact, Venngage has plenty of helpful communications and design resources for marketers. If you’re ready to get started, sign up for  Venngage for Marketers   now. It’s free to register and start designing.

Whether you’re a team trying to set smarter marketing goals, a consultant trying to set your client in the right direction, or a one-person team hustling it out, Venngage for Marketers helps you get things done.

As mentioned above, the scope of your marketing plan varies depending on its purpose or the type of organization it’s for.

For example, you could create a marketing plan that provides an overview of a company’s entire marketing strategy or simply focus on a specific channel like SEO, social media marketing, content marketing and more, like in this example:

A typical outline of a marketing plan includes:

• Executive summary
• Goals and objectives
• User personas
• Competitor analysis/SWOT analysis
• Baseline metrics
• Marketing strategy
• Tracking guidelines

Below you will see in details how to write each section as well as some examples of how you can design each section in a marketing plan.

Let’s look at how to create a successful marketing plan (click to jump ahead):

• Write a simple executive summary
• Set metric-driven marketing goals
• Outline your user personas
• Research all of your competitors
• Set accurate key baselines & metrics
• Create an actionable marketing strategy
• Set tracking or reporting guidelines

1. Write a simple executive summary

Starting your marketing plan off on the right foot is important. You want to pull people into your amazing plan for marketing domination. Not bore them to tears.

One of the best ways to get people excited to read your marketing plan is with a well-written executive summary. An executive summary introduces readers to your company goals, marketing triumphs, future plans, and other important contextual facts.

Basically, you can use the Executive Summary as a primer for the rest of your marketing plan.

Include things like:

• Simple marketing goals
• High-level metrics
• Important company milestones
• Facts about your brand
• Employee anecdotes
• Future goals & plans

Try to keep your executive summary rather brief and to the point. You aren’t writing a novel, so try to keep it under three to four paragraphs.

Take a look at the executive summary in the marketing plan example below:

The executive summary is only two paragraphs long — short but effective.

The executive summary tells readers about the company’s growth, and how they are about to overtake one of their competitors. But there’s no mention of specific metrics or figures. That will be highlighted in the next section of the marketing plan.

An effective executive summary should have enough information to pique the reader’s interest, but not bog them down with specifics yet. That’s what the rest of your marketing plan is for!

The executive summary also sets the tone for your marketing plan. Think about what tone will fit your brand ? Friendly and humorous? Professional and reliable? Inspiring and visionary?

2. Set metric-driven marketing goals

After you perfect your executive summary, it’s time to outline your marketing goals.

(If you’ve never set data-driven goals like this before, it would be worth reading this growth strategy guide ).

This is one of the most important parts of the entire marketing plan, so be sure to take your time and be as clear as possible. Moreover, optimizing your marketing funnel is key. Employing effective funnel software can simplify operations and provide valuable customer insights. It facilitates lead tracking, conversion rate analysis, and efficient marketing optimization .

As a rule of thumb, be as specific as possible. The folks over at  VoyMedia  advise that you should set goals that impact website traffic, conversions, and customer success — and to use real numbers.

Avoid outlining vague goals like:

• Get more Twitter followers
• Write more articles
• Create more YouTube videos (like educational or Explainer videos )
• Increase retention rate
• Decrease bounce rate

Instead, identify  key performance metrics  (KPI) you want to impact and the percentage you want to increase them by.

Take a look at the goals page in the marketing plan example below:

They not only identify a specific metric in each of their goals, but they also set a timeline for when they will be increased.

The same vague goals listed earlier become much clearer when specific numbers and timelines are applied to them:

• Get 100 new Twitter followers per month
• Write 5 more articles per week
• Create 10 YouTube videos each year
• Increase retention rate by 15% by 2020
• Decrease bounce rate by 5% by Q1
• Create an online course  and get 1,000 new leads
• Focus more on local SEO strategies
• Conduct a monthly social media report to track progress

You can dive even deeper into your marketing goals if you want (generally, the more specific, the better). Here’s a marketing plan example that shows how to outline your growth goals:

3. Outline your user personas

Now, this may not seem like the most important part of your marketing plan, but I think it holds a ton of value.

Outlining your user personas is an important part of a marketing plan that should not be overlooked.

You should be asking not just how you can get the most visitors to your business, but how you can get the right visitors.

Who are your ideal customers? What are their goals? What are their biggest problems? How does your business solve customer problems?

Answering these questions will take lots of research, but it’s essential information to get.

Some ways to conduct user research are:

• Interviewing your users (either in person or on the phone)
• Conducting focus groups
• Researching other businesses in the same industry
• Surveying your audience

Then, you will need to compile your user data into a user persona  guide.

Take a look at how detailed this user persona template is below:

Taking the time to identify specific demographic traits, habits and goals will make it easier for you to cater your marketing plan to them.

Here’s how you can create a user persona guide:

The first thing you should add is a profile picture or icon for each user persona. It can help to put a face to your personas, so they seem more real.

Next, list demographic information like:

• Identifiers
• Activities/Hobbies

The user persona example above uses sliding scales to identify personality traits like introversion vs. extroversion and thinking vs. feeling. Identifying what type of personality your target users tend to have an influence on the messaging you use in your marketing content.

Meanwhile, this user persona guide identifies specific challenges the user faces each day:

But if you don’t want to go into such precise detail, you can stick to basic information, like in this marketing plan example:

Most businesses will have a few different types of target users. That’s why it’s pertinent to identify and create several different user personas . That way, you can better segment your marketing campaigns and set separate goals, if necessary.

Here’s a marketing plan example with a segmented user persona guide:

The important thing is for your team or client to have a clear picture of who their target user is and how they can appeal to their specific problems.

Start creating robust user personas using Venngage’s user persona guide .

4. Conduct an extensive competitor analysis

Next, on the marketing plan checklist, we have the competitor research section. This section will help you identify who your competitors are, what they’re doing, and how you could carve yourself a place alongside them in your niche — and ideally, surpass them. It’s something you can learn to do with rank tracking software .

Competitor research is also incredibly important if you are starting a blog .

Typically, your competitor research should include:

• Who their marketing team is
• Who their leadership team is
• What their marketing strategy and strategic marketing plan are (this will probably revolve some reverse-engineering)
• What their sales strategy is (same deal)
• Social Media strategy (are they using discounting strategies such as coupon marketing to get conversions)
• Their market cap/financials
• Their yearly growth (you will probably need to use a marketing tool like Ahrefs to do this)
• The number of customers they have & their user personas

Also, take as deep a dive as you can into the strategies they use across their:

• Blog/Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• SEO Marketing
• Video marketing
• And any other marketing tactics they use

Research their strengths and weaknesses in all parts of their company, and you will find some great opportunities. Bookmark has a great guide to different marketing strategies for small businesses  if you need some more information there.

You can use this simple SWOT analysis worksheet to quickly work through all parts of their strategy as well:

Click the template above to create a SWOT chart . Customize the template to your liking — no design know-how needed.

Since you have already done all the research beforehand, adding this information to your marketing plan shouldn’t be that hard.

In this marketing plan example, some high-level research is outlined for 3 competing brands:

But you could take a deeper dive into different facets of your competitors’ strategies. This marketing plan example analyses a competitor’s content marketing strategy:

It can also be helpful to divide your competitors into Primary and Secondary groups. For example, Apple’s primary competitor may be Dell for computers, but its secondary competitor could be a company that makes tablets.

Your most dangerous competitors may not even be in the same industry as you. Like the CEO of Netflix said, “Sleep is our competition.”

5. Set accurate key baselines & metrics

It’s pretty hard to plan for the future if you don’t know where your business stands right now.

Before we do anything at Venngage, we find the baselines so we can compare future results to something. We do it so much it’s almost like second nature now!

Setting baselines will allow you to more accurately track your progress. You will also be able to better analyze what worked and what didn’t work, so you can build a stronger strategy. It will definitely help them clearly understand your goals and strategy as well.

Here’s a marketing plan example where the baselines are visualized:

Another way to include baselines in your plan is with a simple chart, like in the marketing plan example below:

Because data can be intimidating to a lot of people, visualizing your data using charts and infographics will help demystify the information.

6. Create an actionable marketing strategy

After pulling all the contextual information and relevant metrics into your marketing plan, it’s time to break down your marketing strategy.

Once again, it’s easier to communicate your information to your team or clients using visuals .

Mind maps are an effective way to show how a strategy with many moving parts ties together. For example, this mind map shows how the four main components of a marketing strategy interact together:

You can also use a flow chart to map out your strategy by objectives:

However you choose to visualize your strategy, your team should know exactly what they need to do. This is not the time to keep your cards close to your chest.

Your strategy section may need to take up a few pages to explain, like in the marketing plan example below:

With all of this information, even someone from the development team will understand what the marketing team is working on.

This minimalistic marketing plan example uses color blocks to make the different parts of the strategy easy to scan:

Breaking your strategy down into tasks will make it easier to tackle.

Another important way to visualize your marketing strategy is to create a project roadmap. A project roadmap visualizes the timeline of your product with individual tasks. Our roadmap maker can help you with this.

For example, this project roadmap shows how tasks on both the marketing and web design side run parallel to each other:

A simple timeline can also be used in your marketing plan:

Or a mind map, if you want to include a ton of information in a more organized way:

Even a simple “Next, Now, Later” chart can help visualize your strategy:

7. Set tracking or reporting guidelines

Close your marketing plan with a brief explanation of how you plan to track or measure your results. This will save you a lot of frustration down the line by standardizing how you track results across your team.

Like the other sections of your marketing plan, you can choose how in-depth you want to go. But there need to be some clear guidelines on how to measure the progress and results of your marketing plan.

At the bare minimum, your results tracking guidelines should specify:

• What you plan to track
• How you plan to track results
• How often you plan to measure

But you can more add tracking guidelines to your marketing plan if you see the need to. You may also want to include a template that your team or client can follow,  for  client reporting ,  ensure that the right metrics are being tracked.

The marketing plan example below dedicates a whole page to tracking criteria:

Use a task tracker to track tasks and marketing results, and a checklist maker to note down tasks, important life events, or tracking your daily life.

Similarly, the marketing plan example below talks about tracking content marketing instead:

Marketing plan vs. marketing strategy

Although often used interchangeably, the terms “marketing plan” and “marketing strategy” do have some differences.

Simply speaking, a marketing strategy presents what the business will do in order to reach a certain goal. A marketing plan outlines the specific daily, weekly, monthly or yearly activities that the marketing strategy calls for. As a business, you can create a marketing proposal for the marketing strategies defined in your company’s marketing plan. There are various marketing proposal examples that you can look at to help with this.

A company’s extended marketing strategy can be like this:

Notice how it’s more general and doesn’t include the actual activities required to complete each strategy or the timeframe those marketing activities will take place. That kind of information is included in a marketing plan, like this marketing plan template which talks about the content strategy in detail:

Marketing plan v.s business plan

While both marketing plans and business plans are crucial documents for businesses, they serve distinct purposes and have different scopes. Here’s a breakdown of the key differences:

Business plan is a comprehensive document that outlines all aspects of your business, including:

• Mission and vision
• Products or services
• Target market
• Competition
• Management team
• Financial projections
• Marketing strategy (including a marketing plan)
• Operations plan

Marketing plan on the other hand, dives deep into the specific strategies and tactics related to your marketing efforts. It expands on the marketing section of a business plan by detailing:

• Specific marketing goals (e.g., brand awareness, lead generation, sales)
• Target audience analysis (detailed understanding of their needs and behaviors)
• Product:  Features, benefits, positioning
• Price:  Pricing strategy, discounts
• Place:  Distribution channels (online, offline)
• Promotion:  Advertising, social media, content marketing, public relations
• Budget allocation for different marketing activities
• Metrics and measurement to track progress and success

In short, business plans paint the entire business picture, while marketing plans zoom in on the specific strategies used to reach your target audience and achieve marketing goals.

