parts of marketing plan in business plan

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.

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 t his 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.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Blog Marketing

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

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

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 is (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.

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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• Building Your Business
• Becoming an Owner
• Business Plans

The Marketing Plan Section of the Business Plan

Writing The Business Plan: Section 5

Susan Ward wrote about small businesses for The Balance for 18 years. She has run an IT consulting firm and designed and presented courses on how to promote small businesses.

• Products, Services, and Your USP

Pricing and Positioning Strategy

Sales and distribution plan, advertising and promotion plan.

The marketing plan section of the business plan explains how you're going to get your customers to buy your products or services. The marketing plan, then, will include sections detailing your:

• Products and services and your unique selling proposition (USP)
• Pricing strategy
• Sales and distribution plan
• Advertising and promotions plan

The easiest way to develop your marketing plan is to work through each of these sections, referring to the market research you completed when you were writing the previous sections of the business plan . (Note that if you are developing a marketing plan on its own, rather than as part of a business plan, you will also need to include a target market and a competitors' analysis section.)

Let's look at each of these four sections in detail.

Products, Services, and Your Unique Selling Proposition

Focus on the uniqueness of your product or service and how the customer will benefit from what you're offering. Use these questions to write a paragraph summarizing these aspects for your marketing plan:

• What are the features of your product or service?
• Describe the physical attributes of your product or service and any other relevant features such as what it does or how it differs from competitors' offerings.
• How will your product or service benefit the customer?
• Remember that benefits can be intangible as well as tangible; for instance, if you're selling a cleaning product, your customers will benefit by having a cleaner house, but they may also benefit by enjoying better health. Brainstorm as many benefits as possible to begin with, then choose to emphasize the benefits that your targeted customers will most appreciate in your marketing plan.
• What is it that sets your product or service apart from all the rest? In other words, what is your USP, the message you want your customers to receive about your product or service? This will be at the heart of your marketing plan.

Examples of Unique Selling Propositions

Unique selling propositions should be short (no more than a sentence) and concise. Here are a few great examples:

• Domino's Pizza : "We deliver hot, fresh pizza in 30 minutes or less, or it's free."
• FedEx Corporation : "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight."
• M&Ms : "The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand ."
• Dollar Shave Club: “Everything you need in the bathroom—from razor blades to grooming products—automatically delivered to your door. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.”

The pricing strategy portion of the marketing plan involves determining how you will price your product or service. The price you charge has to be competitive but still allow you to make a reasonable profit.

Being reasonable is key—you can charge any price you want to, but for every product or service there's a limit to how much the consumer is willing to pay. Your pricing strategy needs to take this consumer threshold into account.

The most common question small business people have about the pricing strategy section of the marketing plan is, "How do you know what price to charge?" Basically, you set your pricing through a process of calculating your costs, estimating the benefits to consumers, and comparing your products, services, and prices to others that are similar.

Set your pricing by examining how much it cost you to produce the product or service and adding a fair price for the benefits that the customer will enjoy. You may find it useful to conduct a  breakeven analysis to determine your minimum threshold. Competitor pricing will also help guide you toward the fair market value and help you determine how high you can reasonably go.  

The pricing strategy you outline in your marketing plan will answer the following questions:

• What is the cost of your product or service? Make sure you include all your fixed and variable costs when you're calculating this. The costs of labor and materials are obvious, but you may also need to include freight costs, administrative costs, and selling costs, for example.
• How does the pricing of your product or service compare to the market price of similar products or services?
• Explain how the pricing of your product or service is competitive. For instance, if the price you plan to charge is lower, why are you able to do this? If it's higher, why would your customers be willing to pay more? This is where the strategy aspect comes into play; will your business be more competitive if you charge more, less, or the same as your competitors, and why?
• What kind of return on investment (ROI) are you expecting with this pricing strategy, and within what time frame?

Remember, the primary goal of the marketing plan is to get people to buy your products or services. Here's where you detail how this is going to happen.

There are usually three parts to the sales and distribution section, although all three parts may not apply to your business.

Distribution Methods

• How is your product or service going to get to the customer? Will you distribute your product or service through a website, through the mail, through sales representatives, home delivery, or through retail?
• What distribution channel is going to be used? In a direct distribution channel, the product or service goes directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. In a one-stage distribution channel, it goes from manufacturer to retailer to consumer. The traditional distribution channel is from manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. Outline all the different companies, people and technologies that will be involved in the process of getting your product or service to your customer.
• What are the costs associated with distribution?
• What are the delivery terms?
• How will the distribution methods affect production time frames or delivery? How long will it take to get your product or service to your customer?

If your business involves selling a product, you should also include information about inventory levels and packaging in this part of your marketing plan. For instance:

• How are your products to be packaged for shipping and for display?
• Does the packaging meet all regulatory requirements (such as labeling)?
• Is the packaging appropriately coded, priced, and complementary to the product?
• What minimum inventory levels must be maintained to ensure that there is no loss of sales due to problems such as late shipments and backorders?

Transaction Process

• What system will be used for processing orders, shipping, and billing?
• What methods of payment will customers be able to use?
• What credit terms will customers be offered? If you will offer discounts for early payment or impose penalties for late payment, they should be mentioned in this part of your marketing plan.
• What is your return policy?
• What warranties will the customer be offered? Describe these or any other service guarantees.
• What after-sale support will you offer customers and what will you charge (if anything) for this support?
• Is there a system for customer feedback so customer satisfaction (or the lack of it) can be tracked and addressed?

Sales Strategy

• What types of salespeople will be involved (commissioned salespeople, product demonstrators, telephone solicitors, etc.)?
• Describe your expectations of these salespeople and how sales effectiveness will be measured.
• Will a sales training program be offered? If so, describe it in this section of the marketing plan.
• Describe the incentives salespeople will be offered to encourage their achievements (such as getting new accounts, the most orders, etc.).

Essentially the advertising and promotion section of the marketing plan describes how you're going to deliver your USP to your prospective customers. While there are literally thousands of different promotion avenues available to you, what distinguishes a successful plan from an unsuccessful one is the focus—and that's what your USP provides.

So think first of the message that you want to send to your target audience. Then look at these promotion possibilities and decide which to emphasize in your marketing plan:

Advertising

The best approach to advertising is to think of it in terms of media—specifically, which media will be most effective in reaching your target market. Then you can make decisions about how much of your annual advertising budget you're going to spend on each medium.

What percentage of your annual advertising budget will you invest in applicable methods of advertising, such as:

• The internet (including business website, email, social media campaigns, etc.)
• Direct mail
• Door-to-door flyer delivery
• Cooperative advertising with wholesalers, retailers, or other businesses
• Directories
• Bench/bus/subway ads

Include not only the cost of the advertising but your projections about how much business the advertising will bring in. 

Sales Promotion

If it's appropriate to your business, you may want to incorporate sales promotional activities into your advertising and promotion plan, such as:

• Offering free samples
• Point of purchase displays
• Product demonstrations

Marketing Materials

Every business will include some of these in its promotion plans. The most common marketing material is the business card, but brochures, pamphlets, and service sheets are also popular.

This is another avenue of promotion that every business should use. Describe how you plan to generate publicity. While press releases spring to mind, that's only one way to get people spreading the word about your business. Consider:

• Product launches
• Social media
• Special events, including community involvement
• Writing articles
• Getting and using testimonials

Your Business's Website

If your business has or will have a website and a business Facebook page, describe how these fit into your advertising and promotion plan.

Trade Shows

Trade shows can be incredibly effective promotion and sales opportunities if you pick the right ones and go equipped to put your promotion plan into action.

Other Promotion Activities

Your promotion activities are limited only by your imagination. But whether you plan to teach a course, sponsor a community event, or conduct an email campaign, you'll want to include it in your advertising and promotion plan. Sporadic, disconnected attempts to promote your product or service are bound to fail. Your goal is to plan and carry out a sequence of focused promotion activities that will communicate the message you want to send about your products or services.

No business is too small to have a marketing plan. After all, no business is too small for customers or clients. And if you have these, you need to communicate with them about what you have to offer.

Harvard Business Review. " How to Find Out What Customers Will Pay ." Accessed Jan. 16, 2020.

The 5 parts of a marketing plan that every company needs to succeed

If you have a commercial aspiration, you need a marketing plan.

What should that plan look like?

It depends on your market, your brand, what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, your business goals, etc.

But at a high level, these are the 5 parts of a marketing plan that every company – regardless of target market or industry – needs to succeed:

• An honest look at your brand .
• Short- and long-term marketing goals .
• Content that supports your goals .
• The right marketing channels for your content .

Let’s get into it.

1. An honest look at your brand

What’s going on in the world around your brand?

It’s a complicated question that you need to periodically revisit to continue justifying your brand’s existence and articulating its mission.

Think of this as checking in on the “why?” of your business so you can better inform the “what” and the “how” of your current marketing strategy.

Start with PEST analysis:

• P olitical: For instance, manufacturers in the north of England previously encountered headwinds because of Brexit .
• E conomic: Tourism companies in the COVID-19 era are seeing slumps due to waning demand for travel experiences.
• S ocial: Sustainable brands are really hot among millennials; 73% say they’ll pay more for an environmentally friendly product or service.
• T echnological: Data is everywhere, and anyone with novel ideas for how to put it to use has a platform for business success.

Some of these are hindrances, others opportunities. All of them represent factors that will guide the identity of your business and direction of its marketing efforts.

Once you’re done with PEST, assess your brand’s readiness for those circumstances. Cue SWOT analysis:

• S trengths: You have solid intellectual property, or hold some other competitive advantage that can inform marketing activities.
• W eaknesses: You’re beat on price, you need a bigger marketing budget or your competitors are doing a better job adopting new technologies.
• O pportunities: Sustainability is all the rage among millennials, and they have a lot of money to spend on your brand if you get your messaging right.
• T hreats: You’re running into a bit of a market slump due to seasonal or economic shifts beyond your control.

Clearly, a circumstance that’s a threat to one brand can be an opportunity for another.

And that’s the whole point of this exercise. It helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses in your target market.

From here, you can start forming the short- and long-term goals of your marketing strategy – whether that’s to play up your strengths or bolster your weaknesses.

2. A strategy built on short- and long-term marketing goals

At the top of your aspirational hierarchy, you have business objectives. For example:

• Trying to lock down more venture capital to grow your B2B firm.
• Increasing e-commerce sales for a B2C retailer.
• Shifting to a subscription-based, pay-as-you-go model.

Beneath that are the long-term goals that serve those business goals.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an example.

Ranking on the first page of Google for all of your industry’s highly competitive keywords can:

• Help you get investors’ attention.
• Improve online sales.
• Build awareness for your new business model.

But none of this happens overnight. It requires a series of strategies and tactics.

Enter your short-term goals. They serve a long-term goal that serves bigger business objectives.

