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How to develop a content marketing plan

Written by by Jenn Chen

Published on  February 14, 2022

Reading time  7 minutes

Say you’re sitting on a lot of content. Product photos, blog posts and how-to videos. How are you going to get it all out there in front of prospects and customers? Do you have specific goals tied to your content? Maybe you want to increase leads? How about growing your brand awareness and social media presence?

If you can’t answer these questions, then you need a content marketing plan.

But you’re not alone. According to one recent study , only 40% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Whether or not you are in that 40%, it’s a good idea to establish or revisit an existing content marketing plan.

In this article, we’ll cover what a content marketing plan is and how to create your own content strategy.

What is a content marketing plan?

A content marketing plan is a documented strategy that details the who, what, when, where, why and how of your content.

• Who is creating the content?
• What kind of content?
• When is the content being published?
• Where is the content being distributed
• Why are you even content marketing?
• How are promoting and analyzing the marketing results?

Why do marketers need to create a content marketing strategy?

Without a plan, content marketing is done on the fly. If you’ve ever done any of the below, then you’re in need of a content marketing plan.

• You’ve run out of things to post
• You have multiple channels but don’t know which kind of content works best where
• You don’t know what topics your audience really enjoys
• You realize you haven’t posted that day
• You don’t know what to post about

A content marketing strategy provides a framework for all of the above and much more. Plus, once you have a strategy in place, you’ll be able to use data to make sure it’s working. Content marketing spans multiple departments. Sales teams can use product sheets and case studies to nurture their leads while the marketing team can use newsletters to reach new customers.

It doesn’t matter how big your company is, you will at some point use content to help market your product or services. And if you continue to do so, having a plan keeps everyone on the same page. Instead of creating a post on the spot, you’ll have that content already completed and scheduled, leaving you more time to spend on community engagement.

10 steps to creating an effective content marketing plan

1. set goals & kpis.

Every strategy begins with goals. What do you want to achieve with your content marketing? According to a recent survey of B2B marketers , 80% said that content marketing helped them successfully achieve the goal of creating brand awareness, 75% for building credibility and trust and 70% for educating their audiences.

Some common goals are listed in the image above and if you need more help, check out our social media goals template to help you. For every goal, you’ll need at least one KPI to know how well you’re working towards those goals. You can explore useful social media KPIs to track goals like reach, engagement, conversion and consumer loyalty.

2. Decide on target audiences

The next step is to decide on your target audiences. Oftentimes, this already coincides with your buyer personas or social media personas. If you have multiple audiences, like most businesses do, then you’ll be matching up content topics and types to each one.

If you’re starting from scratch, we have a few resources you can use to learn more about finding your audiences.

• How to define and reach your target audience on social media
• Social media demographics to inform your brand’s strategy
• How to use social media personas to boost brand engagement
• How to find your target audience on Instagram

3. Audit your current content

How do you know where to go if you don’t know where you’re starting from? An audit helps answer this question, making it easy to assess your content.. To start, you’ll want to document all of your existing content. If there’s an overwhelming amount, set a limit such as 3 months or a year. You need to have a data set that gives a good look into what you’re publishing.

Running a content audit on your blog posts may help you find content you didn’t know existed. It may also help you identify duplicate content on your site. For social media posts, you can use Sprout Social’s social media audit template to help you assess content that is published on your social media platforms. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can add in a competitor or two to help benchmark your content marketing.

During the audit, take a look at:

• Topics : What are you posting about?
• Types : What types of content are you posting?
• Channels : Where are you sharing the content?
• Performance : How are your posts preforming? Check

After the documentation is complete, you should be able to see some trends on which content and channels are performing better than others.

4. Identify the best content channels

Usually, the distribution channels where you already have an engaged presence is where you want to start your content marketing plan. During the audit, you should’ve found some trends on the best channels that work for your content .

For extra data, take a look at your website’s analytics to see where the referral sources are coming from. Are people getting to your blog post via a newsletter or social media post? Do they find you more via search? Knowing where your audience is coming from will help focus your efforts on those channels.

Fifty-one percent of consumers unfollow brands on social media because of irrelevant content. If you’re still at a loss or you don’t have enough data, explore Sprout’s advice on what to post on each social media platform .

5. Decide on content types

Not all content types are created equal and there are several different content formats to consider when planning your content marketing strategy. Some perform better on certain channels while others are more expensive to create. Common content types include photos, videos, blog posts, podcasts, infographics, and user-generated content.

Your content will also change based on the marketing funnel stage and the audiences that you’re targeting.

To explore more resources on content types, take a look at the articles below:

• B2B Content Marketing: Ultimate Strategy Guide for 2024
• 5 types of social media content that can accelerate business success
• User-generated content: 5 steps to turn customers into advocates

6. Determine budget, tools & resources

Part of developing this content marketing plan is knowing how much you have to work with. This includes your budget , available tools, and staff or freelancers that you might use.

Producing creative content remotely can be challenging but it’s not impossible. In this step, figure out what resources you already have and what you’ll need (which might require approval).

For most content marketing plans, you’ll need:

• Content creator(s): who is creating the content?
• Content management system (CMS): where to plan, store, publish your content
• Content manager: who’s managing topics and production?
• Data collection: Content analyzers, reports, any digital tools you use in content marketing

7. Create a content calendar

A content calendar is vital to your strategy. You need a place to plan your content out. At the very least, it should be able to track the topics and content you want to post and when. An enhanced content calendar will also track the status of each piece of content, the distribution of it, who’s working on it and its eventual performance after marketing it.

There are plenty of content calendar templates out there for you to check out. You can also keep track of your content with your social media calendar or a spreadsheet.

8. Create content

Now it’s time for creating the actual content that you’ll be sharing. At this point, you should have a good idea of what content types and channels you’ll be using. This means that the next is content ideation, development and curation.

Sprout has plenty of resources for you to explore on content creation.

• Smart steps to content development
• How to find content inspiration for your social strategy (free worksheet)
• How to craft an effective social media content strategy
• How to write a white paper that inspires a year-long content strategy

9. Publish & promote

After the calendar is set and the content is created, the next step is to publish and promote it to the various channels you decided to focus on. If you’re promoting on multiple channels , it’s best to have one tool to get a clear, bird’s eye view of your publishing calendar.

Sprout’s social media publishing tools were created with the busy marketer in mind. Use the publishing calendar to plan and schedule out your social content. The Asset Library offers you easy access to brand-approved images and simplifies asset management in one location to access.

Remember, if your content is performing well and it’s not tied to a holiday or time-specific, repurpose it into other channels and types . Don’t be afraid to re-share the same piece of content in different ways.

10. Measure results

Finally, the last step in your content marketing strategy is to analyze. Without collecting data, you won’t know if you’re hitting the goals you set at the beginning. For channels like newsletters or your website, you’ll need either Google Analytics or any native tools analytics. To track social performance, use social media analytics tools like what Sprout offers .

For example, the Post Performance Report shows you the performance of each piece of content published. You’ll know every post’s likes, impressions, and engagement numbers.

Network-specific reports like the Instagram Business Profile Report will drill down into each network’s performance. You’ll be able to see which posts performed the best and how your overall content is doing.

Plan your content marketing strategy

Now that you know the steps, it’s time to get to work on your own content marketing strategy. If you produce and distribute content, then you need to have a strategy in place to get the most out of it. This means documenting a strategy following the 10 steps listed above. For templates and worksheets, check out the B2B content planner , an assessment for finding your own ideal content mix , and a list of free content creation templates .

A content marketing strategy is great but you’ll still need to execute it. This is where a tool like Sprout is useful, especially for publishing and analytics. Sign up for a free trial today .

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Content Marketing Plan Template

• Content Marketing Templates

Use this free content marketing plan template to make your content drive real business results. And to help you publish more often. (Available in Word, Google Docs and as a PDF.)

This template will help you create a rock-solid content marketing plan. It includes topic selection, competitive analysis, scheduling, promotion and more.

Download the Content Marketing Plan Template

The Digital Marketing Templates Library

Download as Microsoft Word

Download as PDF

Open as Google Doc

Why Use a Content Marketing Plan Template?

Compared to paid search, content marketing drives 3x as much business per dollar spent.

What’s more, content marketing can:

• Attract boatloads of SEO traffic and links
• Bring in tons of social shares
• Get your business press coverage
• Make prospective customers trust you more
• Increase your revenue

But there is one drawback:

It’s REALLY competitive.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 75% of businesses have a content marketing strategy .

So to succeed at content marketing today, you need a rock-solid plan.

And that’s exactly what this template is for.

What’s Included

Here’s what’s included in this Content Marketing Plan template:

• Finding content ideas: How to come up with topics for great pieces of content.
• How to stand out from your competitors: Competitive analysis that helps you take action. (And doesn’t leave you spinning your wheels)
• Promoting your content: How to turn your content into traffic magnets.

How to Use This Template

• Optional: Start with our free Content Strategy Template to plan your top-level strategy
• Download the free Content Marketing Plan Template on this page
• Follow the step-by-step instructions to plan out several pieces of content
• Create and publish your content
• Refer back to your content marketing plan to promote your content and measure its results

How to Turn Your Content Into a Marketing Machine

It’s hard to succeed at content marketing without a solid plan. And this template will be a HUGE help. It will take you through all the basic steps you need.

But content marketing is a big undertaking. Too big for a single template to cover.

So going beyond this template, here are some ways to turn your content into an incredible marketing machine.

• More links = better rankings. And more SEO traffic. So make your content link-worthy . And don’t passively wait for the links to come, either. You’ll get a lot more of them with a little outreach .
• Don’t forget on-page SEO, either. (Use our On-Page SEO Template .)
• Sometimes you can sell products directly within your content. But most of the time, that feels unnatural. The solution? Use your content to drive email subscribers . Then sell things to your email list.
• Optimize your site’s user experience . For example, compress any images with TinyPNG before uploading. This will help improve your page speed .
• For more actionable advice, check out our Definitive Guide to Content Marketing .

Here Are The Templates One More Time...

• Product management
• Marketing plans
• What is a content marketing plan?

Content marketing is the creation, publication, and distribution of content that reinforces important company messages. Content is primarily used to attract and build trust with target audiences by sharing expertise and establishing authority. Consistent, quality content also helps organizations achieve thought leadership within their market, build brand awareness, boost organic search, and generate and convert leads.