Types of marketing plans that can transform your business strategy

Let’s take a look at several types of marketing plans you can create, along with specific examples for each.

1. General marketing strategic plan / Annual marketing plan

This is a good example of a marketing plan that covers the overarching annual marketing strategy for a company:

Another good example would be this Starbucks marketing plan:

This one-page marketing plan example from coffee chain Starbucks has everything at a glance. The bold headers and subheadings make it easier to segment the sections so readers can focus on the area most relevant to them.

What we like about this example is how much it covers. From the ideal buyer persona to actional activities, as well as positioning and metrics, this marketing plan has it all.

Another marketing plan example that caught our eye is this one from Cengage. Although a bit text-heavy and traditional, it explains the various sections well. The clean layout makes this plan easy to read and absorb.

The last marketing plan example we would like to feature in this section is this one from Lush cosmetics.

It is a long one but it’s also very detailed. The plan outlines numerous areas, including the company mission, SWOT analysis , brand positioning, packaging, geographical criteria, and much more.

2. Content marketing plan

A content marketing plan highlights different strategies , campaigns or tactics you can use for your content to help your business reach its goals.

This one-page marketing plan example from Contently outlines a content strategy and workflow using simple colors and blocks. The bullet points detail more information but this plan can easily be understood at a glance, which makes it so effective.

For a more detailed content marketing plan example, take a look at this template which features an editorial calendar you can share with the whole team:

3. SEO marketing plan

Your SEO marketing plan highlights what you plan to do for your SEO marketing strategy . This could include tactics for website on-page optimization , off-page optimization using AI SEO , and link building using an SEO PowerSuite backlink API for quick backlink profile checks.

This SEO marketing plan example discusses in detail the target audience of the business and the SEO plan laid out in different stages:

4. Social media marketing plan

Your social media marketing plan presents what you’ll do to reach your marketing goal through social media. This could include tactics specific to each social media channel that you own, recommendations on developing a new channel, specific campaigns you want to run, and so on, like how B2B channels use Linkedin to generate leads with automation tools and expand their customer base; or like making use of Twitter walls that could display live Twitter feeds from Twitter in real-time on digital screens.

For B2C brands, you can target Facebook and Instagram. Gain Instagram likes to build trust for your brand’s profile and post engaging content on both platforms

Edit this social media marketing plan example easily with Venngage’s drag-and-drop editor:

5. Demand generation marketing plan

This could cover your paid marketing strategy (which can include search ads, paid social media ads, traditional advertisements, etc.), email marketing strategy and more. Here’s an example:

1. Free marketing plan template

Here’s a free nonprofit marketing plan example that is ideal for organizations with a comprehensive vision to share. It’s a simple plan that is incredibly effective. Not only does the plan outline the core values of the company, it also shares the ideal buyer persona.

Note how the branding is consistent throughout this example so there is no doubt which company is presenting this plan. The content plan is an added incentive for anyone viewing the document to go ahead and give the team the green light.

2. Pastel social media marketing campaign template

Two-page marketing plan samples aren’t very common, but this free template proves how effective they are. There’s a dedicated section for business goals as well as for project planning .

The milestones for the marketing campaign are clearly laid out, which is a great way to show how organized this business strategy is.

3. Small business marketing strategy template

This marketing plan template is perfect for small businesses who set out to develop an overarching marketing strategy for the whole year:

Notice how this aligns pretty well with the marketing plan outline we discussed in previous sections.

In terms of specific tactics for the company’s marketing strategy, the template only discusses SEO strategy, but you can certainly expand on that section to discuss any other strategies — such as link building , that you would like to build out a complete marketing plan for.

4. Orange simple marketing proposal template

Marketing plans, like the sample below, are a great way to highlight what your business strategy and the proposal you wan to put forward to win potential customers.

5. One-page marketing fact sheet template

This one-page marketing plan example is great for showcasing marketing efforts in a persuasive presentation or to print out for an in-person meeting.

Note how the fact sheet breaks down the marketing budget as well as the key metrics for the organization. You can win over clients and partners with a plan like this.

6. Light company business fact sheet template

This one-page sample marketing plan clearly outlines the marketing objectives for the organization. It’s a simple but effective way to share a large amount of information in a short amount of time.

What really works with this example is that includes a mission statement, key contact information alongside all the key metrics.

7. Marketing media press kit template

This press kit marketing plan template is bright and unmistakable as belonging to the Cloud Nine marketing agency . The way the brand colors are used also helps diversify the layouts for each page, making the plan easier to read.

We like the way the marketing department has outlined the important facts about the organization. The bold and large numbers draw the eye and look impressive.

8. Professional marketing proposal template

Start your marketing campaign on a promising note with this marketing plan template. It’s short, sharp and to the point. The table of contents sets out the agenda, and there’s a page for the company overview and mission statement.

9. Social media marketing proposal template

A complete marketing plan example, like the one below, not only breaks down the business goals to be achieved but a whole lot more. Note how the terms and conditions and payment schedule are included, which makes this one of the most comprehensive marketing plans on our list.

What should marketing plans include?

Marketing plans should include:

• A detailed analysis of the target market and customer segments.
• Clear and achievable marketing objectives and goals.
• Strategies and tactics for product promotion and distribution.
• Budget allocation for various marketing activities.
• Timelines and milestones for the implementation of marketing strategies.
• Evaluation metrics and methods for tracking the success of the marketing plan.

What is an executive summary in a marketing plan and what is its main goal?

An executive summary in a marketing plan is a brief overview of the entire document, summarizing the key points, goals, and strategies. Its main goal is to provide readers with a quick understanding of the plan’s purpose and to entice them to read further.

What are the results when a marketing plan is effective?

When a marketing plan is effective, businesses can experience increased brand visibility, higher customer engagement, improved sales and revenue, and strengthened customer loyalty.

What is the first section of a marketing plan?

The first section of a marketing plan is typically the “Executive Summary,” which provides a concise overview of the entire plan, including the business’s goals and the strategies to achieve them.

Now that you have the basics for designing your own marketing plan, it’s time to get started:

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Featured Reads

• Marketing |
• How to create a winning marketing plan, ...

How to create a winning marketing plan, with 3 examples from world-class teams

A marketing plan helps leaders clearly visualize marketing strategies across channels, so they can ensure every campaign drives pipeline and revenue. In this article you’ll learn eight steps to create a winning marketing plan that brings business-critical goals to life, with examples from word-class teams.

To be successful as a marketer, you have to deliver the pipeline and the revenue.”

In other words—they need a well-crafted marketing plan.

Level up your marketing plan to drive revenue in 2024

Learn how to create the right marketing plan to hit your revenue targets in 2024. Hear best practices from marketing experts, including how to confidently set and hit business goals, socialize marketing plans, and move faster with clearer resourcing.

7 steps to build a comprehensive marketing plan

How do you build the right marketing plan to hit your revenue goals? Follow these eight steps for success:

1. Define your plan

First you need to define each specific component of your plan to ensure stakeholders are aligned on goals, deliverables, resources, and more. Ironing out these details early on ensures your plan supports the right business objectives, and that you have sufficient resources and time to get the job done. 

Get started by asking yourself the following questions: 

What resources do I need? 

What is the vision?

What is the value?

What is the goal?

Who is my audience?

What are my channels?

What is the timeline?

For example, imagine you’re creating an annual marketing plan to improve customer adoption and retention in the next fiscal year. Here’s how you could go through the questions above to ensure you’re ready to move forward with your plan: 

I will need support from the content team, web team, and email team to create targeted content for existing customers. One person on each team will need to be dedicated full-time to this initiative. To achieve this, the marketing team will need an additional $100K in budget and one new headcount. 

What is the vision?  

To create a positive experience for existing customers, address new customer needs, and encourage them to upgrade. We’ll do this by serving them how-to content, new feature updates, information about deals and pricing, and troubleshooting guides. 

According to the Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) , CEOs and go-to-market leaders report that more than 60% of their net-new revenue will come from existing customers in 2023. By retaining and building on the customers we have, we can maintain revenue growth over time. 

To decrease the customer churn rate from 30% to 10%, and increase upgrades from 20% to 30% in the next fiscal year. 

All existing customers. 

The main channel will be email. Supporting marketing channels include the website, blog, YouTube, and social media. 

The first half of the next fiscal year. 

One of the most important things to do as you create your marketing strategy is to identify your target audience . As with all marketing, you need to know who you’re marketing to. If you’re having a hard time determining who exactly your target audience is, try the bullseye targeting framework . The bullseye makes it easy for you to determine who your target audience is by industry, geography, company size, psychographics, demographics, and more.

2. Identify key metrics for success 

Now it’s time to define what key marketing metrics you’ll use to measure success. Your key metrics will help you measure and track the performance of your marketing activities. They’ll also help you understand how your efforts tie back to larger business goals. 

Once you establish key metrics, use a goal-setting framework—like objectives and key results (OKRs) or SMART goals —to fully flush out your marketing objectives. This ensures your targets are as specific as possible, with no ambiguity about what should be accomplished by when. 

Example: If a goal of your marketing plan is to increase email subscriptions and you follow the SMART goal framework (ensuring your objective is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) your goal might look like this: Increase email subscription rate from 10% to 20% in H1 . 

3. Research your competition 

It’s easy to get caught up in your company’s world, but there’s a lot of value in understanding your competitors . Knowing how they market themselves will help you find opportunities to make your company stand out and capture more market share.

Make sure you’re not duplicating your competitors’ efforts. If you discover a competitor has already executed your idea, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board and brainstorm new ways to differentiate yourself.  By looking at your competitors, you might be surprised at the type of inspiration and opportunities you’ll find.

To stay ahead of market trends, conduct a SWOT analysis for your marketing plan. A SWOT analysis helps you improve your plan by identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Example: If your competitor launches a social media campaign identical to what you had planned, go back to the drawing board and see how you can build off their campaign. Ask yourself: How can we differentiate our campaign while still getting our message across? What are the weaknesses of their campaign that we can capitalize on? What angles did they not approach?

4. Integrate your marketing efforts

Here’s where the fun comes in. Let’s dive into the different components that go into building a successful marketing plan. You’ll want to make sure your marketing plan includes multiple supporting activities that all add up into a powerful marketing machine. Some marketing plan components include: 

Lead generation

Social media

Product marketing

Public relations

Analyst relations

Customer marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Conversational marketing

Knowing where your consumer base spends the most time is significant for nailing this step. You need to have a solid understanding of your target audience before integrating your marketing efforts. 

Example: If your target audience is executives that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, focus your social media strategy around placing branded content on LinkedIn. 

5. Differentiate with creative content

Forty-nine percent of marketers say visual images are hugely important to their content strategy. In other words, a clear brand and creative strategy is an essential component to every marketing plan. As you craft your own creative strategy, here are some tips to keep in mind: 

Speak to your audience: When defining your creative strategy, think about your audience—what you want them to feel, think, and do when they see your marketing. Will your audience find your creative work relevant? If your audience can’t relate to your creative work, they won’t feel connected to the story you’re trying to tell. 

Think outside the box: Find innovative ways to engage your audience, whether through video, animations, or interactive graphics. Know what screens your creative work will live on, whether desktop, mobile, or tablet, and make sure they display beautifully and load quickly across every type of device. 

Tie everything back to CTAs: It’s easy to get caught up in the creative process, so it’s important to never lose sight of your ultimate goal: Get your audience to take action. Always find the best way to display strong Calls to Action (CTAs) in your creative work. We live in a visual world—make sure your creative content counts.

Streamline creative production:   Once you’ve established a strong creative strategy, the next step is to bring your strategy to life in the production stage. It’s vital to set up a strong framework for your creative production process to eliminate any unnecessary back and forth and potential bottlenecks. Consider establishing creative request forms , streamlining feedback and approval processes, and taking advantage of integrations that might make your designers’ lives easier.