Let’s make this a little more concrete by walking through an example of strategic marketing. We’ll use the long-term goal of boosting online visibility through SEO as our template.

Within that long-term goal, you have your more immediate short-term goals:

• Increase raw traffic: You can do this by ranking for relevant long-tail keywords or earning the featured-snippet spot for said keywords; you can rank for relevant keywords with high-quality content that best answers the questions typed into a search engine.
• Boost on-page engagement: Once you get people on the page, you want to keep them on your site. This tells Google your content is engaging the right audience.
• Optimize technical SEO: Eliminate 404 errors, improve your linking structure, make sure you’re using the right metatags to help Google’s crawlers rank your site.
• Influencer outreach: Promote your webpages on social media, and try reaching out to influencers who may be willing to promote them for you (you don’t necessarily have to pay them – you link to theirs if they link to yours, kind of thing). Backlinks from high-quality sources are good for your page authority, which is good for SEO.

As part of the marketing planning process, make sure you’ve benchmarked everything you might need in order to track your progress.

In this particular example, your key performance indicators might include:

• Number of keywords you rank for.
• Pageviews per Session.
• Average time per Session.
• Click-through rates.
• Bounce rates (how many users leave after viewing just one page).

It’s possible that your marketing goals may have nothing to do with SEO, but this general hierarchy of objectives can serve as a planning template as you set out creating a marketing plan.

Draw a straight line between business objectives and the short-term goals that need to be achieved before you can lock down those bigger wins.

This will make it much easier to get buy-in, because every marketing plan needs a budget, right?

Make your case with a realistic and methodically detailed strategy.

3. Content that supports your goals

Content is the “how” for just about any imaginable form of marketing. It’s video, it’s graphics, it’s words, it’s interactive UX.

Even a multi-million-dollar ad on prime-time TV is content. But is it the right type of content?

Maybe, but probably not.

When you’re creating content, you need to do so with your long-term goal in mind.

Let’s go back to SEO. A business might want to improve online visibility for any number of reasons.

Maybe a B2B brand wants to create a steady flow of inbound leads with useful content that performs well on search. A B2C brand might want to drive up site traffic so that it can get more potential buyers in front of its product pages.

In the case of the B2B brand, you’ll need content at every stage of the sales funnel:

You’re clearly dealing with a lot of short-term goals here, and much minutiae within those goals.

So where do you begin when planning what content to create?

With analysis to know what type of content you’re really hurting for. This requires the aforementioned benchmarking (see section, “A strategy built on short and long-term marketing goals”).

Let’s say, for instance, you have plenty of traffic coming into your blog but no one’s signing up for your newsletter. This is a tell-tale indicator of two possible problems:

• You’re targeting the wrong audience in your content.
• You’re not doing enough to convert your traffic into leads (with strategically positioned calls-to-action, opt-in fields and user-friendly UX).

For the purposes of this example, we’ll assume you have your visitor personas on lock, and that the problem is poor UX.

Now you have your short-term goal. The content you might use to address that goal would include CTA banners embedded in your blog posts, a website redesign and other strategic graphical elements to encourage more subscribers, like so:

Other examples are less straightforward. Maybe you’re a burgeoning B2C e-commerce brand and you don’t have a lot of traffic to your product pages.

The same general marketing plan template still applies.

You have your long-term goal (brand awareness) and you can build your short-term goals around that (generating more traffic to your site with useful, high-quality blog posts, how-to videos and other top-of-funnel content).

This approach to a content marketing campaign is scientific, analytical and deliberate. Your business shouldn’t necessarily strive to do the coolest thing or the loudest thing. It needs to do the thing that works, and that means creating the right content for the occasion.

Yes, it can be a slow-going process, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is good marketing.

4. The right marketing channels for your content

If content is the atomic particle of marketing, so to speak, marketing channels make up the universe it inhabits.

For the purposes of your marketing plan, you need to know which channels are most important to your goals. Some of your options include:

• Word-of-mouth: Conferences and events.
• Search: Google.
• Web: Your website, content you contribute to other websites, paids ads, etc.
• Mobile: Encompasses mobile web and search as well as apps and location.
• Social: Your social media pages and paid ads that appear on others’ pages.
• Email: Exactly what it sounds like.
• YouTube: Your brand’s channel, or paid ads on other videos.
• Print ads: In magazines, etc.
• TV commercials: Local or national.

Choosing the right channels on which to create or pay for content depends partly on your short- and long-term goals and partly on what you can afford.

At the most basic level, you’ll need a website, and preferably one that ranks well on search.

What you do on your website (content created for SEO) will ultimately affect how you perform on search channels (Google, Bing).

But you can also promote your content on social media and through email marketing. For social media marketing, you need a strong grasp on the specific social networks your target audience uses.

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty about the fundamentals of email marketing or social media marketing since we’ve done that elsewhere on this blog.

For the sake of your marketing plan, just know this: Practically any long-term marketing goal you can name will require some combination of the channels listed above.

And deciding which channels to use for content creation, distribution and promotion (based on your goals) is a whole lot easier when you have a bit of help from a digital marketing expert.

We’re at the home stretch and this one is fairly self-explanatory, so we won’t belabor the point.

You need metrics from sources such as SEMrush, BuzzSumo, Google Analytics and Screaming Frog to:

• Inform your short- and long-term goals.
• Track the effectiveness of your efforts to achieve those goals.
• Create new goals that will help you inch ever-nearer to accomplishing your business objectives.

The precise metrics you’ll need vary depending on your goals, and our eBook on the subject is a good place to get started in terms of knowing what’s worth measuring.

The marketing X-factor: Dedication

Specifically, dedication to doing what works as opposed to what seems easy or convenient.

I’ll be brutally honest: There is no “easy way out” of marketing. It requires attention to detail, some trial and error and, of course, a well-thought-out plan.

And when you’re willing to produce all of that, the results speak for themselves .

Dominick Sorrentino

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

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

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

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

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

Level up your marketing plan to drive revenue in 2024

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

7 steps to build a comprehensive marketing plan

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

1. Define your plan

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

Get started by asking yourself the following questions: 

What resources do I need? 

What is the vision?

What is the value?

What is the goal?

Who is my audience?

What are my channels?

What is the timeline?

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

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

What is the vision?  

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

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

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

All existing customers. 

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

The first half of the next fiscal year. 

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

2. Identify key metrics for success 

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

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

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

3. Research your competition 

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

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

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

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

4. Integrate your marketing efforts

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

Lead generation

Social media

Product marketing

Public relations

Analyst relations

Customer marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Conversational marketing

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

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

5. Differentiate with creative content

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Operationalize your marketing plan

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

With the right work management tool , you can: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See marketing planning in action

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

7. Measure performance

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

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

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

Marketing plan examples from world-class teams

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

Autodesk grows site traffic 30% three years in a row

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

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

Sony Music boosts creative production capacity by 4X

In recent years the music industry has gone through a pivotal transition—shifting from album sales to a streaming business model. For marketing and creative teams at Sony Music, that meant adopting an “always on” campaign plan. 

The team successfully executed this campaign plan by centralizing creative production and approvals in one project. By standardizing processes, the team reduced campaign production time by 75%. Read the case study to learn more about how Sony Music successfully scaled their creative production process.

Trinny London perfects new customer acquisition 

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

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

Turn your marketing plan into marketing success 

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

Use a free marketing plan template to get started

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

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

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

Marketing project plan template

Marketing campaign plan template

Product marketing launch template

Editorial calendar template

Agency collaboration template

Creative requests template

Event planning template

GTM strategy template

Still have questions? We have answers. 

What is a marketing plan.

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

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

Current business plan

Mission statement  

Business goals

Target customers  

Competitive analysis 

Current marketing mix

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Marketing budget  

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

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

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

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

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

What are different types of marketing plans? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related resources

How Asana uses work management for smoother creative production

Build a marketing operations strategy in 4 steps

How Asana uses work management for more impactful campaigns

Marketing vs. advertising: What’s the difference?

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What Is a Marketing Plan?

Understanding marketing plans, how to write a marketing plan, marketing plan vs. business plan.

• Marketing Plan FAQs

The Bottom Line

• Marketing Essentials

What Is a Marketing Plan? Types and How to Write One

James Chen, CMT is an expert trader, investment adviser, and global market strategist.

Pete Rathburn is a copy editor and fact-checker with expertise in economics and personal finance and over twenty years of experience in the classroom.

Investopedia / Zoe Hansen

A marketing plan is an operational document that outlines an advertising strategy that an organization will implement to generate leads and reach its target market . A marketing plan details the outreach and PR campaigns to be undertaken over a period, including how the company will measure the effect of these initiatives. The functions and components of a marketing plan include the following:

• Market research to support pricing decisions and new market entries
• Tailored messaging that targets certain demographics and geographic areas
• Platform selection for product and service promotion: digital, radio, Internet, trade magazines, and the mix of those platforms for each campaign
• Metrics that measure the results of marketing efforts and their reporting timelines

A marketing plan is based on a company’s overall marketing strategy.

Key Takeaways

• The marketing plan details the strategy that a company will use to market its products to customers.
• The plan identifies the target market, the value proposition of the brand or the product, the campaigns to be initiated, and the metrics to be used to assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.
• The marketing plan should be adjusted on an ongoing basis based on the findings from the metrics that show which efforts are having an impact and which are not.
• Digital marketing shows results in near real-time, whereas TV ads require rotation to realize any level of market penetration.
• A marketing plan is part of a business plan, which describes all of the important aspects of a business, such as its goals, values, mission statement, budget, and strategies.

The terms marketing plan and marketing strategy are often used interchangeably because a marketing plan is developed based on an overarching strategic framework. In some cases, the strategy and the plan may be incorporated into one document, particularly for smaller companies that may only run one or two major campaigns in a year. The plan outlines marketing activities on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis while the marketing strategy outlines the overall value proposition.

Types of Marketing Plans

There are a variety of different marketing plans that suit different businesses and different business needs.

New Product Launch: This is a marketing plan that outlines how a new product will enter the market, who it will target, and in what way advertising will be done.

Social Media: A social media marketing plan focuses on the advertising strategies on different social media platforms and how to engage with the users on these platforms.

Time-Based: Time-based marketing plans, such as those that are executed quarterly or annually, focus on the time of the year, the current condition of the business, and the best strategies in that period.

Mission and Value Proposition

A marketing plan considers the value proposition of a business. The value proposition is the overall promise of value to be delivered to the customer and is a statement that appears front and center of the company website or any branding materials.

The value proposition should state how a product or brand solves the customer's problem, the benefits of the product or brand, and why the customer should buy from this company and not another. The marketing plan is based on this value proposition to the customer.

Establishing your key performance indicators (KPIs) will allow you to measure the success of your marketing plan in relation to your company's value proposition. For example, if your goal is to engage with a certain demographic in a certain region, you can track social media and website visits.

The most effective digital marketing techniques in 2020 according to marketers are content marketing and marketing automation.