Content is the foundation of nearly all types of marketing — from product marketing to email marketing to social media . But it is also a strategic marketing approach in its own right. So while content is typically one aspect of a marketing team's overall marketing plan , most marketing teams build out separate content plans to define content activities, set production schedules, and keep the team in sync.

Skip ahead to any section:

The importance of a content plan

Components of a content plan, how to create a content plan.

A content plan aligns content work with your overall marketing team strategy , defines the content you will create, and sets timelines for getting it done. It should serve as a high-level guide that defines the topics, cadence, and channels that make it possible to communicate with your audience in a way that inspires them to engage and take action.

Your content plan will include the content needed to support specific campaigns, product launches, or other initiatives to reach new audiences. It should also define the plan for your regular production cadence, which might include blog posts or newsletter content. Creating a calendar is a great way to bring all of these deliverables together. Calendars not only help set the timelines for getting work done, but they also help you visualize everything — from the status of a particular piece of content to its associated campaign — in a single view.

You can create a content-specific calendar view similar to this one using Aha! software .

Content plans are essential for a number of reasons:

Strategy alignment: Content plans align content work with marketing and overall organizational objectives, ensuring that content teams focus on the work that matters most.

Coordination: The best content plans clearly define what will be completed and when, keeping teams on schedule and in sync.

Messaging alignment: Content plans get the whole team on the same page with approved messaging by providing a framework for communicating company messages.

Visibility: Content plans offer visibility into a company's content work. This is useful for the broader marketing team as well as executive leadership.

Agility: Well-crafted content plans give content teams the agility to quickly adapt and respond to current events that resonate with audiences.

Content plans can incorporate many different types of content. When creating a content plan, consider the types that resonate best with your audiences. For example, consumer audiences are more likely to engage with social media or email content, while business audiences tend to consume more educational content such as white papers or blog posts.

Here are the definitions of the types of content you might include in your plan.

Content is a vital part of any organization's efforts to attract and convert leads. At their most basic level, content plans provide a production schedule for upcoming content work. But building an effective content plan involves much more than that. You must ground your plan in measurable and time-bound goals, define workflows, determine your content mix, and much more.

As a start, a monthly calendar can help you visualize your content plan. This whiteboard template in Aha! software is a great option for sketching out your content schedule, annotating ideas, and collaborating without the rigidity of a normal calendar. Plus, once everything is mapped out, work can easily be converted into a strategic plan in Aha! Roadmaps .

Start using this template now

Follow the steps below to build a plan that helps you get the most out of your content as well as your overall marketing efforts.

Set your goals

Start with your overall business and marketing goals and determine how content will help you achieve those goals and when. This step must always come first. The goals you set now will influence the remaining decisions you make about your content plan. Content marketing goals might include increased website traffic, conversions, or share of voice.

Complete an audit

If this is your first content plan, document all of the content you already have and how well it performs against KPIs. And identify where your content is failing to support the customer journey or speak to customer needs. Keyword analysis is also important here — look for missed opportunities based on your target terms. Your audit will help you decide what types of content or topics to include in your plan and what you want to leave out in order to achieve your goals.

Decide your content mix

Each type of content brings a unique set of benefits, so it is important to use your goals to determine which types of content you will create. Search-optimized website content and blogs are great for increased web traffic, while social media content can help boost brand awareness. Remember who your customers are too. Know what types of content they will read and engage with and create your mix accordingly.

Determine delivery channels

After you decide the type of content you want to create, determine how you will deliver it to your audiences. This decision should be based on the typical buyer journey for your company's products or services. What channels do prospects use to interact with your company before converting? How much research do they conduct before making a purchase? Email drip campaigns, paid advertising, and social media are commonly used channels for distributing content.

Brainstorm themes and topics

Once you have decided on your content and channel mix, decide at a high level what themes you want to write about and identify specific topics within those themes. It is important to ensure that the themes you choose tie back to the company's overall vision and strategy. Your content must always help move overall organizational objectives forward.

Detail production workflows

It is important to determine what steps are involved in the creation of each piece of content. Who within your organization needs to review each piece? What does the editing and approval process look like? This will help you create a plan that is possible to be completed within your set time frame.

Set a production cadence

With workflows in mind, determine how often you want to publish content. Do you want to post two blog posts per week or three? What about daily social posts? Then determine the resources you need to accomplish it. You might need additional in-house support or maybe freelance writers if your desired cadence is not manageable with the resources you currently have. Or you might need to adjust your cadence so it is realistic for your current team.

Create a schedule

Once you have defined production workflows and cadence, set timelines for each piece of content and assign the work to the appropriate internal team members or outside resources. This will keep your team in sync and on schedule. Schedules are often visualized in a calendar that clearly show go-live dates as well as any associated themes, campaigns, or personas.

Define dependencies

Lastly, determine what all needs to happen for your plan to be successful — including cross-functionally. This will help you prioritize work and set your team up to meet deadlines. For example, a script must be completed before a videographer can begin working on a video.

Content marketing can be incredibly effective — especially in B2B where buyers are increasingly conducting their own research before reaching out to companies to make a purchase. Content can serve as a way to attract potential customers and differentiate your products or services during this critical research phase.

To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you need a solid plan that sets strategy, defines the work, and keeps your team on schedule.

While templates can help bring consistency and structure to your creative process, it is up to you to nurture your own curiosity and think beyond the brief. Then, when inspiration strikes, you are able to harness it in the most effective way.

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Content Marketing Strategy: The Beginners’ Guide

76% of marketers accept that content marketing generates quality leads. While 56% say it produces the highest return on investments .

Content marketing strategy is one of the best ways to build your brand authority, educate your customers and attract new users.

The content on your website, social media platforms and other digital platforms acts as a guide for your ideal customers, informs them about the benefits of your products and establishes a strong brand presence in the industry.

It is the content that gives voice to your brand, helps you narrate your brand journey and appeals to your customers with your stories.

But there are different forms of content. From blogs to social media posts, webinars, ebooks and whitepapers, every content format attracts different groups of people. Plus, they serve different purposes in a marketing strategy.

• How do we know which content format to use and where?
• What should be your content pillars?
• How to plan your content strategy?

This is where content marketing strategy comes into the scene.

If you have no idea how content marketing works, this guide is for you.

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

What Is Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is the plan for creating and sharing content across all digital platforms.

The best content marketing strategy is the one that:

• Publishes content relevant to your audience
• Builds your brand authority
• Caters to your customer’s pain points
• Increases website traffic
• Converts leads to loyal customers
• Boosts customer engagement
• Builds strong customer relations

Content marketing doesn’t just focus on achieving one goal. If done the right way, it can help you increase your online visibility, build a huge customer base and open revenue streams.

An ideal content marketing strategy includes:

• Goals – what do you want to achieve with your content?
• Audience – who are you creating the content for?
• Content types – which content types will you use?
• Promotion – which digital platforms will you use?

If you align these points correctly, you will build a list of content pillars and topics that offer value to your customers and fulfill your business goals.

For example, you are to run content marketing campaign for a beauty and skincare brand. You can use a content mix of blogs, Instagram reels, and newsletters. So, you generate a buyer journey and create content across all stages to successfully lead the buyer to buy your products at the end.

You will want to educate your buyer about skincare routines and beauty tips. Then you can show how your products fit perfectly to your customer’s ideal skincare regime.

• Blogs will help you educate your customers in detail
• Instagram posts will create a sensation about your products
• Newsletters will keep your audience informed about upcoming sales, offers and product releases.

Please note that content strategy and types depend on your niche. What works for a beauty brand may not work for a tech company.

So, define your business goals, identify your target audience, and plan a winning content marketing strategy.

Why Is Content Marketing Strategy Important?

A documented content strategy helps you create and distribute content that offers value to your customers and helps you achieve your business goals.

Otherwise, you will waste resources in creating content without value for your customers or business.

Here are some reasons why you need a content marketing strategy.

• A content marketing strategy aligns your content format and types to your business goals. This means you will not waste resources creating irrelevant content.
• A content plan ensures that everyone on the team is aware of the purpose of the content and works in sync to achieve that.
• Content marketing agencies often go for documented strategies and brand guidelines. This enables them to showcase their efforts and results to their clients.
• A strategized content calendar streamlines your content creation and distribution process. So, you can publish your content more efficiently and effectively.
• When you have a proper content marketing strategy, you can easily evaluate the results and identify what’s working and what’s not. Therefore, you can change the strategy as and when needed.
• A well-executed plan for content marketing with targeted keywords and topics can bring substantial traffic and leads to your website.
• By consistently producing quality content, you can establish your brand as an authority in the industry. This will also help you build customer trust and gain their loyalty for long-term goals.

Tip: Please ensure that you have a documented content marketing strategy. Because 80% of the content marketing agencies who documented their brand guidelines, resources, goals, and content calendar have high success rates.

How to create a content marketing strategy?

Here is a step-by-step process to create a successful content marketing strategy.

The first step of any digital marketing strategy is setting a goal. Similarly, here you need to set one or multiple goals for your content plan.

The below questions are some of the top ones that will help you define your goals.

• Do you want to attract more traffic?
• Do you want to educate your customers?
• Do you want to educate users and sell products?
• Do you want to boost customer engagement?
• Do you want to have a huge follower base on social media?
• Once you have set your goals, it’s time to find out how to achieve them through a strong content strategy.

Create buyer persona

The next step to planning content marketing is to know who are you creating the content for.

• Understand your audience – who are they?
• What are their pain points?
• What excites or interests them?
• What is their buying intent?

Create a buyer persona of your ideal customer with all characteristics like age, demographics, buying nature, history, interests, challenges etc. Align your ideal buyer persona with the company’s actual customers.

Buyer persona helps you understand what your customers are looking for. So, you create content that either interests them or resolves their pain points. In any case, you will be creating content with a high probability of your ideal buyers consuming it.

Choose your content type

As we discussed before, not all content types perform best for all niches.

A beauty or travel brand may have Instagram reels working best for them. While a tech company can generate leads from LinkedIn posts.

So it’s important to decide your content type and content marketing platform.

Depending on your niche, you can choose from a wide range of content types for marketing like:

• Social media posts
• Video and reels
• Whitepapers
• Infographics
• Newsletters

Each content marketing type gives you an opportunity to educate users, attract new users, and promote your products. It all depends on how smartly you use them.