Example: If your brand is fun and approachable, make sure that shows in your creative efforts. Create designs and CTAs that spark joy, offer entertainment, and alleviate the pressure in choosing a partner.

6. Operationalize your marketing plan

Turn your plan into action by making goals, deliverables, and timelines clear for every stakeholder—so teams stay accountable for getting work done. The best way to do this is by centralizing all the details of your marketing plan in one platform , so teams can access the information they need and connect campaign work back to company goals.  

With the right work management tool , you can: 

Set goals for every marketing activity, and connect campaign work to overarching marketing and business objectives so teams focus on revenue-driving projects. 

Centralize deliverables for your entire marketing plan in one project or portfolio .

Mark major milestones and visualize your plan as a timeline, Gantt chart, calendar, list, or Kanban board—without doing any extra work. 

Quickly loop in stakeholders with status updates so they’re always up to date on progress. This is extremely important if you have a global team to ensure efforts aren’t being duplicated. 

Use automations to seamlessly hand off work between teams, streamlining processes like content creation and reviews. 

Create dashboards to report on work and make sure projects are properly staffed , so campaigns stay on track. 

With everything housed in one spot, you can easily visualize the status of your entire marketing plan and keep work on track. Building an effective marketing plan is one thing, but how you operationalize it can be your secret to standout marketing.

Example: If your strategy focuses on increasing page views, connect all campaign work to an overarching OKR—like “we will double page views as measured by the amount of organic traffic on our blog.” By making that goal visible to all stakeholders, you help teams prioritize the right work. 

See marketing planning in action

With Asana, marketing teams can connect work, standardize processes, and automate workflows—all in one place.

7. Measure performance

Nearly three in four CMOs use revenue growth to measure success, so it’s no surprise that measuring performance is necessary. You established your key metrics in step two, and now it’s time to track and report on them in step eight.

Periodically measure your marketing efforts to find areas of improvement so you can optimize in real-time. There are always lessons to be learned when looking at data. You can discover trends, detect which marketing initiatives performed well, and course-correct what isn’t performing well. And when your plan is complete, you can apply these learnings to your next initiative for improved results. 

Example: Say you discover that long-form content is consistently bringing in 400% more page views than short-form content. As a result, you’ll want to focus on producing more long-form content in your next marketing plan.

Marketing plan examples from world-class teams

The best brands in the world bring their marketing plans to life every day. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out these examples from successful marketing teams.

Autodesk grows site traffic 30% three years in a row

When the Autodesk team launched Redshift, it was initially a small business blog. The editorial team executed a successful marketing plan to expand it into a premier owned-media site, making it a destination for stories and videos about the future of making. 

The team scaled content production to support seven additional languages. By standardizing their content production workflow and centralizing all content conversations in one place, the editorial team now publishes 2X more content monthly. Read the case study to learn more about how Autodesk runs a well-oiled content machine. Trinny London perfects new customer acquisition 

In consumer industries, social media is crucial for building a community of people who feel an affinity with the brand—and Trinny London is no exception. As such, it was imperative that Trinny London’s ad spend was targeted to the correct audience. Using a work management tool, Trinny London was able to nail the process of creating, testing, and implementing ads on multiple social channels.

With the help of a centralized tool, Trinny London improved its ad spend and drove more likes and subscriptions on its YouTube page. Read the case study to learn more about how Trinny London capitalized on paid advertising and social media. 

Turn your marketing plan into marketing success 

A great marketing plan promotes clarity and accountability across teams—so every stakeholder knows what they’re responsible for, by when. Reading this article is the first step to achieving better team alignment, so you can ensure every marketing campaign contributes to your company’s bottom line. 

Use a free marketing plan template to get started

Once you’ve created your marketing strategy and are ready to operationalize your marketing plan, get started with one of our marketing templates . 

Our marketing templates can help you manage and track every aspect of your marketing plan, from creative requests to approval workflows. Centralize your entire marketing plan in one place, customize the roadmap, assign tasks, and build a timeline or calendar. 

Once you’ve operationalized your entire marketing plan with one of our templates, share it with your stakeholders so everyone can work together in the same tool. Your entire team will feel connected to the marketing plan, know what to prioritize, and see how their work contributes to your project objectives . Choose the best marketing template for your team:

Marketing project plan template

Marketing campaign plan template

Product marketing launch template

Editorial calendar template

Agency collaboration template

Creative requests template

Event planning template

GTM strategy template

Still have questions? We have answers. 

What is a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a detailed roadmap that outlines the different strategies your team will use to achieve organizational objectives. Rather than focusing solely on the end goal, a marketing plan maps every step you need to reach your destination—whether that’s driving pipeline for sales, nurturing your existing customer base, or something in-between. 

As a marketing leader, you know there’s never a shortage of great campaign and project ideas. A marketing plan gives you a framework to effectively prioritize work that aligns to overarching business goals—and then get that work done. Some elements of marketing plans include:

Current business plan

Mission statement  

Business goals

Target customers  

Competitive analysis 

Current marketing mix

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Marketing budget  

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

The purpose of a marketing plan is to grow your company’s consumer base and strengthen your brand, while aligning with your organization’s mission and vision . The plan should analyze the competitive landscape and industry trends, offer actionable insights to help you gain a competitive advantage, and document each step of your strategy—so you can see how your campaigns work together to drive overarching business goals. 

What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy? 

A marketing plan contains many marketing strategies across different channels. In that way, marketing strategies contribute to your overall marketing plan, working together to reach your company’s overarching business goals.

For example, imagine you’re about to launch a new software product and the goal of your marketing plan is to drive downloads. Your marketing plan could include marketing strategies like creating top-of-funnel blog content and launching a social media campaign. 

What are different types of marketing plans? 

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, what your timeline is, or which facet of marketing you’re driving, you’ll need to create a different type of marketing plan. Some different types of marketing plans include, but aren’t limited to:

General marketing plan: A general marketing plan is typically an annual or quarterly marketing plan that details the overarching marketing strategies for the period. This type of marketing plan outlines marketing goals, the company’s mission, buyer personas, unique selling propositions, and more. A general marketing plan lays the foundation for other, more specific marketing plans that an organization may employ. 

Product launch marketing plan: A product launch marketing plan is a step-by-step plan for marketing a new product or expanding into a new market. It helps you build awareness and interest by targeting the right audience, with the right messaging, in the right timeframe—so potential customers are ready to buy your new offering right away. Nailing your product launch marketing plan can reinforce your overall brand and fast-track sales. For a step-by-step framework to organize all the moving pieces of a launch, check out our product marketing launch template .

Paid marketing plan: This plan includes all the paid strategies in your marketing plan, like pay-per-click, paid social media advertising, native advertising, and display advertising. It’s especially important to do audience research prior to launching your paid marketing plan to ensure you’re maximizing ROI. Consult with content strategists to ensure your ads align with your buyer personas so you know you’re showing ads to the right people. 

Content marketing plan: A content marketing plan outlines the different content strategies and campaigns you’ll use to promote your product or service. When putting together a content marketing plan, start by identifying your audience. Then use market research tools to get the best insights into what topics your target audience is most interested in.

SEO marketing plan: Your SEO marketing plan should work directly alongside your content marketing plan as you chart content that’s designed to rank in search results. While your content marketing plan should include all types of content, your SEO marketing plan will cover the top-of-funnel content that drives new users to your site. Planning search engine-friendly content is only one step in your SEO marketing plan. You’ll also need to include link-building and technical aspects in order to ensure your site and content are as optimized as possible.

Social media marketing plan: This plan will highlight the marketing strategies you plan to accomplish on social media. Like in any general or digital marketing plan , your social media strategy should identify your ideal customer base and determine how they engage on different social media platforms. From there, you can cater your social media content to your target audience.  

Related resources

Write better AI prompts: A 4-sentence framework

What is content marketing? A complete guide

Smooth product launches are simpler than you think

How Asana uses work management for smoother creative production

Building a Marketing Team

• 1.  An Introduction to Marketing Management
• 2.  The Role of a Marketing Project Manager

What does a marketing department do?

What are typical roles in a marketing team, advanced marketing team roles, how to build a marketing team, how to structure a marketing department, what tools do marketing teams need.

• 4.  How To Create a Marketing Strategy
• 5.  How to Create a Marketing Plan: Ultimate Guide
• 6.  How To Build a Marketing Calendar
• 7.  An Introduction to MarTech
• 8.  Choosing Marketing Tools & Software
• 9.  A Guide to Marketing Analytics
• 10.  How To Create a Marketing Dashboard
• 11.  Marketing Resource Management Guide
• 12.  FAQs
• 13.  Marketing Glossary

Marketing departments are critical to a company’s profit and growth because of their role in finding, attracting, and retaining customers. Without robust marketing efforts, potential customers may find it difficult to learn about your products or services. Additionally, your company may not be able to discern the best target customer base to advertise products, and the general public would come to their own conclusions about your brand overall. 

From managing the company’s brand and image to promoting upcoming products or events, here’s what you need to know about marketing teams. 

A marketing department drives the promotional engine of a business. It is responsible for increasing brand awareness overall, while also driving potential and recurring customers to a company’s products or services. Therefore, a marketing team is a vital part of a company’s structure because it should be the team that brings in business, retains it, and helps your company grow and achieve financial and organizational goals. 

To that end, a marketing department is responsible for many tasks, and a company’s marketing department structure will vary depending on the volume and scope of those tasks. 

Deliver marketing campaigns with effortless collaboration

Key marketing department responsibilities

Because marketing activities can vary widely, companies often run the risk of the marketing department becoming a catch-all for tasks that don’t necessarily have another place to land. However, in a company with a well-defined marketing department structure, the functions of the marketing department will most likely include, but aren’t limited to, the following: 

• Outlining market strategy: The head of the marketing department, whether the chief marketing officer or the vice president for marketing, will work with senior marketing staff to set the marketing strategy for the company. The marketing strategy will then provide direction to other members of the marketing team who will carry out the relevant tasks. 
• Organizing market research: Market research can be conducted in-house, where members of the marketing team conduct surveys and analyze industry data to ascertain which segments of the market should be targeted. Market research can also involve marketing team members directly speaking to customers or potential customers or holding focus groups. Finally, market research is sometimes conducted by a third party, and the marketing department would be responsible for analyzing this information and making market decisions based upon it. 
• Assisting with product development: Because marketing teams have an intimate understanding of the target market, potential customer base, and competitor offerings, they often assist the product development department. The marketing department will be able to inform product designers about gaps in the market and will be able to relay feedback from customers. 
• Strategizing and spearheading promotion: Promotion is one of the elements most people would assume that a marketing department handles, and they would be correct. Strategizing and spearheading promotional opportunities — whether digital, print, pay-per-click, or earned media — is an integral part of a marketing department’s responsibilities. 
• Managing and planning events: Within the remit of most marketing departments is the planning and management of a range of events , from webinars designed to generate leads to product launches that will garner publicity. 
• Supporting sales and distribution teams: Marketing departments don’t carry out their work in a vacuum. Instead, everything they do affects other parts of the company. One of the key responsibilities of a marketing department is to support sales and distribution teams in order to ensure these areas are prepared for the marketing activity they plan and execute. This might mean prepping the distribution team ahead of a planned promotional activity, checking inventory before coordinating a marketing campaign around a product, or qualifying leads using demographic and behavioral data to help sales teams sell more effectively. 

Marketing departments cover a range of functions that are critical to the success and growth of a company. Now, we’ll look at the specific roles that ensure these responsibilities are carried out. 

What Is a Marketing Environment?

How To Manage Marketing Projects Effectively

The specific roles in each marketing department will vary depending on the size of the company, the industry, and the target audience for the product or service. For example, a small plumbing company probably doesn’t require a data analyst. However, a large multinational might have an entire team of data analysts working to optimize the marketing team’s efforts. 