Identify Your Target Market

The marketing plan identifies the target market for a product or brand. Market research is often the basis for a target market and marketing channel decisions. For example, whether the company will advertise on the radio, on social media, through online ads, or on regional TV. 

Knowing who you want to sell to and why is an extremely critical component of any business plan. It allows you to focus your business and measure its success. Different demographics have different tastes and needs, knowing what your target market is will help you market to them.

Strategy and Execution

The marketing plan includes the rationale for these decisions. The plan should focus on the creation, timing, scheduling, and placement of specific campaigns. The plan will include the metrics that will measure the outcomes of your marketing efforts. For example, will you advertise on the radio or on social media? What time will you air advertisements if they are on the radio or TV? The strategy may include flighting scheduling , which includes the times when you can make the most of your advertising dollars.

Set Your Budget

A marketing plan costs money. Knowing your budget for a marketing plan will allow you to create a suitable plan within that context, stick to it, and prevent runaway costs. It will also help you allocate to different areas of your marketing plan.

Adjust Your Plan

A marketing plan can be adjusted at any point based on the results from the metrics. If digital ads are performing better than expected, for example, the budget for a campaign can be adjusted to fund a higher-performing platform or the company can initiate a new budget. The challenge for marketing leaders is to ensure that every platform has sufficient time to show results.

Without the correct metrics to assess the impact of outreach and marketing efforts, an organization will not know which campaigns to repeat and which ones to drop; maintaining ineffective initiatives will unnecessarily increase marketing costs.

Digital marketing shows results in near real-time, whereas TV ads require rotation to realize any level of market penetration. In the traditional marketing mix model, a marketing plan would fall under the category of "promotion," which is one of the four Ps , a term coined by Neil Borden to describe the marketing mix of product, price, promotion, and place.

A business plan details how a business will operate and function in its entirety. A business plan is a roadmap for a business. It will cover the goals, missions , values, financials, and strategies that the business will use in day-to-day operations and in the achievement of its objectives.

A business plan will include an executive summary, the products and services sold, a marketing analysis, a marketing strategy, financial planning, and a budget , to name but a few items.

As mentioned, a business plan will include a marketing plan, which focuses on creating a marketing strategy on how to bring awareness to the public of the company's product or service, how to reach the target market, and generate sales.

Example of a Marketing Plan

John came up with a new business idea that he believes is a niche offering in the market. He decides to start a business and his first step is creating a business plan that outlines all of the objectives, goals, values, pitfalls, and finances of his company.

John is able to raise enough capital from friends and family to get started, hires a few employees, and eventually creates his product. He now has to start selling his product and generate sales to keep his business operating.

To achieve this, John, with the help of a marketing company, creates a marketing plan. The marketing plan consists of market research that details the target market for John's product, which is recently retired men.

The marketing plan then comes up with the best methods of reaching this target market. The marketing plan stresses radio and television as opposed to social media as older, retired men use social media less than traditional forms of media, according to the market research that was conducted.

The ads are tailored to the target market, showing how John's product will benefit their lives, particularly when compared to market alternatives. Once the marketing plan has been executed, the marketing team analyzes how the efforts translate into sales.

What Is a Marketing Plan Template?

A marketing plan template is a document that an individual can use to create a marketing plan. The marketing plan template will contain all the important elements and the various needed language with blank sections. A user can insert their own information related to their business in the blank sections to ultimately create their own marketing plan.

What Is an Executive Summary in a Marketing Plan?

The executive summary of a marketing plan provides a brief overview of the entire marketing plan. The executive summary will contain the key findings of the market research, the company's objectives, marketing goals, an overview of the marketing trends, the description of the product or service being marketed, information on the target market, and how to financially plan for the marketing plan.

What Is a Top-Down Marketing Strategy?

A top-down marketing strategy is a traditional marketing strategy. This is where a business determines who it should sell to and how, and the customer base is largely passive and spurred to take action once they hear the advertisement. For example, a top-down marketing strategy would include ads on radio or television. Top-down marketing strategies are usually determined by the executives of a firm. It usually consists of what a firm desires to do and then determining a way to do it.

What Is a Bottom-Up Marketing Strategy?

A bottom-up marketing strategy focuses on discovering a workable strategy and then building on that strategy to create an impactful advertising campaign. Today's consumer wants to relate to a product or service in a meaningful way and a bottom-up marketing strategy is better suited to this. A bottom-up marketing strategy should focus on the target market and how better to create value for them.

How Much Does a Marketing Plan Cost?

The cost of a marketing plan will vary based on the company, the complexity, and the length of the overall strategy. The cost can range anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000.

A marketing plan is the advertising strategy that a business will implement to sell its product or service. The marketing plan will help determine who the target market is, how best to reach them, at what price point the product or service should be sold, and how the company will measure its efforts.

Constantly monitoring and adjusting a market plan is an important part of running a business as it shows what are the best and worst ways to generate sales. Without a successful marketing plan, a business may not be able to continue operating for very long.

Statista. " Most Effective Digital Marketing Techniques According to Marketers Worldwide in 2020 ."

Laire. " How Much Does a Marketing Plan Cost? "

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• What Is a Marketing Plan? Types and How to Write One 5 of 25
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How to Write the Marketing Plan in Business Plan?

A marketing plan in business plan is one of the very important sections of a business plan. Marketing is done to spread awareness about your business and its product/service. 

What is a marketing plan?

Marketing plan vs marketing strategy, how to write a marketing plan for a business plan.

An effective marketing strategy helps you achieve early success. 

Use this article to write an effective marketing plan section in a business plan. 

A marketing section of a business plan gives you a roadmap to organize, execute and track the progress of your marketing efforts. 

Your marketing plan helps you align your marketing efforts with your business goals. It gives your marketing effort a direction and you can evaluate your efforts at any point.

Types of marketing plan 

A perfect type of marketing plan in business plan will depend on your business, your goals, and how soon you want to achieve them. 

We have outlined some marketing plans that most businesses need to use. Since this is the age of the internet, we have also included online marketing plans and digital marketing plans.

Want to write a business plan?

Hire our professional business plan writers to prepare your business plan!

Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans 

These are your business marketing plans with a timeline. Every business has its quarterly, bi-yearly, and yearly goals. You will use these goals to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing efforts over time.

Paid Marketing Plans 

Paid marketing plans include online advertising, buying billboards, or marketing on vehicles. Pay Per Click marketing and social media marketing for your small business.

Social Media Marketing Plan 

Social media marketing plan for business plan can be done in two ways. You can hire a team and raise awareness about your business by sharing regular updates. 

You can also do paid marketing on social media. You will need to invest in buying ads on that social media platform and pay for a team of social media marketers.

You can also leverage these effective digital marketing channels for your business. 

Content Marketing Plan 

A content marketing plan is about attracting potential customers to your website with the help of SEO. You create value for your potential customer first and then by extension, market your business. It can be offline in the form of free workshops etc or online in the form of guides and resources.

Product Launch Marketing Plan 

A product lunch  sales and marketing plan in business plan  will help you decide on the marketing tools, tactics, and tracking you will do when launching a new product or service.

You can also hire WiseBusinessPlans Digital Marketing Services to run successful marketing campaigns for your business. 

The difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy is simple; a marketing plan is what methods, tools, and tactics you will use for marketing, and a market strategy in business plan is how you will implement your plan.

Learn how to develop an effective marketing strategy with this detailed guide. 

Access our free business plan examples now!

Follow these simple steps to write a marketing plan in business plan.

Business Mission

Write your business mission statement and translate it into the efforts the marketing department will make. 

For example, your business mission is to help people with home gardening. Your marketing department version will be to attract people who want to do home gardening.

These are performance indicators. These metrics will help you evaluate performance and progress. An example of KPIs for marketing is customer visits to your website, social media page, or brick-and-mortar store.

Create Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a short description of your average customer. When you have no data, a buyer persona will describe the customer you want to attract.

Decide on Marketing Strategies and Content

Go through the marketing strategies you can use and select the one that will produce the best return on investment for your business. 

Similarly, think about the content type that is attractive to your target audience . For example, video format may attract your audience or you may need to share more about your business on social media to grab their attention.

Define Marketing Plan Scope

Define the scope and limits of your marketing plan. Clearly mention what your marketing team will do and will not do. 

This will help you save time, cost, and effort in wasted resources.

Set Marketing Budget 

You can only spend a set amount on marketing. Set your marketing budget and be creative in that budget to produce the best return. 

Your budget is directly related to your marketing goals. Set your marketing budget in a way that does not hamper marketing efforts. 

Know your Competition 

Knowing and profiling your customer helps you market better. See what are strong spots of competitors’ marketing plans, are and how they are attracting audiences to make a plan to compete effectively. 

Appoint your Team & their Responsibilities

Decide on job roles for your team. Set their KPIs, marketing channels they will manage, what content they will create, etc.

Bonus Tip: Here is a step by step guide on how to write a marketing plan executive summary with example and template.

Example of Marketing Plan in Business Plan PDF

See this example of a marketing plan in a business plan to understand how it is done. You can create your marketing plan in the same way.

In the marketing plan section, include details about your target market, competition analysis, marketing strategies, pricing, promotion, and distribution channels. It should outline your approach to reaching and engaging your target audience.

Conduct market research by analyzing your target audience, understanding their needs and preferences, studying your competitors, and identifying market trends. Use surveys, interviews, and industry reports to gather relevant data for your marketing plan.

Consider including a mix of marketing strategies such as digital marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, advertising, public relations, and networking. Choose strategies that align with your target audience and business goals.

Determine pricing by considering factors such as production costs, competitor pricing, market demand, and perceived value. Conduct a pricing analysis to ensure your prices are competitive and profitable for your business.

It is recommended to review and update your marketing plan regularly, at least annually or whenever there are significant changes in your business or market conditions. This allows you to adapt your strategies, stay relevant, and capitalize on new opportunities.

WiseBusinessPlans is the company that writes business plans

One comment.

It is a very useful guide. I was wondering If your site offers marketing plan writers for businesses. If any, kindly reply.

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2.3 Purpose and Structure of the Marketing Plan

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• 1 Explain the purpose of a marketing plan.
• 2 List and discuss elements that should be included in a marketing plan.

Purpose and Structure of a Marketing Plan

A company’s marketing plan ( Figure 2.10 ) is without a doubt one of the most important planning tools in business. You might think that it’s an activity that generates an impressive, colorful document that sits in a desk drawer until the next time it gets revised, but you’d be wrong.

If you’re a new business seeking funding, the bank will want to see and understand your marketing plan before parting with funds. If you have an existing business that you want to grow, investors will likely go over your marketing plan with a fine-tooth comb to understand how additional funding will generate a positive return. Even if you’re not seeking external funding, you still need a marketing plan to help you establish and achieve your sales and marketing goals in the most effective manner. That’s because the marketing plan will set forth the specific actions that marketing team members need to take in order to reach target customers, build brand awareness, and of course, generate increased revenue.