Determine buyer journey

The end goal for all digital marketing strategies is to convert the leads into buyers. So your content plan should also follow the marketing funnel assisting leads at every stage to help them make an informed decision.

The marketing funnel includes:

• TOFU (Top-of-Funnel) – make prospects problem aware and solution aware
• MOFU (Middle-of-Funnel) – present your products as the best solution to the problem
• BOFU (Bottom-of-Funnel) – convert leads into buyers through customer stories, demos, and events

For example, you run a wellness products brand. So, at the TOFU stage, you educate your customers about the hair loss problem, its causes, and possible solutions. Moving forward, at the MOFU stage, you present your products as an ideal solution to the leads.

Now at the final stage BOFU, you win over your leads by sharing reviews, testimonials, and customer stories of how your products helped them cure their hair problem.

This content marketing approach takes the user from the top of the funnel to the end with one goal – to buy your products.

Find keywords and topics

Use your market research, buyer persona and data to brainstorm content ideas for your website and business.

For blogs, you need to search for topics with high search volume. But not always high search volume topics get the most clicks and impressions.

Sometimes a keyword with average search volume and quality content can also attract huge traffic. Also, professional digital marketers share their experiences of how trending topics got them a boost in traffic and rankings.

If a topic is new but trending in your niche. If you think this topic is going to be a big hit in the coming time, grab the opportunity.

Be one of the first websites to create and publish quality blogs covering all aspects of that topic. This will help you beat your competitors, and get more traffic and users to your website. Considering all factors, your content marketing goal should be a mix of content pillars like educational, promotional, and trending content types.

For keyword research, you can use tools like:

• Google Keyword planner
• Ubersuggest
• For topic research, you can use:
• AnswerThePublic

These tools will help you come up with quality topics for your website blogs.

Tip: When creating a content marketing strategy, focus on creating a web of interconnected blogs and not separate blogs. The best way is to create a pillar blog first and then divide the subtopics into further blogs.

Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO

Create a content calendar

Having a content calendar streamlines your content development process.

• Some topics are evergreen while some have time limits. Therefore, prioritize topics on your content calendar
• Track the content creation process – whether it’s at the writing stage, SEO content optimization, or graphics stage.
• Focus on important calendar dates like festivals and holidays to plan your blogs, videos, and social media posts.
• Content calendar enables you to publish your content on time and grab the opportunity without missing any important dates.

Content Audit

Regularly track your content performance and the goals it achieved.

• Did your content bring traffic to the website?
• Did your content convert leads into buyers?
• Did your content have high rankings, CTR, or clicks?
• Do customers engage with your content?
• What is the reach of your posts and blogs?
• Which demographics of your content performed better? ..and more

Keeping track of the content KPI metrics helps you identify the gaps in your content marketing strategy. Therefore, you can revise the strategy for better performance.

Another purpose of content audit is to keep your content fresh and relevant. Identifying the loopholes in your old blogs and updating them with fresh data can help you repurpose the blogs and bring them back on track.

Content Marketing Best Practices

Some of the best content marketing practices are:

Define Your Goals:

Content marketing thrives on clear objectives. Before diving in, take a fresh look at your brand’s goals and craft a structured strategy to achieve them.

Master Keyword Research:

Smart keyword selection is the backbone of content marketing. Research your target keywords thoroughly, then continuously monitor search volume, clicks, and competition to stay ahead of trends.

Schedule for Success:

Consistency is key in online content. Create a content calendar for each platform you manage such as website, blog, and social media apps to streamline the process and maintain a steady flow.

Focus on Your Audience:

Great content marketing prioritizes the audience. By understanding and addressing user needs, factors like search rankings and conversions become easier to manage.

SEO Optimization:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial. Optimize your content using current best practices, but remember: create content for people, not just search engines.

Track and Adapt:

Monitoring progress is essential. Track your results using key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your strategy for content marketing. Be ready to adapt and refine your approach as needed.

Questions to Ask When Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Here is a list of important questions you should ask and find answers to before creating a content marketing plan.

• Who is your target audience?
• What is your ideal buyer persona?
• What interests your target audience?
• What are their challenges or pain points?
• Who are your competitors?
• What services are they offering?
• What problems the users are facing with your competitors?
• What is the content gap with your competitors?
• What makes your services and content unique?
• Which content formats are best for your products?
• Which content management system will you use?
• Which SEO tool will you use?
• How will you do the topic research?
• How often will you publish your content?
• Which metrics will you use to track content performance?
• How often will you revise your old content?
• How will you manage content creation and publication?
• These basic questions will help you get started with your content strategy.

Craft an Effective Content Marketing Strategy!

An ideal content marketing strategy is one that fulfills your business goals, establishes your brand authority, converts leads, engages the audience, increases traffic and boosts revenue.

Content creation and publication aren’t a cakewalk. You need the right experts to help you plan and create quality content that gives results. TopDevelopers has a list of experienced and seasoned content marketing agencies where you can find the right partner who can help you create a successful content marketing strategy.

FAQs Regarding Content Marketing Strategy

What are the best content marketing research tools.

Some of the best content marketing tools are Hubspot, Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, Yoast SEO and Google Console.

What are the most effective types of content?

Blogs, social media posts, infographics and videos are some of the most effective content types that can attract new users, engage audiences and build brand authority.

How do you measure the success of a content marketing strategy

Website traffic, impressions, clicks, CTR and rankings are a few metrics to track your content performance. Plus, if your content is converting leads, engaging your audience, going viral and eventually fulfilling your business goals, then signs of your content plan success.

How often should you review and update your content marketing strategy?

Review your strategy for content marketing at least annually. Ideally, check in quarterly and be ready to adjust based on performance, industry shifts, or audience feedback. This will keep your strategy fresh and effective.

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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:

More marketing design guides and templates:

• Marketing Infographics: The Definitive Guide [Includes Infographic Templates]
• 20+ Business Pitch Deck Templates to Win New Clients and Investors
• 20+ White Paper Examples [Design Guide + White Paper Templates]
• The Evolution of Marketing [Timeline Infographic]

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Content Planning for Social Media in 8 Steps [2024 Guide]

Content planning is more than scheduling. Run your accounts like a well-oiled machine with a strategic social media content plan.

Table of Contents

Ahoy, social media sailors. To navigate the choppy seas of social media, you need to do some solid content planning before you set sail.

The most seasoned social sailors know that you must carefully chart your course before stepping on the ship. Without a content plan, you’re blindly casting yourself into an ocean of content, with competitor sharks nipping at your bow.

If you want the tides to turn in your favor, you need to map out your content plan. Follow the eight steps outlined below, and you’ll make it through your journey safe and sound.

OwlyWriter AI instantly generates captions and content ideas for every social media network. It’s seriously easy.

What is social media content planning?

In social media, content planning is the process of strategizing and scheduling content.

Content planning involves deciding what to post and when to post it. Social media content planning helps you to achieve goals like increased visibility, engagement, or brand awareness.

Well-planned social media content is:

• Created in batches to optimize efficiency.
• Part of a cross-platform campaign and repurposed across all your channels for maximum impact.
• Connected to one or more marketing goals.
• Balanced between your own original content and curated content .

Why content planning is important

We’ve answered, “What is a content plan?” Now we’ll answer, “Why have a content plan?” Lucky you—it’s because we care about the Future You. A little bit of planning upfront will make your life easier in the long run, we promise.

Here are a few benefits you can expect from creating your own content plan.

Social media content planning keeps you organized

Batching your content is way more efficient than trying to come up with a post on the fly every day or for a specific campaign. Batching means you’re taking the time to specifically write a bunch of social media content at once.

Besides being a more efficient way to write content, you’ll get more out of it. As you write each piece of content, extract pieces of it to repurpose. One post can quickly become five or more without much extra time.

For example:

• Write an Instagram Reels script.
• Create a text caption from that script to use on text-based platforms like X (Twitter).
• Create an image or infographic from the Reel content to use as an alternative way to communicate the information.
• And, of course, the most basic: Make a note to save your completed Reel video in different sizes to use on other platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook Pages, TikTok, and more. Check the current recommended post sizes for each platform before saving.
• There are many more options, including writing an article about the topic, to a series of short posts of the key takeaways, and everything in between.

Content planning saves time and gets you the most mileage out of your work. Create a content calendar (like the one below) to keep yourself on track and on time.

Source: Hootsuite’s FREE Content Calendar Template

A social content plan helps you avoid last-minute pressure (and writer’s block)

The best thing about a content plan is that it forces you to plan ahead. You’ll be prepared for any holidays relevant to your industry or audience (hello, posts for National Puppy Day ).

View this post on Instagram A post shared by DANIEL HENSON (@danielghenson)

More than the expected holiday observances, content planning ensures you do your best work. Planning ahead allows space for creative thinking and collaboration and avoids burnout. All are important for creating a positive workplace culture where employees become brand advocates .

Plus, when you’re prepared for the month ahead, you have more time to create posts on the fly for trending topics as they come up in the news cycle.

A content plan connects your social media activity to marketing goals

Planning social media content keeps your eyes on the prize. You’ve got a formal marketing strategy and, hopefully, a content strategy, too. (No? We’ve got a free social media strategy template for ya).

Source: Hootsuite’s FREE Social Media Strategy Template

Your content planning process is what connects those big-picture documents to the day-to-day marketing work your team does.

Despite what your content creator may tell you, individual social media posts aren’t that important on their own. But all of your posts, working toward the same goal together, will determine whether your social media strategy will sink or swim, fail or fly, crash out or cash in. You get it.

How to plan content for social media in 8 steps

We’ve covered the what and the why of social content planning. Welcome to the how to make a content plan.

The following will guide you through how to plan content for social media in 8 easy steps.

Step 1: Plan themes for your content

The first step in content planning is knowing what you’re going to be posting about.

How many topics you have and what they are depends on your unique business, but as an example, Hootsuite posts about:

• Social media marketing tips and industry trends
• Social network updates and best practices
• Marketing research and statistics, like the free Social Trends 2024 report
• Social media marketing experiments , especially on our Hootsuite Labs YouTube channel
• Product updates and features
• Company news
• Product education (tutorials, tips)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hootsuite 🦉 (@hootsuite)

These topics will be your content creation roadmap. If a post isn’t about one of the things on your list, you don’t post it. (Or, if it’s merited, you rethink your marketing strategy and add a new category for it.)