Here is a selection of typical marketing department roles: 

• Chief marketing officer: Whether the head of the marketing department is referred to as the vice president of marketing or the chief marketing officer (CMO), those in the role have similar responsibilities around generating revenue through marketing efforts, minimizing costs and risks, and supporting overall company goals. 
• Marketing director or marketing manager: Once the CMO has designed the marketing strategy and priorities, it is up to the marketing director or manager to create campaigns and plans to achieve that strategy effectively. A marketing manager also directly oversees the marketing team members as they complete tasks that advance the department’s stated mission.
• Marketing specialist: Depending on the needs of the company, a marketing department structure might include a selection of marketing specialists who have particular areas of expertise. These areas of expertise can include digital marketing, SEO marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing. These specialists will take full control of their area of expertise and might even work with a team of lower-level marketing team members to carry out these daily tasks and campaigns. 
• Data analyst: Because a company’s marketing function is driven heavily by data, a data analyst is a role most companies will require. In fact, large companies might have entire teams dedicated to data analysis. Data analysts in marketing departments measure the impact of campaigns, identify best-performing channels and verticals, and enable teams to make informed, data-driven decisions.  
• Content writer: A marketing content writer is responsible for writing many different types of content, all designed to build the company’s brand, draw in potential customers and retain existing customers. Marketing content managers may be tasked with writing website copy, eBooks, mass emails and newsletters, social media copy, video scripts, and advertisements. They must also be adept at optimizing each of these content types for SEO to attract traffic to online content. 
• Visual designer: Sometimes called a graphic designer, a visual designer is responsible for creating various types of on-brand graphics and imagery. These can include infographics, event signage, images for print or online platforms, and visuals for email and online marketing. They design visuals that help promote the brand and support marketing campaigns. 
• Tech expert: Marketing departments often benefit from employing a tech expert who is adept at coding and can therefore manage the website and product shop. Tech experts might be called upon to design A/B testing for an email campaign and should be able to expertly manipulate content management systems. 
• Marketing project manager: Companies often employ marketing project managers who are responsible for specific marketing projects. Marketing project managers might focus their time on a single large campaign or a few smaller projects, and they would oversee the staff involved in carrying out these projects. For example, a marketing project manager might oversee a digital campaign designed to support a product launch or serve as project manager for a large company event. 
• Public relations: While most marketing roles are focused on promoting products or services and building a company’s brand to increase profit, public relations team members are tasked with marketing the company itself to the general public. This might involve writing press releases about key appointments or promoting charitable initiatives to relevant media.

Companies often require advanced marketing team roles, especially when they are looking to grow in scale and scope. These include roles within the following categories: 

• Demand generation: Demand generation marketing department staff are responsible for creating and implementing strategies to attract, nurture, land, and retain customers for the business. Whereas other marketing department roles are often measured by the number of leads they bring into the company, success in lead generation roles is measured by the amount of profit they generate for the company. 
• Marketing operations: Another advanced marketing area is that of marketing operations. Often referred to as marketing ops, this department is responsible for ensuring that the marketing team’s technology and processes work in an efficient manner. They are in charge of the work management software or marketing tools the team uses on a daily basis to carry out their work. 
• Automation: Automating certain marketing functions can greatly improve the efficiency and efficacy of the marketing department, capitalizing on leads and helping nurture them into purchasing a product or service. Marketing automation involves acquiring as much data as possible about a prospective customer and tailoring and automating the information and communication they receive.

Building a marketing team can be a daunting task because it is such a crucial aspect of business success. Hiring the wrong person can be costly, frustrating, and can set your company’s growth back significantly. In fact, 74% of companies report an average cost of $14,900 per bad hire, according to one survey . But it is possible to build a strong marketing department that can help your company succeed quickly. 

There are many ways to build a marketing team, and your marketing team needs will vary depending upon the size of your company and your specific marketing requirements. If you are in the initial stages of building your marketing team, there are two common routes to consider:

• Start with a marketing team leader and marketing generalists: Your marketing department will need a leader from the beginning, but whether you choose to hire an executive-level marketing team leader like a CMO will depend on the future prospects for your company. Small or mid-level companies and start-ups might begin instead with a marketing manager as team leader, marketing generalist, and visual designer. A marketing generalist is someone who has experience with several different areas of marketing but who doesn’t specialize in one particular area. For instance, a marketing generalist might be able to manage writing website content, email campaigns, and social media but wouldn’t necessarily have specialized skills in SEO or data analysis. 
• Build a digital team first: Another route to building your marketing department is to focus on a digital marketing team first and hire several roles that allow you a more broad base of specialties from the start. A digital marketing manager will be an important first hire, followed by a selection of digital specialists, including a data analyst who can help drill down your company’s target market segments, a content writer who can populate your website and social media to attract customers, as well as a website and visual designer to support the marketing team’s design needs. 

Freelance marketing specialists and project managers hired on a contract basis can help support your marketing department, filling gaps in your team as the company scales.

The structure of a marketing department depends in part on the size and type of company. Very small or fledgling start-up companies might only have a handful of people on their marketing team. Meanwhile, mid-level companies and large multinationals have significantly broader needs when it comes to marketing functions . 

Here is an example of an enterprise marketing department structure: 

Which skills are needed in high-functioning marketing teams?

Marketing departments are fast-paced environments, with a slew of projects, tasks, and moving parts in motion every day. Marketing teams need to recognize and adapt to changes in customer desires and master the best ways to reach those customers using a myriad of channels . 

These hard skills are critical to a high-functioning marketing team: 

• Data analysis: Because marketing departments rely heavily on data analysis to evaluate how to access potential customers, the ability to analyze information and strategize based on those findings is critical to a marketing team’s success. 
• Writing: From blog posts to eBooks, website content to ad copy, writing skills are highly important for high-functioning marketing teams who need to shift tone and style to reach a variety of customers and draw them to the brand. 
• SEO: In the last decade, optimizing content for search engines has become one of the best ways for companies to get their products and services in front of customers and generate leads and sales. A marketing team needs to stay at the cutting edge of SEO practice in order to excel. 
• Social media: Arguably just as important as SEO, social media is a critical element to any marketing department’s skill set. The ability to create engaging and even viral content for a range of different social media, work with social media influencers for product placement, and respond to customer queries is important for a marketing team. 
• Technology: These days, marketing is inherently reliant on technology, from managing websites to software for scheduling the above-mentioned social media campaigns or e-commerce options for selling products and services. The marketing department’s technology stack is extensive, and fully integrated work management software can help efficiency, visibility, and accountability.

What’s the best way to hire for marketing department positions?

When you’re building your marketing team, one of the biggest questions you might have is what is the best way to hire the best people? Marketing candidates are often excellent at using networking tools like LinkedIn, making that a valuable place to start your marketing search. Referrals from existing marketing team members is another great strategy for ensuring that potential marketing team employees will be a good fit with company culture and that they have the skills required to push your team to the next level. 

While many marketing candidates will need to work in an office-based capacity, some roles can be fulfilled remotely , which can greatly increase the potential pool of marketing applicants to build out your team.

Because marketing departments deal with a host of different metrics, social media channels, and a range of print and digital media, the marketing department tools they use will make all the difference. Marketing departments often rely heavily on work management or marketing management software , and one key element that all marketing departments should look for in their marketing tools is app integration. If possible, a marketing department should use work management software that integrates as many of the apps they use on a regular basis as possible, like WordPress, MediaValet, and Mailchimp. 

Wrike’s work management add-ons like Wrike for Marketers are specifically designed to streamline a marketer’s workflow, cutting down on time lost switching between platforms and supercharging their performance every day. 

Create a Marketing Plan With Wrike

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Your Guide to Creating a Small Business Marketing Plan

Follow these templates and guidelines to get started on your business's marketing plan.

Table of Contents

To have a successful business, you need a well-thought-out marketing plan to promote your products or services. Although making a few social media posts or blasting a few promotional emails may seem simple enough, disjointed marketing efforts not only confuse your target audience, but can ultimately harm your business. 

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic road map for how you communicate (online and offline) with your target audience to successfully promote your products or services. Depending on your goal, marketing plans can be extremely basic or highly detailed.

According to Molly Maple Bryant, vice president of marketing at Vibrent Health, a marketing plan is not simply a list of things you want to accomplish. Instead, it should list the outcomes you seek — measurable and contextual, like the pipeline you’re developing, or leads you’re generating — and it should explain the high-level strategies you will use to achieve those outcomes. Developing strategies can be complicated, but they make a major difference in keeping you on track and avoiding diversions, also called scope creep .

“Once you have an agreed-upon plan, you are able to compare any incoming requests against your strategies to determine ‘Yes, this adheres to my strategy so we can add it,’ or ‘No, this sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t adhere to our agreed-upon strategy, so we won’t adjust resources,'” Bryant told us.

Types of marketing plans

There are several different types of marketing plans you can use based on certain strategies that make sense for your organization. Your business will likely need a combination of the following marketing plans to create an effective, comprehensive marketing strategy:

• Advertising plan
• Branding plan
• Content marketing plan
• Customer acquisition plan
• Direct marketing plan
• Email marketing plan
• Public relation plan
• Print marketing plan
• Reputation management plan
• Retention plan
• Search engine optimization plan
• Social media marketing plan

Why is it important to have a marketing plan for your business?

A marketing plan is a crucial resource for any small business because it helps you identify the market needs your product or service meets, how your product is different from competitors, and who your product or service is for. Marketing plans also serve as a road map for your sales strategy, branding direction and building your overall business. This is important for successfully conveying your brand messaging to your target audience .

Another significant benefit of a marketing plan for your company is that rather than simply guessing metrics, it forces you to sit down and do the math about your business goals and how to realistically fulfill them. When you look at your growth outcomes, you can delve further to determine what it will take to get to those numbers.

Bryant offered the following example: “Need $100,000 in revenue? How many sales is that? If 10, what’s your close rate? Let’s say 10 percent from lead to closed deal. Now you have a metric to start with — to get to 10 sales, we need 100 leads. Where will they come from, and what strategies will you use? The plan helps you put it all on paper so you can map out resources and tactics later with a lot of preparation and realism,” said Bryant.

When analyzing outcomes and resources, you can save time and avoid scope creep by focusing only on strategies that are relevant to your marketing plan. A marketing plan helps you think realistically about your strategies, gets your stakeholders on the same page, and holds your marketing team accountable for their decisions.

“When everyone’s tasks and goals are laid out for the stakeholders and company partners to see, it is much easier for the entire team to feel at ease about reaching sales goals and allowing the marketing team the space and freedom needed to execute work without constant supervision,” said Cassady Dill, digital marketing consultant and owner of Ethos Agency.

Additionally, Dill said a marketing plan should be easily understood by your entire team, executives and outside departments. Your plan should also serve as an easy guide for future marketing managers and team members to understand and implement.

What are the key elements of an effective business marketing plan?

A marketing plan should be customized to fit your business; however, Dill said, all marketing plans contain five essential functions:

• Your business goals
• Key metrics (how you quantify and measure success)
• Strategies (an overview of implementation and how that will achieve goals)
• A plan (the details of execution and the human resources, departments and software that will be involved)
• Reporting (what reports of progress will include and/or look like)

We broke down those five functions into 10 actionable categories to help you create a marketing plan that is unique and effective for your business.

1. Executive summary

The executive summary is a great place to give the reader of your plan an overview of your business’s mission or goals, as well as the marketing strategy you’re looking to employ. An executive summary is often written after you’ve completed the rest of the marketing plan, to ensure it covers all the important elements of your plan. If the executive summary is the only part of your marketing plan that someone reads (which is highly possible), you want to be sure they understand the most crucial details.