If you like sports analogies, think about marketing plans as being akin to playbooks in football. A football playbook sets forth what needs to be done to win the game. The playbook breaks the team’s strategy into actionable plays and defines who is responsible for what in order to win the game. That’s exactly the purpose of a marketing plan as well!

Structure of a Marketing Plan

Do a quick Internet search on “structure of a marketing plan,” and you’ll get countless results. To make this even more confusing, there is little agreement within marketing about the precise structure of a marketing plan. Some marketing “experts” argue for 10 components, others for 5 or 6 components. For our purposes in this book, we’re going to use a 12-element marketing plan comprising the elements shown in Figure 2.11 , each of which will be discussed in detail.

If your professor has assigned the semester-long marketing plan template assignment, these next sections will provide you with excellent guidance for completing each of the sections. So let’s dive right in.

Executive Summary

As the name suggests, the executive summary of your marketing plan provides those who will be reviewing your plan with a brief overview (usually one to two pages). It’s going to give the reader a quick synopsis of the main parts of the plan—an overview of what your company has done, what it plans to do, and how it plans to do it.

Think of the executive summary as being an “elevator pitch” of the plan. If you’re not familiar with elevator pitches, they’re persuasive, concise introductions that provide the listener with the information they need to know within just a short period of time—usually the length of the average elevator ride.

The executive summary of your marketing plan should succinctly cover the main parts of the plan. It should contain information about the company, brand, products/services, the market itself, and the overall marketing direction of the company.

It’s important to keep in mind that a marketing plan is typically written in sections separated by headings or subheadings. That’s not the case with the executive summary. You’ll write the executive summary as a series of paragraphs, and each paragraph will focus on a different section of the marketing plan.

Instead of talking about the executive summary strictly in abstract terms, let’s see how this plays out in an example.

This marketing plan is presented for ABC Company, a manufacturer of electronic components for a variety of industries. We have developed a new product for the health care industry, and this marketing plan will demonstrate that ABC Company has a unique opportunity to expand into this dynamic, growing market.

ABC Company was founded in 2002 and is based in Park City, Utah. The company produces electronic components for a variety of industries. When the company was founded, it produced electronic apparatuses primarily for the automotive industry. Its product line has expanded over the past 20+ years to include electronic apparatuses for the appliance and heating, ventilating, and cooling (HVAC) industries. Key Team Members: Khadija Simone, founder and CEO—Khadija has over 30 years of experience in the electronic apparatus industry, having managed divisions of two Fortune 500 companies before founding ABC Company. Khadija has a BS in electrical engineering from Purdue University and a master of business administration from the University of Chicago. Tanasha Turner, vice president of marketing—Tanasha has 20 years of sales and business development experience from working with several start-up companies that she helped grow into large businesses. She joined ABC Company in 2016 and has spearheaded the entry of the company into the appliance industry. Tanasha has a BA in marketing from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in business marketing from California Coast University.

There are several large players in the electronic apparatus industry, including EAC Industries and Antwell Industries, as well as a few smaller companies that sell similar products to the automotive, appliance, and HVAC industries. The rapid pace of innovations in the industry is stimulating demand for newer and faster apparatuses. Digital technologies such as 5G mobile communication networks and 3D printing are expected to aid in the development of innovative electronic apparatuses.

As noted above, ABC Company has created a new electronic apparatus for the health care industry. The success of this product would provide the company with an inroad to a new industry that uses the sophisticated technology developed by the company. This new product would provide the health care industry with improved efficiencies and cost savings vis-à-vis those that are offered by existing products on the market. Although there are similar products designed for other industries, there are currently no competitors for this type of product designed specifically for the health care industry.

The target market for ABC Company’s new product is large health care providers, including hospitals, research laboratories, and clinics. This marketing plan will outline its campaign to reach this target market through a combination of direct sales and social media marketing.

ABC Company has experienced significant sales growth in the appliance and HVAC industries since the company’s inception in 2002. Its sales revenue from these industries last year exceeded $23.4 million. Our marketing budget for the coming year in connection with entry into the health care industry is estimated to be $150,000.

ABC Company has developed a marketing plan that will enable it to quickly make inroads into the health care industry and become the premier provider of electronic apparatuses to this growing market. We intend to use our experience and expertise in selling to the appliance and HVAC industries to showcase how this electronic apparatus can benefit the health care industry.

Mission Statement

The next section of your marketing plan will be the mission statement of your company. You’ll recall from Section 2.1 that a mission statement is an action statement that clearly and concisely declares the purpose of the organization and how it serves its customers. It defines the what, why, and who of the organization. Once again, a picture (or in this case, an example) is worth a thousand words. Earlier in this chapter, we examined the mission statements of a couple of well-known businesses, so let’s take a look at some mission statements for some other well-known companies:

• Pinterest : “Help people discover the things they love, and inspire them to go do those things in their daily lives” 52
• Spotify : “To unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it” 53
• BBC : “To act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain” 54

Keep in mind that most mission statements are one to three sentences, almost never exceeding 150 words. You want to be succinct in letting people know what you do and who you do it for.

But how do you write a mission statement? You might start out by asking yourself four fundamental questions—what does the company do, how does it do it, who does it do it for, and why does it do what it does? The answers to these questions will likely give you enough information to synthesize and condense it into a meaningful mission statement. Remember that your mission statement should be more than just a meaningless string of “feel good” business jargon. It should be ambitious but realistic. It should be clear and concise. It should be focused on what the company does for its customers. Finally, it should keep employees focused on the organization’s objectives.

SWOT Analysis

The next section in your marketing plan will include a SWOT analysis. We’ve covered the concept of a SWOT analysis in some detail earlier in this chapter, so we won’t review it here. Suffice it to say that the SWOT analysis as part of your marketing plan is crucial in identifying key internal and external influences in your company’s current position so that you can take advantage of the strengths and opportunities, mitigate the threats, and address your internal weaknesses.

Objectives and Issues

As noted earlier in this chapter, marketing plan objectives should be SMART—specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. Within your marketing plan, these objectives should be written in such a manner that they communicate precisely what needs to be achieved and who is responsible for each activity. For example, if you were writing this section of the marketing plan for ABC Company, an objective statement such as “Increase revenue by introducing a new product in the health care industry” would be too generic and not actionable. How much do you want to increase market share and during what time period? A better objective may be “Generate $1.7 million in sales in the health care industry by the end of the next fiscal year.” Remember that writing specific goals and objectives can help you more clearly define and address the issues outlined in your marketing plan. You should also keep in mind that the marketing plan objectives aren’t limited to just revenue. You may have objectives like increasing leads, in-store foot traffic, conversion rates, etc. Just make certain that each of these objectives is SMART.

Market Segmentation and Target Market

Essentially, what you will define in this section of the marketing plan is your target audience and your most likely buyers. We will cover market segmentation and targeting in more detail later in this textbook, but we’ll give you a sneak peek into these concepts. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a target market into smaller, more defined categories of people or businesses with common needs and/or wants who are expected to respond similarly to a marketing action. Ultimately, the purpose of segmenting a market is to highlight the differences between groups of customers so that you can decide which group(s) upon which to focus your marketing efforts and resources—that’s your target market.

Your marketing plan should include a description of the market for the product or service, the segments in this market, and how the plan will address the target market strategy.

Buyer Personas

The intricacies of buyer personas will also be covered in more detail in a later chapter, but your takeaway here is that a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your “ideal customer” that helps you understand and relate to the audience to which you want to market your product and/or services. Buyer personas help marketers visualize the person to whom the company is selling so that marketing messages can be fine-tuned because brands that feel “human” to their target market usually succeed in building a rapport with them, improving the brand reputation for both existing and new customers.

This section of the marketing plan should address who your buyer personas are (and you can have several). These are one-page visual profiles outlining the demographics of your ideal customer, such as age, gender, motivations, and needs. For example, let’s assume that your company sells outdoor apparel and hiking equipment. One of your buyer personas may be “On-the-go-Evan,” a Gen Z male who enjoys being outside and participating in noncompetitive sports and relies on blog posts, influencers, and reviews to get unbiased information about the equipment he needs. 55

Buyer personas aid marketers in bringing the target customer to life in a way that both inspires marketing strategies and prepares sales teams for conversations with customers that connect them in a meaningful way. How many buyer personas should you create? According to LinkedIn, although there isn’t a “magic number,” in most cases three to eight buyer personas are adequate. 56

Link to Learning

Creating buyer personas.

Creating buyer personas is an integral part of marketing, and it can be fun. For more information on steps to creating buyer personas, check out this tool from HubSpot that describes buyer personas and provides an interactive tool for creating them.

• Positioning

Similarly, positioning will be covered in more depth in a later chapter. Remember that you first will have segmented the market by dividing it into distinct groups of customers and determined which customer group(s) you want to target. Positioning now defines where your product or service fits into the marketplace and why it is better than your competitors’ products.

Product positioning is typically illustrated on a perceptual positioning map that uses two determinant attributes (those factors customers use in making their purchase decision) on the vertical and horizontal axes, and the marketer places his or her product offering on the map, along with those of the major competitors.

Once you’ve developed the map, you’ll have a clearer idea of where your product or service stands in relation to the competition. The questions to address in your marketing plan might include the following:

• Do consumer attitudes toward your product or service match what you want them to think about it?
• Do consumer attitudes toward your competitors’ products or services match what you perceive?
• Who are the competitors that consumers perceive as offering products or services that are close to yours?
• Are there holes or gaps in the map, indicating the potential for new offerings?

Creating a Perceptual Positioning Map

See an example of a perceptual positioning map as applied to the fast-food industry.

An important aspect of these maps is understanding how your products and your competition are perceived by customers, and this video shows you how to process and map this information.

Check out this example using chocolate. If you’re interested in using Excel data to create the map, watch this video example.

Current Marketing Situation

This section of your marketing plan should provide the reader with a clear description of the current state of the marketplace, including your target market and the competitive environment. It should include a synopsis of the research into and analysis of your target market, your competitors, challenges in the marketplace, and the company’s competitive differentiators. Some of the key items to address in the plan are as follows:

• Market Description. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list, but this section should address things like statistics about the size of your target market; whether it is growing, shrinking, or staying the same; if it is changing; and why. 57
• Product Review. The product review section of your marketing plan summarizes the main features of your company’s products, including information about sales, price, and gross margins.
• Competitive Analysis. This section should include a discussion of your top competitors and how they fare in the marketplace vis-à-vis your company’s products and/or services. This typically involves researching major competitors to glean insights into their products or services, sales, marketing tactics, product quality, pricing, market share, and distribution.