Step 2: Brainstorm campaign and post ideas

With your topic list in front of you, free-write a bunch of post ideas. Don’t think about whether they’re good or bad; set a timer for 15 minutes and jot down as many as you can.

Once you have a list of ideas, pare them down to meet the following criteria:

• It’s about one of the topics on your list.
• It’s connected to your marketing goals.

Need help with the above? We know it’s not that simple to just “think of ideas,” even for those of us who smash keyboards for a living. How you brainstorm is up to you, but here are a few ways I get inspired:

• Scope out your competition . What are they posting? Can you put your own spin on those ideas?
• Review the past . What campaigns have been most successful for you before? What elements of those campaigns were most effective? How can you replicate that for your new goal or campaign?
• Use AI to generate a list of ideas you can build on.
• Look around . What’s going on in the world right now? Anything related to your industry or audience interests?
• Steal some of these pre-thought-up social media post ideas !

Source: ChatGPT

To know what’s worked before, you need top-notch analytics reports . Hootsuite Analytics gives you a full 360-degree view of your performance across all networks. Custom reports will show you what you need to do more of and what you can leave out of your content plan.

Step 3: Decide when you will post

We’ve got our why and what. Now we need the when. This leads us to the daily best time to post on your social media platforms.

You’re also going to want to keep an eye on your overall posting frequency .

You’ll need to experiment with how often you’re posting every week and how many posts per day.

Hootsuite’s Best Time to Publish feature analyzes your unique audience engagement patterns to determine the best times to post across all your accounts.

It also recommends different times for different goals. For example, when to post awareness or brand-building content and when to push hard for sales.

Source: Hootsuite

Need to get your social marketing started quickly and hit the ground running? Add your posts, either individually or via bulk upload, hit AutoSchedule , and Hootsuite does the rest. Boom—your social media for the month done in under five minutes.

Of course, AutoSchedule is great for those pressed for time, but you should still experiment with different numbers of posts per week and times of day to find what works best for your target audience.

You can customize AutoSchedule to only post during set times or days of the week. Once you decide how often and when to post, either with Hootsuite Analytics or other tools, modify your AutoSchedule settings and now you have effortless social media post scheduling. Nice.

Only want to post once a day at a specific time? No problem.

Step 4: Decide on your content mix

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel daily. A successful social media and content marketing plan contains a mix of original and curated content . But what should you curate? Where from? How often?

Great curated content is:

• Relevant to your audience.
• Related to one of your content themes (from Step 1).
• Connected to a business goal.

How each piece and type of content fits in with your other social media content is more important than how much of it you share, but a standard content mix is 40% original and 60% curated .

With tools like Talkwalker, you can easily add content from around the web to build a library of quality content to share later. Try some of our robust social listening tools.

Source: Talkwalker

Psst : Hootsuite is set to acquire Talkwalker VERY SOON . This means that you will get access to Talkwalker social listening and analytics directly in your Hootsuite dashboard!

Step 5: Assign responsibilities

Setting clear expectations around who’s doing what is essential for content planning (and, so I hear, life). Social marketing teams with writers, designers, customer support peeps, and so on need a clear delineation of responsibilities.

A social media workflow will define who does what and how the content process will move from content planning to creation to publication. A well-done social media approval workflow will have your content planning process zipping along like a well-oiled machine.

Bonus : Within Hootsuite’s Business and Enterprise plans, you can assign permissions to different accounts. This way, only those who are responsible for publishing can actually publish a post, and so on. This avoids confusion and mistakes when it comes to content publication.

Everything you need to make engaging content. AI support for captions, an AI hashtag generator, and access to Canva in Hootsuite.

Step 6: Write post captions

Whenever possible, it’s best to write your social media post content before the campaign goes off to the design team (the next step).

This has a few key benefits:

• It gives context to the designer so they can work efficiently.
• They will have a better understanding of the entire campaign’s structure and goals.
• While writing the posts, you may think of more ideas to add to the campaign to fill gaps.
• It saves time by allowing copyediting and approvals to happen simultaneously with design, so you can publish it sooner.

Hootsuite comes with OwlyWriter AI, a built-in creative AI tool that saves social media pros hours of work. You can use OwlyWriter to:

• Write a new social media caption in a specific tone, based on a prompt
• Write a post based on a link (e.g. a blog post or a product page)
• Generate post ideas based on a keyword or topic (and then write posts expanding on the idea you like best)
• Identify and repurpose your top-performing posts
• Create relevant captions for upcoming holidays

To get started with OwlyWriter, sign in to your Hootsuite account and head to the Inspiration section of the dashboard. Then, pick the type of AI magic you want to see in action.

For example, if you’re not sure what to post, click on Get inspired . Then, type in the general, high-level topic you want to address and click Get ideas .

OwlyWriter will generate a list of post ideas related to the topic: 

Click on the one you like best to move to the next step — captions and hashtags.

Pick the caption you like and click Create post . The caption will open in Hootsuite Composer, where you can make edits, add media files and links, check the copy against your compliance guidelines — and schedule your post to go live later.

And that’s it! OwlyWriter never runs out of ideas, so you can repeat this process until your social media calendar is full — and sit back to watch your engagement grow.

Step 7: Create (or source) design assets

This is often where content plans get bottlenecked. You can think up all these amazing campaigns, but without the creative assets that get them noticed, like graphics and videos, you can be stuck in your drafts forever.

This is why a social media workflow is important. Having a dedicated person and a specific timeline for each part of the content planning process keeps things moving along.

With Hootsuite Planner , you can collaborate with other team members on specific campaigns, view the overall calendar, and map out your content to identify opportunities and gaps to fill. Plus, approvals are a snap with the built-in approval process, so the only content that gets posted is the content that should be.

Source: Hootsuite Planner

Here’s how everyone can work together inside Hootsuite to bring a campaign from idea to finished:

Step 8: Schedule content in advance

Last but very not least, scheduling. Scheduling your content ahead of time is important for basic efficiency. Plus, it will help bring your social media marketing strategy to life.

Hootsuite, we’re not too humble to admit, can help save you tons of time with publication; you can schedule content to all of your favorite platforms in advance from the same dashboard. Plus, you’ll get:

• Easy team collaboration,
• detailed analytics,
• ads management,
• social listening, and more—all in one convenient place.

You can create single posts in Composer or dial up your efficiency to 11 with the much-loved bulk upload tool, where you and 350 of your best posts can be scheduled in under 2 minutes flat.

Bonus: Download our free, customizable social media calendar template to easily plan and schedule all your content in advance.

7 free content planning resources

This content calendar template.

This free content calendar skeleton will show you how to organize and schedule your content in advance. Just fill it out with your content plan and let the organizational endorphins roll in.

This campaign template

Use this free campaign template as a structured framework to plan your campaign. Answer each of the sections to create a strategy for your next social campaign.

An engagement rate calculator

Running the numbers is never super fun. Luckily, this free engagement rate calculator makes it easy to measure the effectiveness of your content or social media efforts. You’ll be able to quantify how well your audience interacts with your posts. In turn, these insights can help you to optimize your social strategy.

This ROI guide

Knowing what your return on investment (ROI) is can help you convince your superiors that your social plan is working! This free ROI guide can help you reallocate your social budget in a smart way.

The best free social media audit template

A full-scale social media audit is great for onboarding new clients or getting a lay of the land with existing social media accounts. This free audit template is a systematic checklist for evaluating your current social strategy.

Your cheat sheet for image sizes

This free image size guide is a quick reference guide for the optimal image dimensions across different social platforms. It’ll help your content look polished and professional.

The only social strategy guide you’ll ever need

Want comprehensive insights and best practices for developing effective marketing strategies? Then this guide’s for you. Take these nine steps to achieve long-term success in your marketing efforts.

Hootsuite is your content planning partner in success with robust scheduling, collaboration, analytics, and smart insights like the Best Time to Publish feature to make your job easier. Sign up for free today.

Save time and grow faster with OwlyWriter AI, the tool that instantly generates social media captions and content ideas .

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

As an ex-agency strategist turned freelance WFH fashion icon, Michelle is passionate about putting the sass in SaaS content. She's known for quickly understanding and distilling complicated technical topics into conversational copy that gets results. She has written for Fortune 500 companies and startups, and her clients have earned features in Forbes, Strategy Magazine and Entrepreneur.

Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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How to Write a Business Plan: Step-by-Step Guide + Examples

Noah Parsons

24 min. read

Updated May 7, 2024

Writing a business plan doesn’t have to be complicated. 

In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn how to write a business plan that’s detailed enough to impress bankers and potential investors, while giving you the tools to start, run, and grow a successful business.

• The basics of business planning

If you’re reading this guide, then you already know why you need a business plan . 

You understand that planning helps you: 

• Raise money
• Grow strategically
• Keep your business on the right track 

As you start to write your plan, it’s useful to zoom out and remember what a business plan is .

At its core, a business plan is an overview of the products and services you sell, and the customers that you sell to. It explains your business strategy: how you’re going to build and grow your business, what your marketing strategy is, and who your competitors are.

Most business plans also include financial forecasts for the future. These set sales goals, budget for expenses, and predict profits and cash flow. 

A good business plan is much more than just a document that you write once and forget about. It’s also a guide that helps you outline and achieve your goals. 

After completing your plan, you can use it as a management tool to track your progress toward your goals. Updating and adjusting your forecasts and budgets as you go is one of the most important steps you can take to run a healthier, smarter business. 

We’ll dive into how to use your plan later in this article.

There are many different types of plans , but we’ll go over the most common type here, which includes everything you need for an investor-ready plan. However, if you’re just starting out and are looking for something simpler—I recommend starting with a one-page business plan . It’s faster and easier to create. 

It’s also the perfect place to start if you’re just figuring out your idea, or need a simple strategic plan to use inside your business.

Dig deeper : How to write a one-page business plan

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• What to include in your business plan

Executive summary

The executive summary is an overview of your business and your plans. It comes first in your plan and is ideally just one to two pages. Most people write it last because it’s a summary of the complete business plan.