2. Mission statement

The mission statement , not to be confused with a vision statement, is a statement that encompasses your company’s values and how they relate to your overall goals as an organization. Here are some good questions to get you thinking:

• What does your company do today?
• What’s important to your company?
• What would your company like to do in the future?
• What is your brand identity?
• What’s your culture like ?
• How does your company benefit customers, employees and stakeholders?

3. Target markets

Identifying your target market is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan. Without a defined target audience, your marketing expenses will be wasted. Think of it like this: Some people need your service or product but don’t know it exists yet. Who are those people?

Here are some other questions to help you brainstorm your target market :

• What is the demographic of your customers (gender, age, income, education, etc.)?
• What are their needs and interests?
• What’s their psychographic profile (attitudes, philosophies, values, lifestyle, etc.)?
• How do they behave?
• What are some existing products they use?

4. Products and services

In this section, don’t just list what your product or service is. Think critically about what you have to offer your customers and what that value proposition means to them.

• What do you make or provide for customers?
• What are your customers’ needs?
• How does your product or service fulfill customers’ needs?
• What value do you add to your customers’ lives?
• What type of product or service are you offering?

5. Distribution channels

At this point in your report, you should transition your thinking into actual marketing theory and practices. Distribution channels are the avenues you’ll use to reach a prospective customer or business . Think of all current and potential sales channels on which your specific target audience is active. One distribution channel that works great for one organization may be useless to another. For example, one company may host their website for free on a site like HubSpot and solely rely on that as their sales channel, while another company may have a whole team of people using Pinterest to drive sales. [Learn how CRM systems can help track your marketing leads based on various distribution channels.]

Examples of sales channels include the following:

• Mobile text message marketing
• Social media
• Print (newspapers, magazines, brochures, catalogs, direct mail)
• Broadcast (TV, radio)
• Press releases
• Trade shows, product demonstrations, event marketing

6. Competitive profile

One of the major aspects of your marketing plan is developing your unique selling proposition (USP). A USP is a feature or stance that separates your product or service from competitors. Finding your USP is all about differentiation and distinguishing your company as a sole proprietor of one type of good or service. Conduct a competitive analysis to identify your competitive profile and how you stack up against the competition. It is important to remain unbiased when conducting this analysis.

Here are some ideas to consider:

• What’s your USP?
• Who are your competitors? What do they offer?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competition?
• What needs of the market (or customer) are not being served? What can you do to meet those needs?

7. A pricing strategy

Consider pricing when drafting your marketing plan. Developing the right pricing strategy helps you better market your product. Think about your current and projected finances when developing a long-term marketing strategy that is realistic and beneficial for your business. Here are some key questions to ask yourself about your pricing:

• What are reasonable margins to make a profit and cover production costs?
• Is there a market for products or services at your projected price point?
• Are you willing to sacrifice profit margins in return for a greater market share?
• What are your marketing and distribution costs?

8. Objectives

Consider your objectives when developing a marketing plan. This aspect of your plan should involve specific goals related to market penetration and revenue targets. Be sure to keep your marketing objectives on-brand with your business. Here are some things to consider:

• Sales quotas
• Number of new customers gained
• Customer retention percentages
• Revenue targets
• Market penetration
• Brand awareness
• Website traffic

9. Action plans

With all of the above items outlined, determine what steps need to be taken to enact your marketing plan. This includes determining the proper steps, setting goals, breaking down responsibilities, and establishing an overall timeline.

It’s also important to brainstorm potential roadblocks your business could face and some solutions to overcome them. Your research is useless if you don’t have an actionable plan that can be realistically implemented to carry out your ideas.

10. Financial projections

This last step allows you to establish a realistic marketing budget and better understand your marketing plan from a cost perspective. In addition to setting a budget, consider the overall return on investment as well. Here are some other financial projections to consider:

• Cost of implementation
• Cost to produce product or service
• Existing and projected cash flow
• Projected sales
• Desired profit margin on projected sales

What is a template for creating a successful marketing plan?

The internet is full of useful tools, including paid and free marketing plan templates, to help you build a successful marketing plan .

Whether you are looking for a free template generator to build a new marketing plan or a benchmarking tool to evaluate your current strategies, several great resources are available. Keep in mind that the best marketing plan for your business will be a customized one.

“Ultimately, you should design a marketing plan that best serves the needs of your team as you see fit,” said Dill. “Don’t force yourself into a plan that doesn’t fit your team. Use templates to shorten the workload time, but then adjust it for a more custom plan.”

Here are some tools and templates to get you started:

• Free marketing plan template : business.com has developed a free template that is fully customizable based on the needs of your business. Each section provides in-depth explanations, examples and resources to help you create an impressive marketing plan.
• Smart Insights: In addition to offering marketing plan templates, some companies, like Smart Insights, offer marketing benchmarking templates to help you evaluate your strategy performance. These are accessible with a free Smart Insights membership.
• GERU: Similarly, GERU offers a funnel-planning, profit-prediction and simulation tool to help you assess mock business ideas and simulations. This can help you identify weak points in your marketing strategy that need improvement. Although GERU requires users to sign up for a paid account, you can access a free trial to test it out.

What mistakes should you avoid when creating your marketing plan?

When creating an effective marketing plan, you need to avoid falling for common missteps and mistakes. For starters, failing to identify any of the 10 actionable categories above is an obvious mistake.

Here are some other key mistakes to avoid:

• Setting unrealistic budgets: Underestimating the costs of marketing activities or setting an unrealistic budget can limit your ability to execute your plan effectively. Marketing can be expensive, so it’s important to fully understand the estimated cost and budget before building a marketing strategy that you can’t afford.
• Focusing on quantity over quality: “More” doesn’t always mean “better” if you are posting on irrelevant marketing channels or your efforts are bringing in unqualified leads. Prioritizing the quantity of marketing activities over their quality can lead to superficial engagement and a lack of meaningful results.
• Not testing campaigns: Launching large campaigns without testing can lead to wasted resources if the messaging or tactics don’t resonate as expected. Test out your new campaigns to ensure they achieve your intended goal.
• Ignoring customer feedback: You may be tempted to ignore negative feedback, but disregarding customer comments and failing to address their concerns can lead to negative perceptions of your brand. Instead, use customer feedback to your advantage to improve your product and marketing efforts.
• Overpromising and underdelivering: Setting unrealistic expectations in your marketing messages that your products or services can’t fulfill can damage your brand’s reputation.
• Ignoring seasonality and trends: Failing to account for seasonal trends and market changes can result in missed opportunities for timely marketing efforts.
• Not reviewing and updating your plan: A rigid marketing plan that doesn’t allow for adjustments in response to market feedback and changing conditions can hinder your success. A marketing plan should be a living document that is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect changes in the market and your business’s goals.

Avoiding these mistakes and missteps can help you create a more effective and successful marketing plan that drives results for your business.

How can you take action with your new marketing plan?

Before you dive into marketing plan templates, it’s important to understand how to think about a marketing plan.

A good marketing plan targets who your buyers are, establishes the service or product you are offering, and determines your unique selling proposition. From here, you will tackle the marketing planning process and develop the best way to get your product in front of buyers who want your product or service.

Dill created a simple four-step process for how small businesses can take action with creating a marketing plan.

• The first step is to hold a marketing meeting with all the marketing team and executives or stakeholders. This gives them time to offer questions, concerns and criticisms you haven’t thought of so you can go back to the board room and revise your strategy or plan.
• Next, add a timeline to all your tasks and assign team members and all the help you’ll need to execute that plan.
• Once your plan is in action, hold weekly check-ins in person or by email to keep everyone on track.
• Share a weekly progress report with all parties involved and execs to ensure you are moving in the right direction.

In addition to drafting your own plan, you can work with a digital marketing agency or use internet marketing and pay-per-click management services to leverage your online presence.

Once you’ve established a general road map, update it annually. Developing an evolving marketing plan sets your business up for continued success because it allows you to prepare for the unexpected and establish a connection between your brand and your audience.

Matt D’Angelo contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.

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Grow » marketing, how to build a marketing department for your small business.

Marketing plays an important role in improving sales and awareness for nearly every type of business. Here’s how to start building a marketing team to meet your goals.

No matter what industry your business is in — from restaurants to fashion to enterprise software — marketing has a vital role to play in attracting customers. While the importance of marketing has remained steady over the years, the strategies powering it have changed frequently during the past decade.

To adapt to the ever-changing marketing landscape, companies need to build a team that can adapt with the times. Here are several tips on how to build a forward-thinking marketing department.

No one-size-fits-all approach

Before we dive into the basics of building out your marketing team, first keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for this. Generally speaking, you can at least usually break down marketing into two structures: distributed and centralized.

A distributed approach means that different teams (defined by product lines, marketing functions, geographical locations, etc.) will work on their own goals without coordinating with other teams, which makes these teams more nimble but less connected. A centralized approach means a single team runs everything related to marketing, which leads to more coordinated efforts but less flexibility.

“Each end of the spectrum has its own issues, so define a place on the spectrum that works for your organization and then proactively prepare a plan and set of processes to address potential issues around control and visibility,” Anita Brearton, founder and CEO of CabinetM, writes .

Start as lean as possible

When building out a marketing department, it may be tempting to try performing every function, including search engine marketing (SEM), multiple social media channels, content marketing, email marketing campaigns and creating a slick website with every bell and whistle. Instead, survey your target audience and find out what they would respond to. For example, if the majority of your audience uses LinkedIn more than Facebook or prefers reading emails to social media, use this knowledge to focus on the key ways you can attract customers and do those things well.

“One of the smartest decisions you can make when building a new marketing department is to keep things as lean as possible,” marketing guru and author Neil Patel writes . “This way you can focus on quality over quantity, and you can put energy into the channels and tactics that will give you disproportionate results.”

One of the smartest decisions you can make when building a new marketing department is to keep things as lean as possible

Hire people with diverse backgrounds and skill sets

An important part of building a future-looking marketing team, naturally, is hiring a team that can do a lot and execute on your marketing strategies. Marketing requires versatility, and as such, you’ll want to look for team members that have diverse backgrounds and skill sets. By having people with different perspectives, you can help ensure your marketing message connects with a broader audience. As for skill sets, it’s incredibly useful to make sure your team can handle every possible task.

“Hiring versatile employees has many benefits,” Pratik Dholakiya, founder of Growfusely, writes . “For one, it will keep your labor costs down — considering that you can't afford to bring on multiple specialists with exclusive skills. Second, people can jump in and solve issues quickly without all the back-and-forth. Three, both your business and your employees will be constantly expanding their savviness.”

Set and document goals

Once you’ve zeroed in on the types of marketing you want to engage in and hired team members, now you need to set your goals. You should create clear goals for both the marketing team and the company. The head of the marketing team can then design strategies for meeting these goals and communicating why these goals are important to the future of the company.

“Goal setting is important for every marketing team because it provides structure to all your activities,” Kevin Barber, founder of Lean Labs, writes . “A clear destination brings focus to the team and a clear objective inspires people to do what it takes to achieve the goal.”

Always consider the future

Finally, as your marketing team develops, be sure to continue refining your strategies and hiring people who can help you adapt to the times. Keeping your marketing organization nimble is challenging as it becomes entrenched, but it is vital if you want to spur growth and remain relevant.

“Most marketing functions still develop and roll out large and infrequent campaigns, rely on agencies to make the same old media purchases, and are organized by geography or product,” McKinsey & Company writes . “As a result, few marketing organizations are able to take full advantage of new digital and advanced analytics tools that would enable them to be more agile, engaging, and effective.”

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Home » How to Structure Your Marketing Department (the plan)

How to Structure Your Marketing Department (the plan)

Regardless of the industry that your business competes in, marketing plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers.

In this brief tutorial we are going to teach you how to structure your marketing department.