Marketing Strategy

Now let’s get to the heart of the matter. This section of the marketing plan essentially sets forth the broad marketing strategy or game plan for achieving the objectives previously set forth in the plan. It should consist of specific strategies for target markets, positioning, the marketing mix (i.e., product, price, place, and promotion), and anticipated marketing expenditure levels. 58

• Product Strategy. This is the “road map” that you’ll use to develop your product(s) or features(s), including all tasks needed to achieve the objectives set forth in the marketing plan. The product strategy essentially outlines how the product(s) or service(s) will benefit the business, what problem it will solve, and the impact that it will make on customers and the business. It’s only when this strategy has been set forth in straightforward terms that it can act as a baseline upon which you can measure success before, during, and after production. 59
• setting a price that sends the right message in terms of quality and value in the minds of your target market,
• setting a price that supports your promotion strategy (to be covered below), and
• setting a price that maximizes profit. 60
• Promotion Strategy. Your promotion strategy sets forth the tactics you intend to implement in your marketing plan in order to increase demand for your product(s) or service(s). List the methods you will use to gain awareness and interest in your product from those in your target audience. Methods of reaching potential consumers abound—company websites, social media networks, trade shows, and radio/television/website advertising. You’ll want to list the advantages and disadvantages of each method and indicate why and how much it will cost to employ the method(s) you have selected.
• Distribution Strategy. Your distribution strategy describes how customers in your target market will purchase from you. Will they buy directly from your website, from a storefront, or through distributors or retailers? What are the costs involved in this type of distribution, and why do you believe your distribution strategy will enable you to get the right product into the hands of the right consumer at the right time?

Action Programs

You’re getting to the end of the plan (finally). The marketing strategies outlined in the section above should now be translated into specific action programs that indicate what is to be done, when it is to be done, by whom it will be done, and the cost involved. The action program should list when activities will be started, reviewed, and completed.

Budgeting Concerns

The action plans outlined in the section above should enable you to make a supporting marketing budget that is essentially a projected profit-and-loss (P&L) statement. If you’ve previously taken an accounting course, you’ll know that a P&L statement summarizes the revenues, costs, and expenses incurred during a specified period.

On the revenue side, this statement should indicate that forecasted number of units to be sold during the period outlined in the marketing plan and the average net price for revenues. On the expense side, this statement should indicate the cost of production, physical distribution, and marketing expenditures. 61

Controls to Monitor Progress

Controls is the last section of the marketing plan. This section will outline the control methods that will be utilized to monitor the action programs outlined in the plan. The reason you’ll want to monitor these metrics during the time period of the marketing plan is to see where things may have fallen outside the desired range, at which time you’ll want to dig into the details, perform an analysis of the root cause of the problem(s), and make adjustments to get back on track.

Marketing Plans

There are numerous online examples of marketing plans. To be a great marketer, it would be wise to review and study marketing plans and how they tell a unique company story. Here are several to check out:

• Shopify blog: “7 Inspiring Marketing Plan Examples (and How You Can Implement Them)”
• University of Illinois
• Visit Baton Rouge
• Bizfluent example for a generic restaurant

There’s also a free marketing plan template available from HubSpot .

Knowledge Check

It’s time to check your knowledge on the concepts presented in this section. Refer to the Answer Key at the end of the book for feedback.

• Description of products or services being marketed
• Description of customer base and related marketing activities
• Description of company and team
• Description of market factors and trends
• Strengths and opportunities
• Weaknesses and threats
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Opportunities and threats
• A perceptual map indicates the relative strength of competitors in the market segment.
• A perceptual map indicates the relative market share and market growth of a product portfolio.
• A perceptual map illustrates product positioning vis-à-vis the competitors.
• A perceptual map displays the product, pricing, promotion, and distribution strategy of the product or service.
• Objectives and issues
• SWOT analysis
• Buyer personas
• Current marketing situation
• Target market
• Mission statement

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• Publication date: Jan 25, 2023
• Location: Houston, Texas
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Marketing Plan explained plus template

Marketing plan: this article explains the Marketing Plan in a practical way. Next to what a marketing plan is, highlights this article the core elements and a complete marketing plan template to get started. After reading it, you will understand the basics of this marketing approach. Enjoy reading!

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic document that companies use to record their marketing strategy for a specific period of time. A marketing plan is likely to contain separate strategies for different marketing teams and objectives in a company, but they are all designed to support the same overarching business goal.

It can also be part of an overall business plan . In any case, a well-written plan includes a comprehensively described marketing strategy . This allows the marketing goals to be achieved.

What parts does a marketing plan consist of?

Which components are included in the plan, to a large extent, depends on its purpose and the type of organization.

The scope of a plan can be limited to some of the following if it focuses on a specific channel, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing or content marketing .

• Executive summary
• Situational analyses
• Opportunities / threats ( SWOT analysis )
• Marketing objectives
• Marketing strategy
• Action plan
• Financial analysis and forecasting
• Monitoring and control

The above is a summary of chapters in a general marketing plan. These components are briefly explained later in this article. In the Toolshero marketing plan template you will find in detail what should be included in an extensive marketing plan document.

Figure 1 – elements of a marketingplan

1. Executive summary

An executive summary is a short chapter that includes a summary of the entire report. Marketing plans can be complex documents that contain a lot of detail about general marketing goals and specific activities.

It is therefore important to summarize the main points of the document and include them as the first chapter of the document.

See this chapter as an abbreviated version of the full document. The main conclusions and action points from the report must be clearly set out on 1 page. The executive summary is the last part and is written last, but is added as the first chapter of the document.

2. Situational analyses

The first part of a plan includes the current situation and environmental factors of an organization or brand. It is important to explain this as completely as possible because it is a foundation and basis for the following elements.

The situational analysis consists of a number of components, including:

• Macro environment analysis
• Market analysis
• Customer and consumer analysis
• Internal analysis

In the template you will find in detail which matters should be included in these sections. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the main elements.

4. Marketing objectives

The marketing objectives section is an important one. It sets out the goals for a given period and how to achieve them. Ideally, these goals are described in SMART Goals format.

In general, a marketing plan contains one or more of four types of objectives. The first of these is about boosting sales. This is by far the most pursued KPI. The second is about lead generation. In addition, increasing brand awareness is often included in the marketing objectives.

Limit the amount of goals you include in the plan. Keep these goals challenging, but achievable ( SMART Objectives ).

5. Marketing strategy

The marketing strategy is important because it outlines the approach to gain your competitive advantage. That may sound like a pretty simple definition, but confusion often arises when it comes to the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy. As mentioned, the strategy is the plan to gain competitive advantage.

So the strategy is quite specific, where a plan is quite general. A marketing plan can contain multiple objectives and therefore multiple strategies. The strategy keeps the team aligned. The shared goals help everyone understand what is being worked towards. It helps to visualize the way there.

A marketing strategy must therefore be drawn up before actually working. Otherwise, the team works without a clear goal. To make a real impact, this strategy should not change too much in a short time. Therefore, evaluate the strategy regularly and make small changes if necessary.

Related topics that come up in the marketing strategy template section are:

• Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
• Product mix
• Product strengths and weaknesses
• Product life cycle
• Product portfolio matrix

A marketing strategy often includes the following components:

• Positioning
• Competitive environment
• Brand Essence

6. Action plan

A plan is used to actually execute the marketing strategy. Its purpose is to write out the objectives, strategies and other plans so that they help keep the company on track and measure progress.

Every action plan is different because it is directly linked to specific strategies and goals, but there are some elements that often come up.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential in an action plan. These are the metrics that are used to measure the effectiveness of the marketing campaign.

Schedule and timeline

The schedule includes the key deadlines of the campaign. Meeting deadlines is important so that the campaign is not delayed and the objectives are reached on time.

Budget is often an important factor in setting up a marketing strategy . The more budget is available, the more resources such as people and financial tools can be deployed.

It is important to include budgetary considerations in the action plan so that goals and deadlines are met with the right expectations.

7. Financial analysis and forecasting of the Marketing Plan

In the end, almost everything revolves around the financial implications of the plan. The bottom line is therefore in many cases the net profit. Of course, this does not apply to non-profit organizations, where the focus is on keeping the costs contained within reasonable limits.

The following financial ratios are explained in the financial section of the plan:

• Gross profit
• Return on investment (ROI)

8. Monitoring and control

Their usefulness and purpose have already been explained under objectives, but goals are crucial to be able to measure progress. Marketers should be ready to update and adjust marketing plans at any time. This can only be done if progress towards the objectives is accurately measured.

Marketing Plan template

To write your Marketing Plan, you can use this ready-to-use template / worksheet in a .DOC format.

Download the Marketing Plan template

Now it’s your turn

What do you think? Do you recognize the explanation about the marketing plan? Do you have experience drafting and developing an plan? What tools and methods do you use to write it? What tips and tricks can you share for creating an effective marketing strategy? Do you have any other tips or comments?

Share your experience and knowledge in the comments box below.

More information

• Cohen, W. A. (2005). The marketing plan . John Wiley & Sons .
• Wood, M. B. (2003). The marketing plan handbook . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall .
• Westwood, J. (2013). How to write a marketing plan . Kogan Page Publishers.
• Chernev, A. (2020). The marketing plan handbook . Cerebellum Press.

How to cite this article: Janse, B. (2022). Marketing Plan . Retrieved [insert date] from Toolshero: https://www.toolshero.com/marketing/marketing-plan/

Original publication date: 06/07/2022 | Last update: 01/08/2024

Add a link to this page on your website: <a href=”https://www.toolshero.com/marketing/marketing-plan/”>Toolshero: Marketing Plan</a>

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Ben Janse is a young professional working at ToolsHero as Content Manager. He is also an International Business student at Rotterdam Business School where he focusses on analyzing and developing management models. Thanks to his theoretical and practical knowledge, he knows how to distinguish main- and side issues and to make the essence of each article clearly visible.

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8.5: Marketing Strategy and the Marketing Plan

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• Page ID 50802

• Michael Laverty and Chris Littel et al.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Distinguish between a marketing strategy, a marketing plan, and a pitch
• Describe the elements of a marketing plan

Now that you have a better idea of what marketing is, you are ready to start developing a marketing strategy and plan. A marketing strategy describes how a company will reach consumers and convert them into paying customers. Having a solid-yet-flexible marketing strategy is a good business practice, no matter what kind of business you are in.

A marketing plan is a formal business document that is used as a blueprint or guide for how a company will achieve its marketing goals. A marketing plan differs from a business plan in that it focuses more on market research, attracting customers, and marketing strategies, whereas the business plan covers much more than that, as you will see in Business Model and Plan .

Marketing plans are important tools because they act as roadmaps for everyone involved in an enterprise. Writing a marketing plan forces you to specify goals and develop strategies to reach them, and encourages you to research markets and competition. A strong marketing plan will encourage entrepreneurs to think deeply about their business and profit potential, helping them make better business and marketing decisions. Additionally, a marketing plan can create greater involvement and cohesiveness among employees by clarifying goals and expectations.