Ideally, the executive summary can act as a stand-alone document that covers the highlights of your detailed plan. 

In fact, it’s common for investors to ask only for the executive summary when evaluating your business. If they like what they see in the executive summary, they’ll often follow up with a request for a complete plan, a pitch presentation , or more in-depth financial forecasts .

Your executive summary should include:

• A summary of the problem you are solving
• A description of your product or service
• An overview of your target market
• A brief description of your team
• A summary of your financials
• Your funding requirements (if you are raising money)

Dig Deeper: How to write an effective executive summary

Products and services description

This is where you describe exactly what you’re selling, and how it solves a problem for your target market. The best way to organize this part of your plan is to start by describing the problem that exists for your customers. After that, you can describe how you plan to solve that problem with your product or service. 

This is usually called a problem and solution statement .

To truly showcase the value of your products and services, you need to craft a compelling narrative around your offerings. How will your product or service transform your customers’ lives or jobs? A strong narrative will draw in your readers.

This is also the part of the business plan to discuss any competitive advantages you may have, like specific intellectual property or patents that protect your product. If you have any initial sales, contracts, or other evidence that your product or service is likely to sell, include that information as well. It will show that your idea has traction , which can help convince readers that your plan has a high chance of success.

Market analysis

Your target market is a description of the type of people that you plan to sell to. You might even have multiple target markets, depending on your business. 

A market analysis is the part of your plan where you bring together all of the information you know about your target market. Basically, it’s a thorough description of who your customers are and why they need what you’re selling. You’ll also include information about the growth of your market and your industry .

Try to be as specific as possible when you describe your market. 

Include information such as age, income level, and location—these are what’s called “demographics.” If you can, also describe your market’s interests and habits as they relate to your business—these are “psychographics.” 

Related: Target market examples

Essentially, you want to include any knowledge you have about your customers that is relevant to how your product or service is right for them. With a solid target market, it will be easier to create a sales and marketing plan that will reach your customers. That’s because you know who they are, what they like to do, and the best ways to reach them.

Next, provide any additional information you have about your market. 

What is the size of your market ? Is the market growing or shrinking? Ideally, you’ll want to demonstrate that your market is growing over time, and also explain how your business is positioned to take advantage of any expected changes in your industry.

Dig Deeper: Learn how to write a market analysis

Competitive analysis

Part of defining your business opportunity is determining what your competitive advantage is. To do this effectively, you need to know as much about your competitors as your target customers. 

Every business has some form of competition. If you don’t think you have competitors, then explore what alternatives there are in the market for your product or service. 

For example: In the early years of cars, their main competition was horses. For social media, the early competition was reading books, watching TV, and talking on the phone.

A good competitive analysis fully lays out the competitive landscape and then explains how your business is different. Maybe your products are better made, or cheaper, or your customer service is superior. Maybe your competitive advantage is your location – a wide variety of factors can ultimately give you an advantage.

Dig Deeper: How to write a competitive analysis for your business plan

Marketing and sales plan

The marketing and sales plan covers how you will position your product or service in the market, the marketing channels and messaging you will use, and your sales tactics. 

The best place to start with a marketing plan is with a positioning statement . 

This explains how your business fits into the overall market, and how you will explain the advantages of your product or service to customers. You’ll use the information from your competitive analysis to help you with your positioning. 

For example: You might position your company as the premium, most expensive but the highest quality option in the market. Or your positioning might focus on being locally owned and that shoppers support the local economy by buying your products.

Once you understand your positioning, you’ll bring this together with the information about your target market to create your marketing strategy . 

This is how you plan to communicate your message to potential customers. Depending on who your customers are and how they purchase products like yours, you might use many different strategies, from social media advertising to creating a podcast. Your marketing plan is all about how your customers discover who you are and why they should consider your products and services. 

While your marketing plan is about reaching your customers—your sales plan will describe the actual sales process once a customer has decided that they’re interested in what you have to offer. 

If your business requires salespeople and a long sales process, describe that in this section. If your customers can “self-serve” and just make purchases quickly on your website, describe that process. 

A good sales plan picks up where your marketing plan leaves off. The marketing plan brings customers in the door and the sales plan is how you close the deal.

Together, these specific plans paint a picture of how you will connect with your target audience, and how you will turn them into paying customers.

Dig deeper: What to include in your sales and marketing plan

Business operations

The operations section describes the necessary requirements for your business to run smoothly. It’s where you talk about how your business works and what day-to-day operations look like. 

Depending on how your business is structured, your operations plan may include elements of the business like:

• Supply chain management
• Manufacturing processes
• Equipment and technology
• Distribution

Some businesses distribute their products and reach their customers through large retailers like Amazon.com, Walmart, Target, and grocery store chains. 

These businesses should review how this part of their business works. The plan should discuss the logistics and costs of getting products onto store shelves and any potential hurdles the business may have to overcome.

If your business is much simpler than this, that’s OK. This section of your business plan can be either extremely short or more detailed, depending on the type of business you are building.

For businesses selling services, such as physical therapy or online software, you can use this section to describe the technology you’ll leverage, what goes into your service, and who you will partner with to deliver your services.

Dig Deeper: Learn how to write the operations chapter of your plan

Key milestones and metrics

Although it’s not required to complete your business plan, mapping out key business milestones and the metrics can be incredibly useful for measuring your success.

Good milestones clearly lay out the parameters of the task and set expectations for their execution. You’ll want to include:

• A description of each task
• The proposed due date
• Who is responsible for each task

If you have a budget, you can include projected costs to hit each milestone. You don’t need extensive project planning in this section—just list key milestones you want to hit and when you plan to hit them. This is your overall business roadmap. 

Possible milestones might be:

• Website launch date
• Store or office opening date
• First significant sales
• Break even date
• Business licenses and approvals

You should also discuss the key numbers you will track to determine your success. Some common metrics worth tracking include:

• Conversion rates
• Customer acquisition costs
• Profit per customer
• Repeat purchases

It’s perfectly fine to start with just a few metrics and grow the number you are tracking over time. You also may find that some metrics simply aren’t relevant to your business and can narrow down what you’re tracking.

Dig Deeper: How to use milestones in your business plan

Organization and management team

Investors don’t just look for great ideas—they want to find great teams. Use this chapter to describe your current team and who you need to hire . You should also provide a quick overview of your location and history if you’re already up and running.

Briefly highlight the relevant experiences of each key team member in the company. It’s important to make the case for why yours is the right team to turn an idea into a reality. 

Do they have the right industry experience and background? Have members of the team had entrepreneurial successes before? 

If you still need to hire key team members, that’s OK. Just note those gaps in this section.

Your company overview should also include a summary of your company’s current business structure . The most common business structures include:

• Sole proprietor
• Partnership

Be sure to provide an overview of how the business is owned as well. Does each business partner own an equal portion of the business? How is ownership divided? 

Potential lenders and investors will want to know the structure of the business before they will consider a loan or investment.

Dig Deeper: How to write about your company structure and team

Financial plan

Last, but certainly not least, is your financial plan chapter. 

Entrepreneurs often find this section the most daunting. But, business financials for most startups are less complicated than you think, and a business degree is certainly not required to build a solid financial forecast. 

A typical financial forecast in a business plan includes the following:

• Sales forecast : An estimate of the sales expected over a given period. You’ll break down your forecast into the key revenue streams that you expect to have.
• Expense budget : Your planned spending such as personnel costs , marketing expenses, and taxes.
• Profit & Loss : Brings together your sales and expenses and helps you calculate planned profits.
• Cash Flow : Shows how cash moves into and out of your business. It can predict how much cash you’ll have on hand at any given point in the future.
• Balance Sheet : A list of the assets, liabilities, and equity in your company. In short, it provides an overview of the financial health of your business. 

A strong business plan will include a description of assumptions about the future, and potential risks that could impact the financial plan. Including those will be especially important if you’re writing a business plan to pursue a loan or other investment.

Dig Deeper: How to create financial forecasts and budgets

This is the place for additional data, charts, or other information that supports your plan.

Including an appendix can significantly enhance the credibility of your plan by showing readers that you’ve thoroughly considered the details of your business idea, and are backing your ideas up with solid data.

Just remember that the information in the appendix is meant to be supplementary. Your business plan should stand on its own, even if the reader skips this section.

Dig Deeper : What to include in your business plan appendix

Optional: Business plan cover page

Adding a business plan cover page can make your plan, and by extension your business, seem more professional in the eyes of potential investors, lenders, and partners. It serves as the introduction to your document and provides necessary contact information for stakeholders to reference.

Your cover page should be simple and include:

• Company logo
• Business name
• Value proposition (optional)
• Business plan title
• Completion and/or update date
• Address and contact information
• Confidentiality statement

Just remember, the cover page is optional. If you decide to include it, keep it very simple and only spend a short amount of time putting it together.

Dig Deeper: How to create a business plan cover page

How to use AI to help write your business plan

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can speed up the business plan writing process and help you think through concepts like market segmentation and competition. These tools are especially useful for taking ideas that you provide and converting them into polished text for your business plan.

The best way to use AI for your business plan is to leverage it as a collaborator , not a replacement for human creative thinking and ingenuity. 

AI can come up with lots of ideas and act as a brainstorming partner. It’s up to you to filter through those ideas and figure out which ones are realistic enough to resonate with your customers. 

There are pros and cons of using AI to help with your business plan . So, spend some time understanding how it can be most helpful before just outsourcing the job to AI.

Learn more: 10 AI prompts you need to write a business plan

• Writing tips and strategies

To help streamline the business plan writing process, here are a few tips and key questions to answer to make sure you get the most out of your plan and avoid common mistakes .  

Determine why you are writing a business plan

Knowing why you are writing a business plan will determine your approach to your planning project. 

For example: If you are writing a business plan for yourself, or just to use inside your own business , you can probably skip the section about your team and organizational structure. 

If you’re raising money, you’ll want to spend more time explaining why you’re looking to raise the funds and exactly how you will use them.

Regardless of how you intend to use your business plan , think about why you are writing and what you’re trying to get out of the process before you begin.

Keep things concise

Probably the most important tip is to keep your business plan short and simple. There are no prizes for long business plans . The longer your plan is, the less likely people are to read it. 

So focus on trimming things down to the essentials your readers need to know. Skip the extended, wordy descriptions and instead focus on creating a plan that is easy to read —using bullets and short sentences whenever possible.