To structure your marketing department, start with the customer. Define your customer demographics, psychographics and how to communicate with them. Then build your team beginning with team members who can help you attract new customers and retain customers.

Unfortunately, most business owners, including both small and established businesses, don’t know how to structure their marketing departments. This guide outlines some of the best practices to observe when structuring your marketing department. 

How Do You Build a Marketing Department?

Structuring your marketing department is a challenging task. As mentioned, marketing is a dynamic industry. With these imminent changes, marketing team structures and individual job descriptions also change. Therefore, to adapt, companies should build a marketing team that adapts to changing times.

Below are some tips for building a future-proof marketing department.

1. There is no one-size-fits-all for your marketing department

Before looking at the various approaches of building a marketing team , remember that no one-size-fits-all. Generally, marketing can be categorized into two groups; distributed and centralized. You can use either approach to build your marketing team. As the name suggests, a distributed marketing approach involves dividing your marketing department into different teams , each defined by marketing roles, location, and product lines. Each team should work on identified goals independently from other teams.

On the other hand, a centralized marketing approach involves using a single team to coordinate every marketing element. While the centralized approach has a lot of coordination, it has limited flexibility. Both centralized and distributed marketing approaches have pros and cons. Therefore, begin by identifying what suits your organization.

If you are just getting started and need to hire your first marketing team member , many companies focus on hiring a Marketing Manager with a wide skillset who can manage a lot of projects simultaneously, including: handling the marketing budget , the marketing calendar , overseeing the web team (probably outsourced), email promotional campaigns , PPC , SEO and content , social media , print ad campaigns , direct mail letters , postcards and more.

At a certain point this person will need some help because they will quickly get overwhelmed and production quality will decline. This additional person in the marketing department may be a Marketing Specialist and can help take the load off the Marketing Manager.

2. Start small for your marketing department

When building your marketing department, you might be tempted to assign all functions, ranging from search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, web design, and more, to your small team. Doing this will stretch your small teams excessively. Therefore, the best place to begin is researching your target audience and identifying what they respond to.

For instance, if most of your customers prefer Facebook to Instagram or prefer reading emails than using social media, use these findings to curate a marketing strategy that gets to them. The best way to build your marketing team is to keep everything as lean as possible. Through this, you can focus on maximizing quality over quantity. You also get to focus on channels and use specific tactics that give results.

3. Onboard marketers with diverse skills and backgrounds who can help you gain and keep customers for your marketing department

Another crucial aspect of creating a future-proof marketing team is hiring a team with diverse backgrounds and skill sets. Rolling out an effective marketing strategy requires a lot of flexibility and versatility. Therefore, hiring a team with varying perspectives can help create marketing messages that connect with a broad audience.

Hiring people with diverse skill sets is also beneficial as it ensures that your team can handle various tasks. It will also cut on labor costs, as you won’t have to hire specialists for different tasks.

4. Set Your marketing department Goals

Having identified your preferred marketing strategy and hired a marketing team, you should focus on setting goals. You should set clear goals for your marketing teams and your business at large. The head of marketing departments should design and communicate the specific strategies for meeting these goals to their teams.

What Positions Make Up a Marketing Team?

Below are important positions and skills set that make up a marketing team;

1. Marketing Management Team

Marketing managers are responsible for the development and implementation of your marketing strategy. They also oversee the performance of other marketing departments. Roles within marketing management include;

• Chief marketing officer
• Marketing manager
• Marketing analyst
• Marketing strategist
• Product manager
• Brand manager
• Project manager

2. Social Media Team

As the name suggests, social media teams are tasked with creating and executing social media marketing efforts. As such, this team should have content creation skills, social media management skills, graphic design skills, and basic SEO knowledge.

The team should create engaging content, drive brand awareness , connect with the audience , and generate leads . They should also know how to measure the performance of social media content. Roles within the social media team include;

• Social media manager
• Social media executive
• Account manager
• Digital marketing manager

3. Search Engine Optimization Team

Search engine optimization is an important part of modern marketing. As such, your SEO team should focus on driving traffic to your website through content optimization. Your SEO team should have excellent technical, writing, and programming skills to achieve these goals.

They should also be ready to edit and proofread content to suit your target audience. They should find and implement keywords to improve your Google rankings and develop link-building strategies. Roles in this team include;

• SEO executive
• SEO copywriter
• SEO strategist
• On-page and off-page specialists

4. Web Design Team

In the current age of digitalization, your business should have a functional website. Your website should also be maintained regularly. Roles within your web design team include;

• Web developer
• Web designer
• Front-end and back-end developers
• UI/UX designer
• Graphic designer

5. Customer Acquisition Team

Even though your marketing teams should be customer-centered, your customer acquisition team primarily focuses on guiding customers throughout the buyer journey. This team is the point of contact with your target customers as they introduce your brand to customers. They should communicate to customers as your brand’s representative, thus need excellent interpersonal skills.

This team should also understand your company in-depth and pay great attention to detail. They should capitalize on every moment and convey how your products are beneficial to the target customers.

6. Digital Advertising Team

Your digital marketing team focuses on creating and overseeing the performance of paid promotions. They include;

• PPC exclusive
• Paid media specialist
• Performance analyst

How Big Should My Marketing Department Be?

Unfortunately, there is no perfect answer on how big your marketing department should be. This is because large and established businesses have different marketing needs than startups. However, regardless of your business size, the optimal size of your marketing team highly depends on the following;

• Your marketing goals and timelines – you will need a bigger and specialized team to achieve marketing goals and objectives within a short period.
• The skillset of the members – hiring skilled and experienced marketing teams means that you won’t need a big team.
• What competitors are doing – if your competitors have a strong marketing department, you need a strong team to counter their influence on the market.
• Your marketing approach – the size of your marketing team, also varies depending on whether you prefer a specialized or generalized marketing approach.

Regardless of the size of your marketing department, remember that managing a smaller team is easier. Small teams have better agility, speed and react better. However, members will have to take on a lot of tasks. On the other hand, while tasks are spread out in large teams, managing such teams is challenging. Bureaucracy also develops with large teams, and communication is muddled.

The Bottom Line

A marketing team consists of professionals with diverse roles , all with the main goal of attracting customers and increasing brand awareness. As marketing departments continue evolving, new roles that require additional teams get introduced. Therefore, your marketing team and structure may keep ballooning from time to time. As you structure your marketing department, ensure that you hire the best talent that can adapt to change.

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10 Marketing Goals Examples to Achieve Your Objectives

Sudarshan Somanathan

Head of Content

December 15, 2023

Everyone knows marketing goals are important.

One, the competition is tight with growth hacking helping rockstar startups reach impressive heights. And two, you must know what you want, or you’ll be wandering without a destination while everyone else walks past you.

However, for your marketing strategy to be successful, you need to set goals right away.

In this article, we’ll define marketing goals, explore its top ten examples, and answer a few FAQs that you may have about marketing goals.

What are Marketing Goals?

1. increase brand awareness, 2. boost brand engagement, 3. rank higher in search results, 4. increase website traffic, 5. generate qualified leads, 6. increase revenue, 7. increase customer value, 8. establish brand authority, 9. improve customer retention, 10. enhance social media presence, how to track marketing goals, faqs about marketing goals.

Marketing goals are specific objectives defined in a marketing plan .

They outline the intentions of the marketing team, provide them clear directions, and offer information for executives to review and support.

These goals can be:

• Tasks like brainstorming a digital marketing plan
• Improving in KPIs like conversion rates 
• Specific sales quotas

Or other performance-based benchmarks that you can use to measure marketing success.

To make it simpler to understand goals, ask yourself what you want.

• Increase sales or revenue?
• Improve brand recognition or thought leadership?
• Strengthen your inbound marketing efforts ?
• Initiate digital marketing or social media marketing campaigns ?
• Focus on content marketing?

Any of these are marketing goal examples.

Why is goal-setting important?

Strategic marketing objectives let you envision the marketing tactics and strategies you need to achieve them.

They’re like vision goggles that let you see all the possibilities. 🥽

A basic marketing funnel has three levels:

• Discovery (top of the funnel): People discover your brand when looking for a product or service
• Consideration (center of the funnel): The consumer is done browsing and is now ready to buy
• Purchase (Bottom of the Funnel): Your company closes the deal

When you set goals, you glide from one level of the marketing funnel to the next smoothly.

Without them, you’ll drift aimlessly from task to task, with no clear understanding of how your work makes a difference.  

So go set goals !

Bonus: SWOT Analysis Software for Businesses and Teams

Top 10 Marketing Goals Examples

Here are some sample marketing objectives that you’ll need for a stellar marketing strategy! 

When you want to photocopy something, you likely want to “Xerox it,” right? 

Here’s the thing: Xerox isn’t a verb or generic noun for photocopying. It’s a brand .

And the reason they’re so synonymous with this activity is because of brand awareness .

And your company needs to increase its own.

This goal is simple: You need to get your brand in front of more people .

Your brand has a unique personality, just like you! 

Amplify it to increase brand awareness.

Another strategy around this goal is to consider the places where your target buyers spend the most time. Maybe try a social media strategy to get a platform to engage with your target audience.

You can achieve your social media goals by:

• Posting about your company culture
• Sharing interesting industry-related articles
• Or conducting polls to connect with your audience

The point is to engage with your audience on social media and make your brand seem approachable.

Be friendly to your audience to turn them into admirers and patrons of your brand. 🤝

And then watch them share your content and their positive brand associations with their circle.

Soon, your brand name will be a synonym for your product too. 😎

Need more help with product management? 

Take a look at our product management guide and check out the top product management tools .

When people land on your website or social media pages , you want to keep them engaged.

But they have high-speed internet connections and no time to waste. 

Engage with your audience by:

• Posting regularly
• Responding to comments on social media (including Facebook ads comments !)
• Updating all online pages with the latest information

If you don’t engage them, your audience won’t think twice before hitting the back button. 

They’ll bounce off your website faster than LeBron James can shoot a 🏀.

And as soon as Google gets a whiff of high bounce rates…

And that brings us to…

Getting buried on the second page of Google search results is every brand’s worst nightmare.

If you don’t want this to come true, aim to be on top to increase web traffic! 🚀

Because higher search ranking means:

• Increased brand awareness
• Higher lead generation
• Reduced ad expenses 
• Hitting lead and revenue goals

But how do you reach the top?

A digital marketing strategy with a focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will increase your visibility in search engine rankings.

Your everyday tasks may include:

• Optimizing your content for search engines
• Targeting your business-related keywords
• Identifying crawl issues
• And link building

These tasks will ensure that your website is strong enough to reach your ideal customers. 💪

Improving your website’s visibility can also help your marketing communication goals like boosting social media engagement.

You’ll feed two birds with one scone. 😎

Ask marketing teams what they’d like most in the world. 

They’ll probably say ‘new customers.’

For this to happen, you need to have a simple goal: get more people to show up to your website so you can engage with them on your terms.

We’ve already figured that ranking higher in search results lets more people find you.

Easy to find = more web traffic

But you can’t have them land on your website and leave right after. 

Ensure your visitors get the answers to their questions.

• Help them discover more about your business, products, and services
• Include internal site links
• Add call-to-actions (CTAs)

And most importantly, ask for their contact information for your lead generation efforts.

Not only will it benefit your company, but it also helps guide your website visitors and encourages them to the next step of their journey with you. 

Once you’ve acquired their contact information, lead them through a customer journey that suits their demands to ensure that they have the best experience with your brand!

The ClickUp Content Management Template is your ultimate content marketing tool—whether you’re tracking site traffic or social posts across all your channels. Say goodbye to the hassle and hello to an easy, versatile marketing workflow that covers everything from request intake to editorial calendar maintenance and content delivery.

You want to move your site visitors from the awareness stage into the consideration stage.

So your next marketing goal is qualified lead generation .

A qualified lead is someone who can become a potential customer based on criteria and identification data that they’ve provided.