A variety of marketing plan templates are available that can be modified to fit your business’s product and/or services. One thing to consider is why you are writing your plan and who your audience is. In addition to planning for your venture, will it be used by employees or potential investors? Different audiences will require different kinds of information. If it’s an employee, then you must include extra details about the operation of the business. If the plan is geared toward acquiring an investor, be sure to highlight the value that will be gained from investing.

Keep in mind that the various parts of a plan do not need to be written in a certain order. Plans should also be seen as flexible guides rather than absolute rules. All good marketing plans are living, breathing documents that help you measure success while allowing for course corrections when necessary. Table 8.8 provides the standard components of a marketing plan.

Executive Summary

The executive summary is just that—a clear and concise summary of the major points of your marketing plan. Though it is placed first, it is generally written last because it is based on the information presented in other subsequent sections.

The executive summary is typically one or two pages long and includes key indicators of success for the business and its stakeholders, which may include company owners, managers, consultants, investors, and banks. Your goal is not merely to summarize everything in your plan but to highlight why people should be interested in your venture. Whether the reader is an employee or a potential partner or investor, the executive summary should seek to not only inform but to excite.

Focusing on the opportunity at hand, what makes your business model special, and the potential financial reward is a good way to capture a reader’s attention. For example, if your business’ strengths include a great marketing team and a significant competitive advantage, you should highlight them as reasons for success. Some readers may only read this section, so make sure you highlight what makes your company special and how you plan on turning that into profit.

Situation Analysis

In many ways, the basis of your marketing plan is found in your situation analysis , which is an examination of the internal and external circumstances relevant to your business and product. A good analysis will provide the logical support for the strategies you choose. For example, the research you conduct here explains why you will develop a certain product, how you will price it, and what you will do to reach your target market.

Good situation analyses often include a SWOT analysis, which looks at a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. They also look at future and current competitors, and include market validation research that has surveyed potential customers. This information is critical because it proves that you have done your due diligence on your product and market.

Marketing Opportunity

Assuming your background research has led you to determine that there is a business opportunity, this is where you explain what and where that opportunity is. For example, if your research led you to discover a gap in the market for educational children’s toys, this is where you explain the depth of the opportunity. Here you use your research as evidence to prove to your reader that there is a market gap and that you know how to fill it. If your goal is to get an investor interested, this is where you would let them know what they stand to gain and when they would gain that.

LINK TO LEARNING

The US Small Business Administration strives to help business owners initiate and succeed in developing enterprises. Their website is loaded with helpful information, classes, and templates that can help the entrepreneur navigate the intricacies of marketing, as well as provides helpful tips on developing a marketing plan.

Business Model

In this section, your job is to marry the opportunity you saw with the solution you have created. Here you articulate how your competitive advantage and points of differentiation (nature of the solution and its key features and benefits) will provide value to customers and earn profits that will sustain your business into the foreseeable future. What will you do to create value that attracts customers? How will you generate sales? Who is your target market? If you were opening a gym, this is where you would lay out how you will capture customers, the value they will receive, what types of membership contracts will be available to them, and so on.

A great tool for capturing this information is the Business Model Canvas ( Figure 8.13 ), which is discussed in Launch for Growth to Success and Business Model and Plan . The nine building blocks of this model will help you to determine the targeted customer segment, value proposition that you will present each of your segments, channels for the distribution of the proposition or touchpoints, type of customer relationship you will build with your target, types of cost structures and revenue streams based on pricing means, and key resources, activities, and partners that will help you to succeed.

The canvas also allows the entrepreneur to innovate and to change if something doesn’t work out. The point of this tool is to put the pieces of a plan together. 16

Marketing Objectives

Here you present your specific goals and their tangible outcomes. It is not enough to say that you will be very successful without defining what exactly success means. The point of this section is to quantify your goals as units sold, sales/revenue, market share, or some other practical metric. Goals can also include creating measurable brand awareness and developing a certain number of distribution channels.

For example, good, measurable goals might be selling 300 units per month, selling $600,000 worth of product in a year, or gaining brand awareness of 10 percent of your target market in three months. Avoid goals that are unmeasurable or vague, as they won’t help you now or later.

No matter what your goals are, they should be reasonably achievable and as specific as possible. The reason for this is so that later on, you can determine whether you have been successful. If you haven’t, you will know something needs to change.

Marketing Strategies

As mentioned earlier, having a good marketing mix will help your business succeed. As an entrepreneur, you want to segment the market and figure out if there are possible pockets of people whom you can serve. The process of segmenting, targeting, and positioning (STP) will help you figure out who is your best customer and allow you to allocate your resources effectively to serve that market.

After going through this process, you can look at the marketing mix, and depending on whether you have a product, service, or a mixture of both, which is usually the case, you will outline your approach to the 7Ps of the marketing mix.

Action Plan

In the action plan, you detail how things will get done in your business on a day-to-day basis, when they will get done, and who will be doing them. Often, new business owners develop extensive strategies, but they don’t have the people power to implement them. Obviously, ensuring that you have the necessary human resources in place to execute your goals is important. This is the section where you make it clear that you do. For example, if you have a marketing team in place, highlighting their ability to execute your plans will help convince potential investors that you can put your plan into action.

Here you include budgets, forecasts, and any other information that will give readers and potential investors a clear picture of your business’s financial situation. Being transparent and truthful will create trust and goodwill between your company and potential investors.

This section is also important because it will help you determine how profitable your business might be. One place to start is by determining your expenses and future profits. Since most entrepreneurs tend to overestimate these numbers, it is best to develop financial projections for best- and worst-case scenarios, as well as a projection for an average case scenario.

Many entrepreneurs develop one-, three-, or five-year projections to get a sense of future profits and to prove that their business model is sustainable over the long run. Figure 8.14 provides an example.

Key Performance Indicators

Finally, you need to determine your key performance indicators, or how you will evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies, by looking at the progress you have made during a specific timeframe. These include the quantitative milestones that will tell you if you are on the right track, help you analyze your decision-making process and focus on specific strategies, and make changes if these don’t work.

For example, one of your milestones might be a sales goal of $50,000 within the first six months. If you are not on track by the time you hit this milestone, it can be an indication that you either overestimated your sales or your strategies are not working. In either case, you will need to make actionable steps to revise your projections or find more effective strategies.

5 Essential Parts of a Marketing Plan

• Laura Buckler
• Digital Marketing
• 13 Comments

Why do you need a marketing plan? Making your mark is hard enough when you know what you are doing; trying to do it without a plan makes this impossible barring an amazing stroke of luck.

An effective marketing strategy starts with a marketing plan. It is basically a roadmap outlining the steps for attaining the desired end, such as more sales or better brand recognition. In most cases, a marketing plan stretches over a few months to three years.

The reason for such a short span is that your marketing plan has to be dynamic. It is more a work in progress than a static plan. Much can change in a few months, and this can significantly affect your strategy and even your objectives. Setting your goals and strategies for more than three years usually doesn’t work very well, so that’s a lot of effort down the drain.

That said, making a marketing plan is actually not that complicated. You just need to focus on 5 essential parts of a marketing plan that can help you keep on top of market trends, changes and demands while keeping your eye on the ball.

Overview and analyses

The first thing you need to do in creating your marketing plan is putting it in context. Your business does not exist in a vacuum. Your marketing strategy will depend on the position of your business with respect to your competitors as well as current economic, political, natural, technological, and demographic factors that might affect your business.

You can find out what you can and cannot do by making a rigorous and objective SWOT analysis. It is simply a listing of your strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats. Here is a great guide for making your own. To find out what external factors may affect your business, you can do a PEST analysis .

Once you have these two analyses completed, you can use them to establish the foundation for your marketing plan. You now have a clear-eyed view of where you are with respect to your competitors, and your value proposition that can differentiate you from others in your industry. It may be quality of the product or service, unique features, low prices, free delivery, and so on.

Product and target market

Your marketing plan should provide a detailed profile of your target market. No matter what product or service you provide, the success of your marketing rests on identifying your main buyers and gearing your efforts towards attracting, appealing, and engaging them. You are not going to please everyone, and trying to do so will lessen the impact of your marketing efforts, and potentially waste your resources.

To best identify the people you should target , you need to understand the benefits and features of your product and/or service fully. Ask yourself if your product or service caters to one or more of three basic reasons way people buy: solve problems, satisfy a need, or make them feel good. You will then be able to narrow down the people that are most likely to become your customers.

Your target market, or buyer persona, may be an individual, company, or a market segment differentiated by gender, age, culture, education, income, social class, lifestyles, or region. The important thing is to define it and pour all your efforts into marketing to that specific target audience.

Goals and activities

Goal setting is an essential part of any plan, and marketing plans are no different. However, having goals are not enough. Your goals have to be SMART : specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-limited.

For example, aiming to be the “best in the business” is not a SMART goal, because it is so vague there is no way to find out if you have achieved it. A better goal may be to “acquire 1% more sales than the nearest competitor within one year.”

Setting goals are just one part of the equation. You also have to list down activities you will carry out within a certain period to help you achieve your goals. The activities will depend on the goal, of course, so one follows the other.

Task assignments

Every action requires an actor, so your marketing plan should specify a person responsible for each marketing activity. Assigning tasks to specific people not only ensures execution according to plan, but promotes commitment to the plan.

People are more likely to strive for desirable results within the prescribed time if they are specifically accountable. It is also much easier to measure progress, and analyze results when someone is on top of it at all times.

Make sure that when you assign a task that the person has the skills and knowledge to carry it out effectively. It would be disastrous, not to say unfair, to expect an unqualified person to execute a task well. Remember that the results will depend largely on the person executing it. If you must, outsource tasks you cannot do effectively in-house. For example, if you need professionally written copy, you might want to get professional essay services to do it for you.

Review and revision

A marketing plan should include “save progress” levels, so to speak, where you track progress, check metrics and review and analyze results to see if your strategy is working as expected or not. If it is not, you have to analyze what is not working and adjust your strategy to accomplish your goals. You may even find that your goals are not SMART after all, and adjust that.

The metrics you measure will depend on your goal and activity, but essential marketing metrics include traffic, conversion, revenue, cost per lead, and churn rate. Check these regularly so that you know where you are at any given moment and maximize your marketing ROI.

These five essential parts of a marketing plan entail quite a bit of work on your part, but they are necessary for marketing success. Things are changing so fast nowadays that your marketing plan is often the only thing that keeps you on track. Make the time to make a good one, and continually review it so that you can achieve your goals.

Posted by Laura Buckler

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8 Business Plan Templates You Can Get for Free

8 min. read

Updated April 10, 2024

A business plan template can be an excellent tool to simplify the creation of your business plan. 

The pre-set structure helps you organize ideas, covers all critical business information, and saves you time and effort on formatting.

The only issue? There are SO many free business plan templates out there. 

So, which ones are actually worth using? 

To help remove the guesswork, I’ve rounded up some of the best business plan templates you can access right now. 