Have someone review your business plan

Writing a business plan in a vacuum is never a good idea. Sometimes it’s helpful to zoom out and check if your plan makes sense to someone else. You also want to make sure that it’s easy to read and understand.

Don’t wait until your plan is “done” to get a second look. Start sharing your plan early, and find out from readers what questions your plan leaves unanswered. This early review cycle will help you spot shortcomings in your plan and address them quickly, rather than finding out about them right before you present your plan to a lender or investor.

If you need a more detailed review, you may want to explore hiring a professional plan writer to thoroughly examine it.

Use a free business plan template and business plan examples to get started

Knowing what information to include in a business plan is sometimes not quite enough. If you’re struggling to get started or need additional guidance, it may be worth using a business plan template. 

There are plenty of great options available (we’ve rounded up our 8 favorites to streamline your search).

But, if you’re looking for a free downloadable business plan template , you can get one right now; download the template used by more than 1 million businesses. 

Or, if you just want to see what a completed business plan looks like, check out our library of over 550 free business plan examples . 

We even have a growing list of industry business planning guides with tips for what to focus on depending on your business type.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re writing your business plan. Some entrepreneurs get sucked into the writing and research process, and don’t focus enough on actually getting their business started. 

Here are a few common mistakes and how to avoid them:

Not talking to your customers : This is one of the most common mistakes. It’s easy to assume that your product or service is something that people want. Before you invest too much in your business and too much in the planning process, make sure you talk to your prospective customers and have a good understanding of their needs.

• Overly optimistic sales and profit forecasts: By nature, entrepreneurs are optimistic about the future. But it’s good to temper that optimism a little when you’re planning, and make sure your forecasts are grounded in reality. 
• Spending too much time planning: Yes, planning is crucial. But you also need to get out and talk to customers, build prototypes of your product and figure out if there’s a market for your idea. Make sure to balance planning with building.
• Not revising the plan: Planning is useful, but nothing ever goes exactly as planned. As you learn more about what’s working and what’s not—revise your plan, your budgets, and your revenue forecast. Doing so will provide a more realistic picture of where your business is going, and what your financial needs will be moving forward.
• Not using the plan to manage your business: A good business plan is a management tool. Don’t just write it and put it on the shelf to collect dust – use it to track your progress and help you reach your goals.
• Presenting your business plan

The planning process forces you to think through every aspect of your business and answer questions that you may not have thought of. That’s the real benefit of writing a business plan – the knowledge you gain about your business that you may not have been able to discover otherwise.

With all of this knowledge, you’re well prepared to convert your business plan into a pitch presentation to present your ideas. 

A pitch presentation is a summary of your plan, just hitting the highlights and key points. It’s the best way to present your business plan to investors and team members.

Dig Deeper: Learn what key slides should be included in your pitch deck

Use your business plan to manage your business

One of the biggest benefits of planning is that it gives you a tool to manage your business better. With a revenue forecast, expense budget, and projected cash flow, you know your targets and where you are headed.

And yet, nothing ever goes exactly as planned – it’s the nature of business.

That’s where using your plan as a management tool comes in. The key to leveraging it for your business is to review it periodically and compare your forecasts and projections to your actual results.

Start by setting up a regular time to review the plan – a monthly review is a good starting point. During this review, answer questions like:

• Did you meet your sales goals?
• Is spending following your budget?
• Has anything gone differently than what you expected?

Now that you see whether you’re meeting your goals or are off track, you can make adjustments and set new targets. 

Maybe you’re exceeding your sales goals and should set new, more aggressive goals. In that case, maybe you should also explore more spending or hiring more employees. 

Or maybe expenses are rising faster than you projected. If that’s the case, you would need to look at where you can cut costs.

A plan, and a method for comparing your plan to your actual results , is the tool you need to steer your business toward success.

Learn More: How to run a regular plan review

Free business plan templates and examples

Kickstart your business plan writing with one of our free business plan templates or recommended tools.

Free business plan template

Download a free SBA-approved business plan template built for small businesses and startups.

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How to write a business plan FAQ

What is a business plan?

A document that describes your business , the products and services you sell, and the customers that you sell to. It explains your business strategy, how you’re going to build and grow your business, what your marketing strategy is, and who your competitors are.

What are the benefits of a business plan?

A business plan helps you understand where you want to go with your business and what it will take to get there. It reduces your overall risk, helps you uncover your business’s potential, attracts investors, and identifies areas for growth.

Having a business plan ultimately makes you more confident as a business owner and more likely to succeed for a longer period of time.

What are the 7 steps of a business plan?

The seven steps to writing a business plan include:

• Write a brief executive summary
• Describe your products and services.
• Conduct market research and compile data into a cohesive market analysis.
• Describe your marketing and sales strategy.
• Outline your organizational structure and management team.
• Develop financial projections for sales, revenue, and cash flow.
• Add any additional documents to your appendix.

What are the 5 most common business plan mistakes?

There are plenty of mistakes that can be made when writing a business plan. However, these are the 5 most common that you should do your best to avoid:

• 1. Not taking the planning process seriously.
• Having unrealistic financial projections or incomplete financial information.
• Inconsistent information or simple mistakes.
• Failing to establish a sound business model.
• Not having a defined purpose for your business plan.

What questions should be answered in a business plan?

Writing a business plan is all about asking yourself questions about your business and being able to answer them through the planning process. You’ll likely be asking dozens and dozens of questions for each section of your plan.

However, these are the key questions you should ask and answer with your business plan:

• How will your business make money?
• Is there a need for your product or service?
• Who are your customers?
• How are you different from the competition?
• How will you reach your customers?
• How will you measure success?

How long should a business plan be?

The length of your business plan fully depends on what you intend to do with it. From the SBA and traditional lender point of view, a business plan needs to be whatever length necessary to fully explain your business. This means that you prove the viability of your business, show that you understand the market, and have a detailed strategy in place.

If you intend to use your business plan for internal management purposes, you don’t necessarily need a full 25-50 page business plan. Instead, you can start with a one-page plan to get all of the necessary information in place.

What are the different types of business plans?

While all business plans cover similar categories, the style and function fully depend on how you intend to use your plan. Here are a few common business plan types worth considering.

Traditional business plan: The tried-and-true traditional business plan is a formal document meant to be used when applying for funding or pitching to investors. This type of business plan follows the outline above and can be anywhere from 10-50 pages depending on the amount of detail included, the complexity of your business, and what you include in your appendix.

Business model canvas: The business model canvas is a one-page template designed to demystify the business planning process. It removes the need for a traditional, copy-heavy business plan, in favor of a single-page outline that can help you and outside parties better explore your business idea.

One-page business plan: This format is a simplified version of the traditional plan that focuses on the core aspects of your business. You’ll typically stick with bullet points and single sentences. It’s most useful for those exploring ideas, needing to validate their business model, or who need an internal plan to help them run and manage their business.

Lean Plan: The Lean Plan is less of a specific document type and more of a methodology. It takes the simplicity and styling of the one-page business plan and turns it into a process for you to continuously plan, test, review, refine, and take action based on performance. It’s faster, keeps your plan concise, and ensures that your plan is always up-to-date.

What’s the difference between a business plan and a strategic plan?

A business plan covers the “who” and “what” of your business. It explains what your business is doing right now and how it functions. The strategic plan explores long-term goals and explains “how” the business will get there. It encourages you to look more intently toward the future and how you will achieve your vision.

However, when approached correctly, your business plan can actually function as a strategic plan as well. If kept lean, you can define your business, outline strategic steps, and track ongoing operations all with a single plan.

Noah is the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan. He started his career at Yahoo! and then helped start the user review site Epinions.com. From there he started a software distribution business in the UK before coming to Palo Alto Software to run the marketing and product teams.

Table of Contents

• Use AI to help write your plan
• Common planning mistakes
• Manage with your business plan
• Templates and examples

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What is a Marketing Plan & How to Write One [+Examples]

Published: December 27, 2023

For a while now, you've been spearheading your organization's content marketing efforts, and your team's performance has convinced management to adopt the content marketing strategies you’ve suggested.

Now, your boss wants you to write and present a content marketing plan, but you‘ve never done something like that before. You don't even know where to start.

Fortunately, we've curated the best content marketing plans to help you write a concrete plan that's rooted in data and produces results. But first, we'll discuss what a marketing plan is and how some of the best marketing plans include strategies that serve their respective businesses.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period. Marketing plans can include different marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the company, all working toward the same business goals.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.

Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign‘s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You'll also discover what works and what doesn't. Thus, measuring the success of your strategy.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

Looking to develop a marketing plan for your business? Click here to download HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template to get started .

To learn more about how to create your marketing plan, keep reading or jump to the section you’re looking for:

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Types of marketing plans, marketing plan examples, marketing plan faqs, sample marketing plan.

If you're pressed for time or resources, you might not be thinking about a marketing plan. However, a marketing plan is an important part of your business plan.

Marketing Plan vs. Business Plan

A marketing plan is a strategic document that outlines marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics.

A business plan is also a strategic document. But this plan covers all aspects of a company's operations, including finance, operations, and more. It can also help your business decide how to distribute resources and make decisions as your business grows.

I like to think of a marketing plan as a subset of a business plan; it shows how marketing strategies and objectives can support overall business goals.

Keep in mind that there's a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

Free Marketing Plan Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software they'll use to execute that mission and track its success.

For example, while a greater plan or department might handle social media marketing, you might consider your work on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy.

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It's the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

For example, suppose your company is launching a new software product, and it wants customers to sign up. The marketing department needs to develop a marketing plan that'll help introduce this product to the industry and drive the desired signups.

The department decides to launch a blog dedicated to this industry, a new YouTube video series to establish expertise, and an account on Twitter to join the conversation around this subject. All this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into software users.

To summarize, the business's marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software product to the marketplace and driving signups for that product. The business will execute that plan with three marketing strategies : a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and a Twitter account.

Of course, the business might consider these three things as one giant marketing strategy, each with its specific content strategies. How granular you want your marketing plan to get is up to you. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a particular set of steps in its creation.

Learn what they are below.

• State your business's mission.
• Determine the KPIs for this mission.
• Identify your buyer personas.
• Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
• Clearly define your plan's omissions.
• Define your marketing budget.
• Identify your competition.
• Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

1. State your business's mission.

Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business‘s main mission statement.