Basically, it’s someone who hasn’t confessed that they’re interested in you, but you know what’s on their mind. 😏

So you gotta make a move. 

But first, it’s necessary to note two things about such a lead:

• The criteria are unique to your business
• Qualified leads can only be those who have provided information willingly

How do you generate qualified leads?

• Target keywords that potential customers will lookup
• Try a content marketing approach like guest blogging
• Host a webinar and collaborate with an influencer or brand

Qualified leads are your shortlist for potential customers. So focus on them to – 

This is one of the most common smart marketing goals that everyone’s chasing. And it’s one that all your marketing efforts should point towards.

Time to go full throttle!

Set revenue goals and identify every marketing channel best suited for your marketing business .

Then shower all the love and attention on your potential customers.  

To help them connect with your brand on a personal level, you can:

• Connect with your leads like calls, email, chats, social media, etc.
• Offer them promotions, ads, and discounts
• Present relevant content depending on the stage of the buyer’s journey

Eventually, you’ll convert the lead to a sale!

Looking for more tips on marketing your project to increase sales? 

Check out these 20+ project management tips for marketers .

So you found new customers! But once you’re done celebrating, it’s time to think long-term. 

As a marketer, your strategy can’t just focus on just new customer acquisition.

It’s more important to care for your existing customers.

Earn their loyalty, and they’ll be your brand ambassadors, bringing more customers like them. 

And that’s not it. 

A happy customer will buy from you again, increasing their customer lifetime value. Moreover, it costs way less to retain customers than to acquire new ones.

How do you keep existing customers happy and increase customer value?

• Educate them about your products, services, and valuable opportunities you can provide them
• Run retargeting campaigns to sell more products or services 
• Come up with marketing campaigns where customers promote you and, in turn, gain some perks or privileges
• Provide quality customer service
• Give them privilege access to new products or services

Check out these marketing analytics tools!

Brand awareness is great.

But what about brand authority in the industry?

It refers to the trust your brand has earned among customers and the degree to which they view your brand as an industry expert.

Let’s say you sell some killer custom sneakers. 👟

We don’t want a customer’s journey to end there. 

If anyone wants to know what kind of dye works for shoes or how to clean sneakers without damaging them, they should hit your website.

That’s brand authority.

How do you establish it?

• Create quality and educational content that answers searchers’ questions. Your reputation will increase, and people will consider you a trustworthy source. This can be at the top of your list of content marketing goals too
• Employ social proof and display your positive testimonials for the world to see. It proves that your business creates happy customers
• Ditch the sales pitch and marketing words. Instead, show your authentic self, so people know who your brand is. Let your personality shine! ✨
• Keep focusing SEO optimizing all your online content so that you can remain numero uno on Google.

Finally, offer consistent customer service.

Learn how to manage campaigns with content marketing software !

We’re caught up in chasing new customers and assuring we have massive conversion rates.

But it’s just as important to track your existing customers’ satisfaction levels, especially for subscription-based businesses.

Evaluate how satisfied they are with your brand, products, or services.

A quick survey or regular feedback can help you understand their needs better!

Here’s what you can do:

• Track how often customers repeat purchases
• Consider following up with your customer a week after their purchase to ask for feedback
• Monitor for unhappy sentiments and resolve the issue immediately

If the customer knows that you’re constantly working to improve their experience, they’ll be more likely to stick with your business.

In today’s digital era, maintaining a strong social media presence is pivotal for a brand’s success. It serves as a platform for direct communication with the audience, promotes brand visibility, and provides opportunities for customer engagement. The goal here is to consistently increase your brand’s followers, likes, and shares across various social platforms. Accomplish this by:

• Regularly posting engaging and relevant content
• Interacting with your followers through comments, messages, and shares
• Collaborating with influencers to expand your reach
• Running contests or giveaways to encourage audience participation
• Utilizing tools for scheduling posts and tracking metrics

A robust social media presence can significantly drive traffic to your website, enhance brand reputation, and ultimately, contribute to increased sales.

Apart from a very talented marketing team and defined goals, what else do you need?

A powerful tool to manage marketing projects and goals .

ClickUp is relishing success with the help of these three aspects. It’s one of the world’s highest-rated productivity tools used by teams across the globe .

Our marketing team got us where we are by focusing on all goals and achieving them with our world-class software .

And for a company that prides itself on its marketing ways, we had to develop a tool that can be a marketer’s perfect aid .

You can use ClickUp to plan, set, and track marketing goals efficiently.

1. Set marketing Goals

Good news. ClickUp Goals , are high-level objectives that you can split into smaller Targets .

This is where you can set a digital marketing goal to track social media posts, blog posts, or revenue generations.

Use them to track:

• OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
• Weekly scorecards

A Target is a measurable objective or result. You can attach Targets to task completion, numerical values, money, or simple true/false fields. As you complete each Target, it’ll automatically add to your progress in completing the Goal.

Additionally, you can use the ClickUp Strategic Marketing Plan Template as a blueprint for your company’s annual marketing efforts. This template helps you outline the steps you need will take to achieve your marketing goals.

And in turn, that could be anything from increasing sales to expanding into new markets.

Your marketing plan should include specific targets, as well as a detailed plan of action for achieving those targets, and a method for monitoring progress and staying within budget. And with this template, you can use it as a roadmap to guide your marketing efforts over the course of a year.

2. Measure ROI with Dashboards

Dashboards are where you can view all insights on projects, tasks, people…just about anything.

Customize your Dashboards with Custom Widgets and oversee marketing campaign results at a glance.

Custom Widgets let you bring in all the data you want in the form of bar charts, pie charts, calculations, portfolios, etc.

Check out these ROI templates !

ClickUp’s Portfolio widget gives you quick insights into the status of your projects at a high level

Create a specific Dashboard for every campaign. This way, you can easily refer back to past campaigns to optimize for increased ROI.

Pro tip: ClickUp offers a goal-setting templates too. Don’t forget to try.

3. Define timelines for your goals with Gantt Chart view

Make sure your goals have a start and end date.

Make your marketing goals a ClickUp task and schedule them on ClickUp’s Gantt Chart view .

Use marketing planning software to visualize how awesome your marketing plan is.

Messed up a timeline somewhere?

Just drag and drop to rearrange your goals.

ClickUp’s Gantt view lets you plan time, manage resources, visualize dependencies, and much more

Running behind schedule?

No worries.

Gantt Chart lets you calculate the critical path automatically so you can hit the marketing goals as soon as possible.

Have more questions on your mind? Let’s answer some of them.

1. How do I to set SMART marketing goals?

For the purpose of marketing plan, every objective should be a SMART marketing goal .

Once you know your marketing objectives, it’s time to drill down to the details.

The types of marketing objectives that work best are SMART , so use this system to ensure every goal you set is worth the hustle.😎

• S pecific: Define the desired outcome in clear and specific terms so that everyone understands the objective. Set real numbers and deadlines to hold yourself accountable
• M easurable: Objectives should be measurable goals with Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and specific milestones that let you measure your success
• A chievable: Ensure they’re realistic marketing goals within the capacity of your company and team
• R elevant: The goals should be relevant to your brand mission and add to the big-picture plan
• T ime-bound: Your goals need to have a timeline that shows a start and end date

For example, a SMART website traffic goal for your blog can look like this:

By the end of this month (time-bound) , there should be a 5% rise in traffic (measurable) by increasing our weekly posts (specific) from 5/week to 8/week (achievable) .

The increase in traffic will boost brand awareness and generate more leads (relevant) .

2. What are some advertising objectives examples?

Some of the most common advertising goals or objectives include: 

• Introduce new products or services
• Demonstrate their effectiveness
• Expand into a new target market
• Build company or brand image
• Gain social media followers and improve engagement
• Generate demand and lead
• Drive more click-throughs on paid ads

3. How do I connect marketing goals to business goals?

Your business may differ from marketing department goals.

Make sure you understand what these are. Only then can you be sure of what your company wants to achieve.

Your business goals give your marketing goals some direction by giving them an outline.

This should give you a clear picture of whether you’re investing your marketing resources in the right places or not.

For example, your business objective is to increase revenue, and your company’s marketing goal is to attract more customers. That’s the connection you’re looking for.

More customers = Increased revenue generation

Start Tracking Marketing Goals With ClickUp

Your goals will be far from perfect. Even the most ambitious and inspired marketing strategies aren’t.

But they are SMART, and you can only succeed if your goals are too.

So as you create your upcoming marketing strategy, use this list of goals, SMART goal guidelines, and a powerful project management tool like ClickUp to set goals.

With ClickUp, you can plan your marketing goals, set a timeline, plan go to market strategies , track your KPIs, manage campaigns, measure ROI… 

Just show this list to your marketing team, and they’re gonna be impressed.

Join ClickUp for free to beat the marketing strategies of startups and giants…

Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.

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

Published: January 04, 2024

Do you take a good, hard look at your team's marketing strategy every year?

You should. Without an annual marketing plan, things can get messy — and it's nearly impossible to put a number on your budget for the projects, hiring, and outsourcing over the course of a year if you don't have a plan.

To make your plan's creation easier, we've put together a list of what to include in your plan and a few different planning templates where you can easily fill in the blanks.

To start, let's dive into how to create a marketing plan and then take a look at what a high-level marketing plan has inside.

In this article, we're going to discuss:

• What a High-Level Marketing Plan Includes

How to Create a Marketing Plan

• Marketing Plan Templates You Can Use
• Simplified Marketing Plan Template
• Plus — Social Media Plan Templates

Free Marketing Plan Template

Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

• Pre-Sectioned Template
• Completely Customizable
• Example Prompts
• Professionally Designed

Fill out this form to access a free marketing plan template.

Marketing plan outline.

Download This Marketing Plan Outline for Free

The above marketing plan outline will help you create an effective plan that easily generates buy-in from stakeholders and effectively guides your marketing efforts.

Marketing plans can get quite granular to reflect the industry you're in, whether you're selling to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B), and how big your digital presence is. Nonetheless, here are the elements every effective marketing plan includes:

1. Business Summary

In a marketing plan, your business summary is exactly what it sounds like: a summary of the organization. It's essential to include this information so that all stakeholders, including your direct reports, learn about your company in detail before delving into the more strategic components of your plan.

Even if you’re presenting this plan to people who’ve been in the company for a while, it doesn’t hurt to get everyone on the same page.

Most business summaries include:

The company name

Where it's headquartered

Its mission statement

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

2. SWOT Analysis

Your marketing plan's business summary also includes a SWOT analysis , which covers your business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s essential to include this information so you can create targeted strategies that help you capitalize on your strengths and improve upon your weaknesses.

In my experience, you need a lot of patience when doing a SWOT analysis; it requires market research and competitive analysis to become truly accurate. I tend to revisit this section periodically, adjusting it as I discover more information about my own business and competition.

3. Business Initiatives

The business initiatives element of a marketing plan helps you segment the various goals of your department. Be careful not to include big-picture company initiatives, which you'd normally find in a business plan. This section should outline the projects that are specific to marketing. You'll also describe the goals of those projects and how those goals will be measured.

Every initiative should follow the SMART method for goal-making . They should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, a broad goal might be something like, "Increase my Facebook following." But a SMART-ified version of this goal could be, "Increase my Facebook following by 30% by June." See the difference?

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4. Customer Analysis

In this part of the marketing plan outline, you get plenty of space to share all the data you collected during your market research . If your company has already done a thorough market research study, this section of your marketing plan might be easier to put together. Either way, try to do your research before synthesizing it in a shareable document like this one.

Ultimately, this element of your marketing plan will help you describe the industry you're selling to and your buyer persona . A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer, focusing on traits like:

Personal challenges

Triggering event

5. Competitor Analysis

Positioning

Market share

Our marketing plan template includes space to list out the specific products you compete with, as well as 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.