These are listed in no particular order, and each has its benefits and drawbacks.

What to look for in a business plan template

Not all business plan templates are created equal. As you weigh your options and decide which template(s) you’ll use, be sure to review them with the following criteria in mind:

• Easy to edit: A template should save you time. That won’t be the case if you have to fuss around figuring out how to edit the document, or even worse, it doesn’t allow you to edit at all.
• Contains the right sections: A good template should cover all essential sections of a business plan , including the executive summary, product/service description, market/competitive analysis, marketing and sales plan, operations, milestones, and financial projections. 
• Provides guidance: You should be able to trust that the information in a template is accurate. That means the organization or person who created the template is highly credible, known for producing useful resources, and ideally has some entrepreneurial experience.
• Software compatibility: Lastly, you want any template to be compatible with the software platforms you use. More than likely, this means it’s available in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or PDF format at a minimum. 

1. Bplans — A plan with expert guidance

Since you’re already on Bplans, I have to first mention the templates that we have available. 

Our traditional and one-page templates were created by entrepreneurs and business owners with over 80 years of collective planning experience. We revisit and update them annually to ensure they are approachable, thorough, and aligned with our team’s evolving best practices.  

The templates, available in Word, PDF, or Google Doc formats, include in-depth guidance on what to include in each section, expert tips, and links to additional resources. 

Plus, we have over 550 real-world sample business plans you can use for guidance when filling out your template.

Download: Traditional lender-ready business plan template or a simple one-page plan template .

Brought to you by

Create a professional business plan

Using ai and step-by-step instructions.

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2. SBA — Introduction to business plans

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) offers two different business plan templates along with a short planning guide. 

While not incredibly in-depth, it’s enough to help you understand how traditional and lean plans are structured and what information needs to be covered. The templates themselves are more like examples, providing you with a finished product to reference as you write your plan.

The key benefit of using these templates is that they were created by the SBA. While they may provide less guidance, you can be assured that the information and structure meet their expectations.

Explore: The SBA’s planning guide and free templates

3. SCORE — Planning workbook

SCORE’s template is more like a workbook. It includes exercises after each section to help you get your ideas down and turn them into a structured plan.

The market research worksheets are especially useful. They provide a clear framework for identifying your target market and analyzing competitors from multiple angles. Plus, they give you an easy way to document all the information you’re collecting.

You will likely have to remove the exercises in this template to make it investor-ready. But it can be worth it if you’re struggling to get past a blank page and want a more interactive planning method.

Download: SCORE’s business plan template

4. PandaDoc — A template with fillable forms

PandaDoc’s library offers a variety of industry-specific business plan templates that feature a modern design flair and concise instructions. 

These templates are designed for sharing. They include fillable fields and sections for non-disclosure agreements, which may be necessary when sending a plan to investors.  

But the real benefit is their compatibility with PandaDoc’s platform. Yes, they are free, but if you’re a PandaDoc subscriber, you’ll have far more customization options. 

Out of all their templates, the standard business plan template is the most in-depth. The rest, while still useful, go a bit lighter on guidance in favor of tailoring the plan to a specific industry.

Explore: PandaDoc’s business plan template library  

5. Canva — Pitch with your plan

Canva is a great option for building a visually stunning business plan that can be used as a pitch tool. It offers a diverse array of templates built by their in-house team and the larger creative community, meaning the number of options constantly grows.

You will need to verify that the information in the template you choose matches the standard structure of a traditional business plan. 

You should do this with any template, but it’s especially important with any tool that accepts community submissions. While they are likely reviewed and approved, there may still be errors.

Remember, you can only edit these templates within Canva. Luckily, you only need a free subscription, and you may just miss out on some of the visual assets being used. 

To get the most value, it may be best to create a more traditional planning document and transfer that information into Canva. 

Explore: Canva’s business plan gallery

6. ClickUp — The collaborative template

Out of all the project management tools that offer free business plan templates, ClickUp’s is the most approachable.

Rather than throwing you into all the features and expecting you to figure it out—ClickUp provides a thorough startup guide with resource links, images, and videos explaining how to write a plan using the tool. 

There’s also a completed sample plan (structured like an expanded one-page plan) for you to reference and see how the more traditional document can connect to the product management features. You can set goals, target dates, leave comments, and even assign tasks to someone else on your team. 

These features are limited to the ClickUp platform and will not be useful for everyone. They will likely get in the way of writing a plan you can easily share with lenders or investors. 

But this is a great option if you’re looking for a template that makes internal collaboration more fluid and keeps all your information in one place.

Sign Up: Get a free trial of ClickUp and explore their template library

7. Smartsheet — A wide variety of templates

I’m including Smartsheet’s library of templates on this list because of the sheer number of options they provide. 

They have a simple business plan template, a one-page plan, a fill-in-the-blank template, a plan outline, a plan grading rubric, and even an Excel-built project plan. All are perfectly usable and vary in visual style, depth of instructions, and the available format.

Honestly, the only drawback (which is also the core benefit) is that the amount of templates can be overwhelming. If you’re already uncertain which plan option is right for you, the lengthy list they provide may not provide much clarity.

At the same time, it can be a great resource if you want a one-stop shop to view multiple plan types.

Explore: Smartsheet’s business plan template library  

8. ReferralRock affiliate marketing business plan

I’m adding ReferralRock’s template to this list due to its specificity. 

It’s not your standard business plan template. The plan is tailored with specific sections and guidance around launching an affiliate marketing business. 

Most of the template is dedicated to defining how to choose affiliates, set commissions, create legal agreements, and track performance.

So, if you plan on starting an affiliate marketing business or program, this template will provide more specific guidance. Just know that you will likely need to reference additional resources when writing the non-industry sections of your plan.

Download: ReferralRock affiliate marketing business plan template

Does it matter what business plan template you use?

The short answer is no. As long as the structure is correct, it saves you time, and it helps you write your business plan , then any template will work. 

What it ultimately comes down to, is what sort of value you hope to get from the template. 

• Do you need more guidance? 
• A simple way to structure your plan? 
• An option that works with a specific tool?
• A way to make your plan more visually interesting?

Hopefully, this list has helped you hone in on an option that meets one (or several) of these needs. Still, it may be worth downloading a few of these templates to determine the right fit. 

And really, what matters most is that you spend time writing a business plan . It will help you avoid early mistakes, determine if you have a viable business, and fully consider what it will take to get up and running. 

If you need additional guidance, check out our library of planning resources . We cover everything from plan formats , to how to write a business plan, and even how to use it as a management tool . 

If you don’t want to waste time researching other templates, you can download our one-page or traditional business plan template and jump right into the planning process.

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Kody Wirth is a content writer and SEO specialist for Palo Alto Software—the creator's of Bplans and LivePlan. He has 3+ years experience covering small business topics and runs a part-time content writing service in his spare time.

Table of Contents

• Qualities of a good template
• ReferralRock
• Does the template matter?

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How to create a farm business plan.

If you buy something through our links, we may earn money from our affiliate partners. Learn more .

Crafting a comprehensive farm business plan is a crucial step towards transforming your agricultural visions into tangible realities. This plan serves as a blueprint, enabling you to formally articulate your thoughts, ideas, and aspirations. Engaging in this process can lead to profound insights, illuminating the path to a thriving agricultural enterprise.

Even though the term ‘farm business plan’ might evoke a sense of formal rigidity, it’s important to remember that this document is, in fact, a living, evolving entity. Just like a seedling that sprouts, grows, and changes with the seasons, your business plan is not meant to be static.

It’s something you nurture, revise, and expand as circumstances dictate and as your farm business matures. Feeling pressure to perfect your business plan from the outset could be paralyzing. Instead, we suggest you view this document as a foundation that can be continuously built upon.

To get you started, we offer a detailed farm business plan template. This invaluable resource can be tailored and expanded to suit your unique agricultural venture, whether you’re cultivating a sprawling wheat field or nurturing a boutique organic herb garden.

The most effective business plans are those that exhibit flexibility and resilience, characteristics that are at the heart of any successful farm business. Agriculture, by its very nature, is a domain subject to the whims of Mother Nature. From unpredictable weather patterns to seasonal variations, farmers of all kinds grapple with an array of external factors.

Therefore, your farm business plan should not only anticipate these challenges but also prescribe adaptive measures to navigate through them. It’s this inherent adaptability that transforms a good farm business plan into a great one.

Writing a Farm Business Plan Template: 15+ Things Entrepreneurs Should Include

A farm business plan, like any strategic document, should be comprehensive, encompassing all aspects of your operation, be it agricultural (crops) or product-based. Utilize these 15 key sections to shape your farm business plan template.

Do bear in mind that while these sections are integral, they are by no means exhaustive. Your farm business plan may necessitate additional topics based on your specific farming operations.

Creating a robust business plan is of paramount importance, whether you’re kickstarting a farm venture or acquiring an existing one. Our farm business plan template starts off with an executive summary.

Executive Summary

The executive summary provides an essential overview of your farm business. It helps to streamline communication and understanding between various stakeholders, such as internal team members, potential lenders, business partners, and customers. When drafting your executive summary, consider the following key components:

• Business Profile : Provide a snapshot of your farm business, describing its nature and scope. Are you into crop cultivation, livestock rearing, or any specialized farming practices?
• Products : Clearly outline what product or products your farm will produce. These could range from dairy products to specific crops or even services like agrotourism.
• Production Methodology : Describe how you plan to achieve your production goals. This could involve discussing your farming techniques, usage of technology, or unique methodologies.
• Target Audience : Identify the individuals or groups who will be interested in your farm products or services. These might be local consumers, restaurants, farmers’ markets, or even online customers.
• Key Strategies : Highlight the strategies you plan to implement to run and grow your business. This could cover marketing techniques, sustainability practices, or partnerships.
• Mission and Vision : Briefly outline the mission and vision of your farm business. This helps to convey your long-term objectives and core values.

Remember, your executive summary is essentially the first impression of your business plan. Making it comprehensive, clear, and compelling will help attract interest and support from stakeholders.

Goals and Objectives

A well-crafted business plan should encapsulate both personal and economic goals and objectives. Many successful farm business plans also address environmental stewardship and community outreach. You may want to include goals around preserving farm resources for future generations, ensuring that both the operational and stewardship aspects remain within the family.

Introduction

Your introduction should provide information about the business owners, including their backgrounds and levels of industry experience.

Mission Statement and Values of Your Farming Business Plan

This section enables you to express the core values that led you to the farming business, whether it’s an urban farming venture or a homemade product-based farm. Your mission statement should reflect these values. Sustainable practices and conservation are often key motivations that draw people to farming, so don’t be shy to share your commitment to such principles.

Industry History

Understanding your place within the wider agricultural landscape is key. Be sure to research farms that have historically dominated your region, whether they specialize in vineyards, urban farming, or livestock rearing. Use this research to make educated projections about the future.