From my experience, you want to be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you'll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.

Need help building your mission statement? Download this guide for examples and templates and write the ideal mission statement.

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission‘s progress. To do so, you need to decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) .

KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.

Let's take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travelers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.

Also, make sure to check whether your current reporting software facilitates the KPIs you need. Some reporting tools can only measure a set of pre-defined metrics, which can cause massive headaches in particular marketing campaigns.

However, other tools, like HubSpot’s analytics software , can offer full flexibility over the KPIs you wish to track. You can generate custom reports that reveal anything from average website engagement rates to page visits via organic, email, social media traffic, and more.   

These KPIs will come into the conversation again in step 4.

3. Identify your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, and job title. Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business's current and potential customers. So, all business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.

Create your buyer personas with this free guide and set of buyer persona templates.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

Here's where you'll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy. Because there's a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, you must choose wisely and explain how you'll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.

When I write this section , I like to stipulate:

• Which types of content I'll create. These might include blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
• How much of it I'll create. I typically describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on my workflow and the short-term goals for my content.
• The goals (and KPIs) I'll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
• The channels on which I'll distribute my content. Popular channels include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
• Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.

Build out your marketing plan with this free template.

Fill out this form to access the template., 5. clearly define your plan's omissions..

A marketing plan explains the marketing team's focus. It also explains what the marketing team will not focus on.

If there are other aspects of your business that you aren't serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn't on the hook for something, you need to make it known.

In my experience, this section is particularly important for stakeholders to help them understand why certain decisions were made.

6. Define your marketing budget.

Whether it's freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.

You can establish your marketing budget with this kit of 8 free marketing budget templates .

7. Identify your competition.

Part of marketing is knowing whom you're marketing against. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one.

Keep in mind not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business. For example, while one competitor might be ranking highly on search engines for keywords you want your website to rank for, another competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an account.

Easily track and analyze your competitors with this collection of ten free competitive analysis templates .

8. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it's time to explain who’s doing what. I don't like to delve too deeply into my employees’ day-to-day projects, but I know which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

Now that you know why you need to build an effective marketing plan, it’s time to get to work. Starting a plan from scratch can be overwhelming if you haven't done it before. That’s why there are many helpful resources that can support your first steps. We’ll share some of the best guides and templates that can help you build effective results-driven plans for your marketing strategies.

Ready to make your own marketing plan? Get started using this free template.

Depending on the company you work with, you might want to create various marketing plans. We compiled different samples to suit your needs:

1. Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans

These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you'll take on in a certain period.

Forbes published a marketing plan template that has amassed almost 4 million views. To help you sculpt a marketing roadmap with true vision, their template will teach you how to fill out the 15 key sections of a marketing plan, which are:

• Executive Summary
• Target Customers
• Unique Selling Proposition
• Pricing & Positioning Strategy
• Distribution Plan
• Your Offers
• Marketing Materials
• Promotions Strategy
• Online Marketing Strategy
• Conversion Strategy
• Joint Ventures & Partnerships
• Referral Strategy
• Strategy for Increasing Transaction Prices
• Retention Strategy
• Financial Projections

If you're truly lost on where to start with a marketing plan, I highly recommend using this guide to help you define your target audience, figure out how to reach them, and ensure that audience becomes loyal customers.

2. Social Media Marketing Plan

This type of plan highlights the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media. A specific subtype is a paid marketing plan, which highlights paid strategies, such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media promotions.

Shane Snow's Marketing Plan for His Book Dream Team is a great example of a social media marketing plan:

When Shane Snow started promoting his new book, "Dream Team," he knew he had to leverage a data-driven content strategy framework. So, he chose his favorite one: the content strategy waterfall. The content strategy waterfall is defined by Economic Times as a model used to create a system with a linear and sequential approach.

Snow wrote a blog post about how the waterfall‘s content strategy helped him launch his new book successfully. After reading it, you can use his tactics to inform your own marketing plan. More specifically, you’ll learn how he:

• Applied his business objectives to decide which marketing metrics to track.
• Used his ultimate business goal of earning $200,000 in sales or 10,000 purchases to estimate the conversion rate of each stage of his funnel.
• Created buyer personas to figure out which channels his audience would prefer to consume his content.
• Used his average post view on each of his marketing channels to estimate how much content he had to create and how often he had to post on social media.
• Calculated how much earned and paid media could cut down the amount of content he had to create and post.
• Designed his process and workflow, built his team, and assigned members to tasks.
• Analyzed content performance metrics to refine his overall content strategy.

I use Snow's marketing plan to think more creatively about my content promotion and distribution plan. I like that it's linear and builds on the step before it, creating an air-tight strategy that doesn't leave any details out.

3. Content Marketing Plan

This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you'll use content to promote your business or product.

HubSpot's Comprehensive Guide for Content Marketing Strategy is a strong example of a content marketing plan:

At HubSpot, we‘ve built our marketing team from two business school graduates working from a coffee table to a powerhouse of hundreds of employees. Along the way, we’ve learned countless lessons that shaped our current content marketing strategy. So, we decided to illustrate our insights in a blog post to teach marketers how to develop a successful content marketing strategy, regardless of their team's size.

In this comprehensive guide for modern marketers, you'll learn:

• What exactly content marketing is.
• Why your business needs a content marketing strategy.
• Who should lead your content marketing efforts?
• How to structure your content marketing team based on your company's size.
• How to hire the right people for each role on your team.
• What marketing tools and technology you'll need to succeed.
• What type of content your team should create, and which employees should be responsible for creating them.
• The importance of distributing your content through search engines, social media, email, and paid ads.
• And finally, the recommended metrics each of your teams should measure and report to optimize your content marketing program.

This is a fantastic resource for content teams of any size — whether you're a team of one or 100. It includes how to hire and structure a content marketing team, what marketing tools you'll need, what type of content you should create, and even recommends what metrics to track for analyzing campaigns. If you're aiming to establish or boost your online presence, leveraging tools like HubSpot's drag-and-drop website builder can be extremely beneficial. It helps you create a captivating digital footprint that sets the foundation for your content marketing endeavors.

4. New Product Launch Marketing Plan

This will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you‘ll implement to promote a new product. And if you’re searching for an example, look no further than Chief Outsiders' Go-To-Market Plan for a New Product :

After reading this plan, you'll learn how to:

• Validate a product
• Write strategic objectives
• Identify your market
• Compile a competitive landscape
• Create a value proposition for a new product
• Consider sales and service in your marketing plan

If you're looking for a marketing plan for a new product, the Chief Outsiders template is a great place to start. Marketing plans for a new product will be more specific because they target one product versus its entire marketing strategy.

5. Growth Marketing Plan

Growth marketing plans use experimentation and data to drive results, like we see in Venture Harbour’s Growth Marketing Plan Template :

Venture Harbour's growth marketing plan is a data-driven and experiment-led alternative to the more traditional marketing plan. Their template has five steps intended for refinement with every test-measure-learn cycle. The five steps are:

• Experiments

I recommend this plan if you want to experiment with different platforms and campaigns. Experimentation always feels risky and unfamiliar, but this plan creates a framework for accountability and strategy.

• Louisville Tourism
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Visit Oxnard
• Safe Haven Family Shelter
• Wright County Economic Development
• The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County
• Cabarrus County Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Visit Billings

1. Louisville Tourism

It also divides its target market into growth and seed categories to allow for more focused strategies. For example, the plan recognizes Millennials in Chicago, Atlanta, and Nashville as the core of it's growth market, whereas people in Boston, Austin, and New York represent seed markets where potential growth opportunities exist. Then, the plan outlines objectives and tactics for reaching each market.

Why This Marketing Plan Works

• The plan starts with a letter from the President & CEO of the company, who sets the stage for the plan by providing a high-level preview of the incoming developments for Louisville's tourism industry
• The focus on Louisville as "Bourbon City" effectively leverages its unique cultural and culinary attributes to present a strong brand
• Incorporates a variety of data points from Google Analytics, Arrivalist, and visitor profiles to to define their target audience with a data-informed approach

2. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

For example, students who become prospects as freshman and sophomore will receive emails that focus on getting the most out of high school and college prep classes. Once these students become juniors and seniors — thus entering the consideration stage — the emails will focus more on the college application process and other exploratory content.

• The plan incorporates competitive analysis, evaluation surveys, and other research to determine the makeup of its target audience
• The plan lists each marketing program (e.g., direct mail, social media, email etc.) and supplements it with examples on the next page
• Each marketing program has its own objectives, tactics, and KPIs for measuring success

3. Visit Oxnard

This marketing plan by Visit Oxnard, a convention and visitors bureau, is packed with all the information one needs in a marketing plan: target markets, key performance indicators, selling points, personas, marketing tactics by channel, and much more.

It also articulates the organization’s strategic plans for the upcoming fiscal year, especially as it grapples with the aftereffects of the pandemic. Lastly, it has impeccable visual appeal, with color-coded sections and strong branding elements.

• States clear and actionable goals for the coming year
• Includes data and other research that shows how their team made their decisions
• Outlines how the team will measure the success of their plan

4. Safe Haven Family Shelter

This marketing plan by a nonprofit organization is an excellent example to follow if your plan will be presented to internal stakeholders at all levels of your organization. It includes SMART marketing goals , deadlines, action steps, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages , and metrics.

The plan is detailed, yet scannable. By the end of it, one can walk away with a strong understanding of the organization’s strategic direction for its upcoming marketing efforts.

• Confirms ongoing marketing strategies and objectives while introducing new initiatives
• Uses colors, fonts, and formatting to emphasize key parts of the plan
• Closes with long-term goals, key themes, and other overarching topics to set the stage for the future

5. Wright County Economic Development

Wright County Economic Development’s plan drew our attention because of its simplicity, making it good inspiration for those who’d like to outline their plan in broad strokes without frills or filler.

It includes key information such as marketing partners, goals, initiatives, and costs. The sections are easy to scan and contain plenty of information for those who’d like to dig into the details. Most important, it includes a detailed breakdown of projected costs per marketing initiative — which is critical information to include for upper-level managers and other stakeholders.