6. Market Strategy

Your market strategy uses the information included in the above sections to describe how your company should approach the market. 

For instance, when I'm filling out this section, I always pull insights from my SWOT analysis, my competitive analysis, and my general market research. This helps me write targeted, effective descriptions of my strategies.

Here's an 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."

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

Physical Evidence

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

When I created my first marketing plan, I made the mistake of confusing the marketing budget section of my plan with my product's price and other financials.

Here's a better way to think of this section: it should describe how much money the business has allotted the marketing team to pursue the initiatives and goals outlined in the elements above.

Depending on how many individual expenses you have, you should consider itemizing this budget by what specifically you'll spend your budget on. 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)

Knowing the budget and doing analysis on the marketing channels you want to invest in, you should be able to come up with a plan for how much budget to invest in which tactics based on expected ROI. From there, you'll be able to come up with financial projections for the year. These won't be 100% accurate but can help with executive planning.

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

8. Marketing Channels

Your marketing plan should also include a list of your marketing channels. While your company might promote the product itself using certain ad space, your marketing channels are where you'll publish the content that educates your buyers, generates leads, and spreads awareness of your brand.

If you publish (or intend to publish) on social media, this is the place to talk about it. Use the Marketing Channels section of your marketing plan to map out which social networks you want to launch a business page on, what you'll use this social network for, and how you'll measure your success on this network.

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.

Businesses with extensive social media presences might even consider elaborating on their social strategy in a separate social media plan template.

9. Marketing Technology

Last, but certainly not least, your marketing plan should include an overview of the tools you'll include in your marketing technology (MarTech) stack . These are the tools that will 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, it’s essential to connect them to a potential ROI for your business.

For each tool, describe what exactly you’ll use it for, and be sure that it’s a strategy that you’ve mentioned elsewhere. For instance, we wouldn't recommend listing an advertising management tool if you didn’t list “ PPC Advertising ” under “Marketing Channels.” As for marketing analytics software , make sure to specify what metrics you’ll track with it, why, and how it will benefit your overall marketing strategy.  

• Conduct a situation analysis.
• Define your target audience.
• Write SMART goals.
• Analyze your tactics.
• Set your budget.

1. Conduct a situation analysis.

The first step I take when creating a marketing plan is conducting a SWOT analysis. It helps me uncover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing my business.

Additionally, I need a good picture of the current market. How do I compare to my competitors? Doing a competitor analysis can help.

In doing so, I can identify the gaps (and opportunities) in a competitor's approach. What are they missing? What can I offer that'll give me a competitive advantage?

Answering questions like this should help you figure out what your customer wants, which brings us to step number two.

2. Define your target audience.

If your company already has buyer personas , this step might just mean you have to refine your current personas.

But if you don't have a buyer persona, you should create one. To do this, you might have to conduct market research.

Your buyer persona should include demographic information such as age, gender, and income. However, it will also include 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 number three.

3. Write SMART goals.

My mother always used to tell me, "You can't go somewhere unless you have a road map." Now, for me, someone who's geographically challenged, that was literal advice.

However, it can also be applied metaphorically to marketing. You can't improve your ROI unless you know what your goals are.

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. Depending on your overall marketing goals, this should be relevant and attainable. Additionally, this goal is specific, measurable, and time-bound.

Before you start any tactic, you should write out your goals. 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.

At this point, you've written down your goals based on your target audience and current situation.

Now, you have to figure out what tactics will help you achieve your goals. Plus, what are the right channels and action items to focus on?

For example, if your goal is to increase your Instagram followers by 15% in three months, your tactics might include hosting a giveaway, responding to every comment, and posting three times on Instagram per 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 ) — which 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.

Now that you know how to create your marketing plan, let's dive into creating a marketing campaign outline that will help you reach the goals outlined plan.

Marketing Plan Timeline

Rolling out a new marketing plan is a big lift. To make sure things are running smoothly with all of your projects, you'll want to create a timeline that maps out when each project is happening.

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 it’s due, and what’s up next in the pipeline. Typically these plans cover marketing efforts for the entire year, but some companies may operate on a bi-annual or quarterly basis.

Once you’ve completed your analysis, research, and set goals, it’s time to set deadlines for your assignments. From new blog posts and 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 and 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’ll have a better idea of how long each takes and will be able to 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 need to 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, figuring out how much budget will be allocated for it, finalizing deadlines and who is working on each task. Map 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?

All projects and their deadlines should be in a central location where your team can access them whether that’s a calendar like HubSpot's tool , shared document, or project management tool.

One-Page Marketing Plan Template

As demonstrated above, a marketing plan can be a long document. When you want to share information with stakeholders or simply want an overview of your plan for quick reference, having a shorter version on hand can be helpful. A one-page marketing plan can be the solution, and we’ll discuss its elements below.

Include your company name, list the names of individuals responsible for enacting the different stages of your plan, and a brief mission statement.

2. Business Initiatives

3. Target Market

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.

5. Marketing Channels

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.

Free Marketing Plan Template [Word]

Now that you know what to include in your marketing plan, it's time to grab your marketing plan template and see how best to organize the six elements explained above. The following marketing plan template opens directly in Microsoft Word, so you can edit each section as you see fit:

Download your marketing plan template here .

Marketing campaign template.

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 is a focused plan that will help achieve those marketing goals.

A marketing campaign template should include the following key components:

• Goals and KPIs: Identify the end goal for each of the individual campaigns you’ll run and the metrics you will use to measure the results of your campaign when it ends. For example, conversion rates, sales, sign-ups, etc.
• Channels: Identify the different channels you’ll use to enact your marketing campaign to reach your audience. Maybe you run a social media campaign on Twitter to raise brand awareness or a direct mail campaign to notify your audience of upcoming sales.
• Budget : Identify the budget you’ll need to run your campaign and how it will be distributed, like the amount you’ll spend on creating content or ad placements in different areas. Having these numbers also helps you later on when you quantify the success of your campaign, like ROI.
• Content: Identify the type of content you’ll create and distribute during your campaigns—for example, blog posts , video ads, email newsletters, etc.
• Teams and DRIs: Identify the teams and people that will be part of enacting your marketing plan from start to finish, like those responsible for creating your marketing assets, budgets, or analyzing metrics once campaigns are complete.
• Design: Identify what your marketing campaigns will look like and how you’ll use design elements to attract your audience. It’s important to note that your design should directly relate to the purpose of your campaign.

Digital Marketing Plan Template

A digital marketing plan is similar to a marketing campaign plan, but, as the name suggests, it’s tailored to the campaigns that you run online. Let’s go over the key components of a digital marketing plan template to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

• Objectives: The goals for your digital marketing and what you’re hoping to accomplish, like driving more traffic to your website . Maybe you want to drive more traffic to your website, or
• Budget : Identify how much it will cost to run your digital marketing campaign and how the money will be distributed. For example, ad placement on different social media sites costs money, and so does creating your assets.
• Target audience: Which segments of your audience are you hoping to reach with this campaign? It’s essential to identify the audiences you want to reach with your digital marketing, as different channels house different audience segments.
• Channels: Identifies the channels that are central to your digital marketing campaign.
• Timeline: Explains the length of time your digital campaigns will run, from how long it should take to create your assets to the final day of the campaign.

Many people use social media in their digital campaigns, and below we’ll discuss some ideas you can use for inspiration.

Social Media Marketing Plan Templates

As your marketing department grows, so will your presence on social media. And as your social media presence grows, so will your need to measure, plan, and re-plan what types of content you want to publish across each network.

If you're looking for a way to deepen your social media marketing strategy — even further than the marketing plan template above — the following collection of social media marketing plan templates is perfect for you:

Download 10 social media reporting templates here .

In the above collection of marketing plan templates, you'll get to fill in the following contents (and more) to suit your company:

• Annual social media budget tracking
• Weekly social media themes
• Required social media image dimension key
• Pie chart on social media traffic sorted by platform
• Social media post calendar and publish time

Below, let's review the social media reporting templates, and what you'll find in each one.

1. Social Media Questions

This template lists out questions to help you decide which social media management platform you should use.

What We Like

Once you know what social media tactics you're going to implement in your marketing plan, it's time to figure out what channels are right for you. This template will help you do that.

2. Facebook Live Schedule

If Facebook Live is one of the marketing tactics in your plan, this template will help you design an editorial calendar. With this template, you can organize what Facebook live's you want to do and when.

Once you've decided on dates, you can color-code your FB calendar and coordinate with your editorial calendar so everyone can see what lives are running in relation to other campaigns.

3. Instagram Post Log

Are you going to begin using Instagram regularly? Do you want to increase your following? With this template, you can organize your Instagram posts, so everyone on your team knows what posts are going live and when.

This is more than just a content calendar. You can use this doc to collaborate with your team on messaging, landing pages linked in your bio, and campaign rollouts.

4. Paid Social Media Template

With this template, you can organize your annual and monthly budget for your paid social media calendar.

With this spreadsheet, all you need to do is plug in your numbers and the formulas will do the works for you. I recommend using this in conjunction with your marketing plan budget to make sure you are not overspending and funds are allocated appropriately.

5. Social Media Audit

Conducting a social media audit? You can use this template to help you gather the right analytics . Tracking the results of your marketing efforts is key to determining ROI.

Use this template to track each of your campaigns to determine what worked and what didn't. From there, you can allocate funds for the strategies that deliver the results you want.

6. Social Media Editorial Calendar

With this template, you can organize your social media editorial calendar. For example, you can include social media posts for each platform, so your team knows what's going live on any given day.

This calendar makes it easy to track activity across every social media platform, since each platform is assigned a specific color. 

7. Social Media Image Sizes

With this template, your team can have the latest social media image sizes handy. This template includes image sizes for all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Having a resource like this readily available for your team ensures that everyone is on the same page regarding image sizes and prevents delays.

8. Social Media Marketing Proposal

With this template, you can create an entire social media marketing proposal. This will outline the social media goals, the scope of the work, and the tactics that you plan to implement.

This proposal functions as more of a deep dive into the marketing channel section of your marketing plan. It's relatively straightforward and contains all the essential sections of a proposal.

9. Social Media Reporting Template

With this template, you'll gain access to a slide deck that includes templates for social media reporting.

If you plan to implement social media in your marketing plan, these reporting templates can help you track your progress. If using the social media audit above, you can add all of your data here once it's been collected.

10. Hashtag Holidays

If you're going to lean into social media in your marketing plan, you can use hashtag holidays to generate ideas.

These holidays are a great way to fill out your social media publishing schedule. With this template, you'll get a list of all the hashtag holidays for the year. Once you've come up with content ideas, you can add them to your social media calendar.

Simple Marketing Plan Template

Of course, this type of planning takes a lot of time and effort. So if you're strapped for time before the holidays, give our new Marketing Plan Generator a try.

This tool simplifies yearly planning by asking prompted questions to help guide your process. You’ll be asked to input information about:

Try our free Marketing Plan Generator here .

• Your annual marketing mission statement, which is what your marketing is focused on for the year.
• The strategy that you’ll take with your marketing throughout the year to accomplish your marketing goals.
• Three main marketing initiatives that you’ll focus on during the year (i.e., brand awareness or building a high-quality pipeline) metrics you’ll use to measure your success.
• Your target goals for those marketing initiatives like generating 100 leads per week.
• Marketing initiatives that are not aligned with your current strategy to stay focused on your goals and activities that will help you be successful.

Once you input all information, the tool will spit out a table (as shown in the image below) that you can use to guide your processes.

Pro Tip: If the tool doesn't work, clear your browser's cache or access it in incognito mode.

Start the Marketing Planning Process Today

The best way to set up your marketing plan for the year is to start with quick wins first, that way you can ramp up fast and set yourself (and your team) up to hit more challenging goals and take on more sophisticated projects by Q4. So, what do you say? Are you ready to give it a spin?

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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