• Begins with a quick paragraph stating why the recommended changes are important
• Uses clear graphics and bullet points to emphasize key points
• Includes specific budget data to support decision-making

6. The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County

This marketing plan presentation by a cultural council is a great example of how to effectively use data in your plan, address audiences who are new to the industry, and offer extensive detail into specific marketing strategies.

For instance, an entire slide is dedicated to the county’s cultural tourism trends, and at the beginning of the presentation, the organization explains what an arts and culture agency is in the first place.

That’s a critical piece of information to include for those who might not know. If you’re addressing audiences outside your industry, consider defining terms at the beginning, like this organization did.

• Uses quality design and images to support the goals and priorities in the text
• Separate pages for each big idea or new strategy
• Includes sections for awards and accomplishments to show how the marketing plan supports wider business goals
• Defines strategies and tactics for each channel for easy skimming

7. Cabarrus County Convention & Visitors Bureau

Cabarrus County’s convention and visitors bureau takes a slightly different approach with its marketing plan, formatting it like a magazine for stakeholders to flip through. It offers information on the county’s target audience, channels, goals, KPIs, and public relations strategies and initiatives.

We especially love that the plan includes contact information for the bureau’s staff members, so that it’s easy for stakeholders to contact the appropriate person for a specific query.

• Uses infographics to expand on specific concepts, like how visitors benefit a community
• Highlights the team members responsible for each initiative with a photo to emphasize accountability and community
• Closes with an event calendar for transparency into key dates for events

8. Visit Billings

Visit Billing’s comprehensive marketing plan is like Cabarrus County’s in that it follows a magazine format. With sections for each planned strategy, it offers a wealth of information and depth for internal stakeholders and potential investors.

We especially love its content strategy section, where it details the organization’s prior efforts and current objectives for each content platform.

At the end, it includes strategic goals and budgets — a good move to imitate if your primary audience would not need this information highlighted at the forefront.

• Includes a section on the buyer journey, which offers clarity on the reasoning for marketing plan decisions
• Design includes call-outs for special topics that could impact the marketing audience, such as safety concerns or "staycations"
• Clear headings make it easy to scan this comprehensive report and make note of sections a reader may want to return to for more detail

What is a typical marketing plan?

In my experience, most marketing plans outline the following aspects of a business's marketing:

• Target audience

Each marketing plan should include one or more goals, the path your team will take to meet those goals, and how you plan to measure success.

For example, if I were a tech startup that's launching a new mobile app, my marketing plan would include:

• Target audience or buyer personas for the app
• Outline of how app features meet audience needs
• Competitive analysis
• Goals for conversion funnel and user acquisition
• Marketing strategies and tactics for user acquisition

Featured resource : Free Marketing Plan Template

What should a good marketing plan include?

A good marketing plan will create a clear roadmap for your unique marketing team. This means that the best marketing plan for your business will be distinct to your team and business needs.

That said, most marketing plans will include sections for one or more of the following:

• Clear analysis of the target market
• A detailed description of the product or service
• Strategic marketing mix details (such as product, price, place, promotion)
• Measurable goals with defined timelines

This can help you build the best marketing plan for your business.

A good marketing plan should also include a product or service's unique value proposition, a comprehensive marketing strategy including online and offline channels, and a defined budget.

Featured resource : Value Proposition Templates

What are the most important parts of a marketing plan?

When you‘re planning a road trip, you need a map to help define your route, step-by-step directions, and an estimate of the time it will take to get to your destination. It’s literally how you get there that matters.

Like a road map, a marketing plan is only useful if it helps you get to where you want to go. So, no one part is more than the other.

That said, you can use the list below to make sure that you've added or at least considered each of the following in your marketing plan:

• Marketing goals
• Executive summary
• Target market analysis
• Marketing strategies

What questions should I ask when making a marketing plan?

Questions are a useful tool for when you‘re stuck or want to make sure you’ve included important details.

Try using one or more of these questions as a starting point when you create your marketing plan:

• Who is my target audience?
• What are their needs, motivations, and pain points?
• How does our product or service solve their problems?
• How will I reach and engage them?
• Who are my competitors? Are they direct or indirect competitors?
• What are the unique selling points of my product or service?
• What marketing channels are best for the brand?
• What is our budget and timeline?
• How will I measure the success of marketing efforts?

How much does a marketing plan cost?

Creating a marketing plan is mostly free. But the cost of executing a marketing plan will depend on your specific plan.

Marketing plan costs vary by business, industry, and plan scope. Whether your team handles marketing in-house or hires external consultants can also make a difference. Total costs can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands. This is why most marketing plans will include a budget.

Featured resource : Free Marketing Budget Templates

What is a marketing plan template?

A marketing plan template is a pre-designed structure or framework that helps you outline your marketing plan.

It offers a starting point that you can customize for your specific business needs and goals. For example, our template includes easy-to-edit sections for:

• Business summary
• Business initiatives
• Target market
• Market strategy
• Marketing channels
• Marketing technology

Let’s create a sample plan together, step by step.

Follow along with HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template .

1. Create an overview or primary objective.

Our business mission is to provide [service, product, solution] to help [audience] reach their [financial, educational, business related] goals without compromising their [your audience’s valuable asset: free time, mental health, budget, etc.]. We want to improve our social media presence while nurturing our relationships with collaborators and clients.

For example, if I wanted to focus on social media growth, my KPIs might look like this:

We want to achieve a minimum of [followers] with an engagement rate of [X] on [social media platform].

The goal is to achieve an increase of [Y] on recurring clients and new meaningful connections outside the platform by the end of the year.

Use the following categories to create a target audience for your campaign.

• Profession:
• Background:
• Pain points:
• Social media platforms that they use:
• Streaming platforms that they prefer:

For more useful strategies, consider creating a buyer persona in our Make My Persona tool .

Our content pillars will be: [X, Y, Z].

Content pillars should be based on topics your audience needs to know. If your ideal clients are female entrepreneurs, then your content pillars can be: marketing, being a woman in business, remote working, and productivity hacks for entrepreneurs.

Then, determine any omissions.

This marketing plan won’t be focusing on the following areas of improvement: [A, B, C].

5. Define your marketing budget.

Our marketing strategy will use a total of [Y] monthly. This will include anything from freelance collaborations to advertising.

6. Identify your competitors.

I like to work through the following questions to clearly indicate who my competitors are:

• Which platforms do they use the most?
• How does their branding differentiate?
• How do they talk to their audiences?
• What valuable assets do customers talk about? And if they are receiving any negative feedback, what is it about?

7. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

Create responsible parties for each portion of the plan.

Marketing will manage the content plan, implementation, and community interaction to reach the KPIs.

• Social media manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
• Content strategist: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
• Community manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Sales will follow the line of the marketing work while creating and implementing an outreach strategy.

• Sales strategists: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
• Sales executives: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Customer Service will nurture clients’ relationships to ensure that they have what they want. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Project Managers will track the progress and team communication during the project. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Get started on your marketing plan.

These marketing plans serve as initial resources to get your content marketing plan started. But, to truly deliver what your audience wants and needs, you'll likely need to test some different ideas out, measure their success, and then refine your goals as you go.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2019, but was updated for comprehensiveness. This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure t o learn more about how we use AI.

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Original text

WASHINGTON, May 21, 2024 – For entrepreneurs, creating a comprehensive marketing plan can seem like a daunting and overwhelming task. However, a solid marketing plan is crucial to reach your target audience, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales and revenue. As mentors to America’s small business owners, SCORE understands the importance of a well-crafted marketing plan and is committed to helping business owners create one that will put your business on the path to success.

Instead of trying to conquer your corner of the business world by marketing everywhere all the time, it’s important to plan your marketing thoughtfully. Your plan doesn’t have to be overly ambitious. But it does need to help set you up for success, rather than leaving you feeling frazzled or overwhelmed.

Represent your brand

You might already have a logo and branding materials, but it’s time to take that branding to the next level. Envision your logo in various advertising and marketing forms - on community bulletin boards, in newspaper ads, on bus shelters. Where do you want to see your logo? Where do you want to hear people talking about your brand?

Consider asking a mentor for assistance with this process. Luke Jian, founder of Agora Coworking in Grayslake, Ill., turned to SCORE mentors Alan Blitz and Paul Rosenstrock for help with starting his business. “They were always available to answer my questions and provide guidance, even outside of our scheduled meetings,” explained Jian. “Their input helped me to develop a comprehensive business plan and marketing strategy that has set my coworking space up for success in the long run.”

Raise awareness

Once you’ve thought about your brand aesthetic, it’s time to figure out how to reach your target customer. Define who your potential customers are and where they are already consuming information. Try to get a sense of their lifestyle and set your marketing efforts to match.

Not sure where your customers learn about products and services like yours? Ask them. Hearing their preferences can guide where you invest your marketing dollars as you work to raise awareness of your business.

Reward loyal customers

“Communicate often and effectively with your customers,” recommends SCORE mentor Rex Winter. “Repeat customers are a critical asset to a small business. Work at building loyalty through effective communication and programs that reward repeat business.”

A discount after a certain number of visits might be the perfect incentive to keep a customer coming back, but be sure you are incorporating sales, promotions and rewards programs into your overall marketing  plan. Consider in advance your resources and cash flow if you plan to offer flash sales, discount programs or seasonal events or specials so you don’t get overwhelmed.

If you’re looking for individualized support in creating your marketing plan, contact SCORE for free business mentoring . Touright Bicycle Shop owners David and Susan Sperstad in Little Falls, Minn. explain why they sought the expertise of a mentor: “We knew experience is the best teacher, so we couldn’t go wrong in reaching out to a SCORE mentor who had successfully run a small business,” said David.

Interested in more information on marketing strategies and best practices? SCORE is hosting a webinar, How To Create A Marketing Plan For Your Small Business, on May 30 at 1 PM ET. Registration is free and available here .

About SCORE:

Since 1964, SCORE has helped more than 17 million entrepreneurs start, grow or successfully exit a business. SCORE's 10,000 volunteers provide free, expert mentoring, resources and education in all 50 U.S. states and territories. Visit SCORE at www.score.org .

Funded [in part] through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.

202-968-6428

[email protected]

Looking for a small business expert or owner for an upcoming media story? Email  [email protected]  to request an interview source. 

Copyright © 2024 SCORE Association, SCORE.org

Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.