Company Background and History

Share the history of your farm if it has been a long-standing family venture or the journey leading up to your purchase if it wasn’t. If your farm business is a startup, focus on the business experience and backgrounds of the involved parties.

Competitor Analysis

Understanding your competition is crucial. In the agricultural sector, farmers often share resources, such as a high-tech corn planter , or cooperate in marketing endeavors. Factor in such synergies when analyzing competitors.

Target Market

Clearly define your target market. This can include area groceries, farmers’ markets, or online customers. If you’ll be relying on online sales, ensure your website is professionally designed, keyword optimized, and easily discoverable.

Products and Services

Describe each product or service offered by your farm, highlighting those features most appealing to your target market.

Organization, Human Resources, and Management Plans

These interconnected elements cover your farm’s day-to-day operations, employee roles and responsibilities (including their job descriptions ), and overarching management plans.

SWOT Analysis

Conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your farm’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will help you strategize on how to leverage your strengths, mitigate your weaknesses, exploit opportunities, and neutralize threats.

Your vision is the roadmap for your farm’s future. It should express not just your financial aspirations but also your plans for the farm operation in the long run.

Growth Strategy

A comprehensive growth strategy should outline your plans for debt reduction, savings, and business expansion. Keeping detailed farm production records is key to evaluating the effectiveness of your growth strategy.

Financial Plan

Your financial plan should include elements like balance sheets, income statements, projected cash flows, loan repayment schedules, and depreciation factors.

Marketing Strategy

A robust marketing strategy is essential for your farm’s success. Look into brochures, advertisements, and joining co-op groups. Resources from institutions like the University of Minnesota and Cornell University offer comprehensive insights into effective marketing strategies for farm businesses.

Establishing a Farming Business Entity

Discuss the legal structure of your farm business. Will it be a sole proprietorship, a partnership, an LLC, or a corporation? Outline the pros and cons of each and why the chosen structure is the best fit for your farm business.

Detailed Description of Farm Operations

Include a section that provides an in-depth look at your day-to-day farm operations. This can cover everything from crop rotation plans, livestock breeding programs, to the use of technology and machinery in your farming activities.

Risk Management Strategies

Address potential risks and challenges your farm might face, such as natural disasters, market fluctuations, or pest infestations. Discuss the strategies you plan to implement to mitigate these risks, like insurance coverage, diversification, and emergency response plans.

Sustainability and Environmental Impact

Highlight your farm’s approach to sustainability and its impact on the environment. Discuss practices like organic farming, conservation techniques, and renewable energy usage, which demonstrate your commitment to environmental stewardship.

Community Involvement and Social Responsibility

Describe how your farm business plans to engage with and contribute to the local community. This could include hosting educational farm tours, participating in farmers’ markets, or supporting local food programs.

Supply Chain and Vendor Relationships

Detail your farm’s supply chain and vendor relationships. Explain how you plan to source inputs like seeds, feed, or equipment, and any partnerships with local suppliers or distributors.

Technology and Innovation

Discuss the role of technology and innovation in your farm business. This could include the use of precision agriculture, innovative irrigation systems, or the adoption of farm management software to enhance efficiency and productivity.

Training and Development Plans

Explain how you intend to train and develop your staff. Include plans for ongoing education, skill development, and potentially, leadership training for future farm managers.

Expansion and Diversification

Outline your long-term plans for expansion and diversification. This could involve adding new crops, branching into agrotourism, or exploring value-added products like farm-produced jams or cheeses.

Exit Strategy

Consider including an exit strategy for your farming business. This could be a plan for succession, selling the business, or transitioning to a different type of agricultural operation.

Wrap up your business plan with a conclusion that reiterates your farm’s core mission and vision, and express your enthusiasm and commitment to making your farm business a success.

Frequently Asked Questions

Include a FAQ section at the end of your business plan to address common questions potential investors or partners may have about your farm business. This can include queries about your business model, funding needs, or market potential.

Provide an addendum for additional documents that support your business plan. This can include resumes of key team members, detailed financial projections, market research data, or letters of support from future customers or partners.

Do I Need a Business Plan for My Farm?

Even if you’re knee-deep in the dirt, tending to your crops or livestock, every farming enterprise has the core elements of a business at its heart. These include aspects such as operations, marketing, human resources, and finances. When you embark on developing a farm business plan, it might astonish you to see where the journey takes you. You could end up discovering facets of your farm business that you hadn’t previously considered.

One of the many advantages of constructing your business plan is the opportunity it affords to involve others. Employees, family members, even your loyal farm dog might have innovative small farm business ideas that could significantly enhance your farm’s productivity and marketability. A different perspective can often yield solutions for issues you might not have even been aware of. Therefore, encourage an open exchange of thoughts and ideas. Who knows, the next great idea could be lying right under your hay bale!

More than just a document outlining your farm’s structure, your farm business plan should serve as a valuable decision-making tool. With it, you can confidently navigate the varied terrain of farm management, from daily operations to larger strategic initiatives. When you’ve got a meticulously crafted, robust farm business plan, it doesn’t just narrate your farm’s story, but also provides you with a roadmap to future growth and success.

Beyond this, a top-notch farm business plan can also be a lever that helps you access critical financing. Lenders and investors are more likely to support your venture when they see a well-structured, thoughtful business plan that articulates your vision, illustrates your understanding of the market, and demonstrates your commitment to fiscal responsibility.

So, where to begin? Let’s dive into our fundamental guide to crafting a farm business plan using our adaptable template. This resource has been designed to help you capture every aspect of your agricultural venture, laying a strong foundation for a bountiful future.

How Do I Write a Small Farm Business Plan?

Don’t sit down to write the whole thing. Chip away, one section at a time. Keep in mind that the plan doesn’t have to be the definitive last word. You can make adaptations.

How do you start a farm business plan?

Start with one piece of the business plan. One of the hardest sections of a business plan to write is the Mission Statement . If you get bogged down there, continue and come back to it later.

How much do farm owners make a year?

As you can imagine, the net income varies greatly by type of farm business.

The bottom line after expenses may not be high. Farmers need to consider net worth as assets grow and the farm property increases in value.

How much does it cost to start a small farm?

Getting set up to raise 100 beef cattle costs lots more than getting set up to raise 100 rabbits.

Things like property acquisition, soil preparation, equipment and machinery and the key costs. Other costs may be i rrigation systems , packaging and trucking.

What is the most profitable farming business?

Poultry farming is currently the most profitable – and common – farm business in the world. It includes chicken, turkey, quail, ducks and goose, that are being raised for meat or eggs.

It’s also one of the most expensive businesses to start, requiring significant capital investment. The industry is very labor-intensive and labor costs are high.

Image: Depositphotos

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Nike Bosses Plan 'Biggest' Olympics Spend as Marketing Ramps Up

Nike Bosses Plan 'Biggest' Olympics Spend as Marketing Ramps Up

FILE PHOTO: Athletics - London Marathon - London, Britain - April 23, 2023 Adidas and Nike running trainers are seen during the race REUTERS/Andrew Boyers/File Photo

By Helen Reid

PARIS (Reuters) - Nike is spending more on this Olympics than any previous Games, top executives said on Friday, as the U.S. sportswear brand embarks on a marketing push it hopes will revive flagging sales and help compete with upstart rivals.

Sportswear makers are looking to reignite demand on the back of Paris 2024, which represents a return to normalcy after Tokyo 2020, delayed to 2021 and held without spectators due to the global pandemic.

Sponsored athletes including U.S. sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson and Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge modeled Nike's Olympics kits at a show in Paris on Thursday, where the brand also unveiled 13 futuristic shoe prototypes developed with athletes.

"This Olympics will be our biggest ... it will be our largest media spend," Heidi O'Neill, president of consumer, product and brand at Nike said in an interview. "This will be the most investment and the biggest moment for Nike in years," she added, without putting a figure on the amount of spending planned.

In Nike's latest quarter, total marketing expense was $1 billion, up 10% on the same period last year. Asked whether spending will continue to ramp up, O'Neill said marketing was "the number one priority investment" for the company.

Nike in general is focusing on "fewer, bigger" marketing campaigns, she added. The $139 billion company hired a new chief marketing officer at the end of last year as it seeks to bolster its brand in an increasingly competitive sportswear market.

Newer running brands such as On and Hoka are taking market share from Nike, while a trend away from chunky basketball sneakers is benefiting its closest rival Adidas and its low-profile "terrace" shoes.

Nike's plans contrast with those of Adidas. The German brand has been cutting back on marketing spend and spent 2.5 billion euros ($2.7 billion) on marketing in 2023, down 8.5% from the previous year. Nike's spend over its latest four quarters was $4.3 billion, an increase of 6%.

Nike's investment should help stimulate demand despite pressure on consumers globally, executives say.

"Consumers are challenged in just about every market we do business in," said Craig Williams, Nike's president of global geographies and marketplace.

Despite that, consumers continue to respond "very positively" to the Olympics as an event, Williams said, adding it is still seen as "the epitome of sport".

(Reporting by Helen Reid; Editing by Matt Scuffham and David Holmes)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

Tags: United States , The Olympics

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Michael Pollan's deliciously simple meal plan to avoid ultra-processed foods — and where it falls short

Michael Pollan is probably best known for the seven simple words of diet advice he first used to open a New York Times essay in 2007, which later became the backbone of a bestselling book :

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants ."

He knows it's really not so simple.

"We all make compromises," Pollan told Business Insider ahead of the release of his latest documentary, Food, Inc. 2 , out April 12. "We do the best we can, and people pick out the issues they want to deal with, and can deal with."

At home, Pollan tries his best to avoid eating industrial meat, eggs, or any other product from big factory farms.

He and his wife have set up their life to make healthy eating easy and affordable. They keep a stash of well-sharpened knives, ready to chop and cook a rainbow of veggies for dinner most nights. Lately, his table's featured stir-frys and pasta dishes, as well as some wild salmon, since they happen to be running in Alaska this season. Pollan also enjoys cooking a firmer, more protein-rich form of tofu I'd never heard of called yuba, which is essentially a soymilk skin. Hearty stews , perhaps with Indian or Moroccan-inspired spices, are some of the other fan favorites simmering around his kitchen island in Berkeley, California.

It sounds very healthy, very delicious, very aspirational … and pretty impossible. Because it is.

The reality is that Pollan does participate in America's industrialized food system. He's spent the better part of two decades investigating the way food corporations combine chemicals, plants, and animals in some very toxic ways, and as a result he feels "really uncomfortable participating in a system that was so brutal, not just to the animals, but to the workers in it," he told BI. But he knows that, ultimately, if you want to participate in US society, some amount of toxic and unethical food is unavoidable.

"If you had me over to your house and you were cooking a pork shoulder, I wouldn't be rude I would eat it," he said. "I'm not so zealous about it."

Still, he might have some intrusive thoughts while eating store-bought sliced white bread or fruit salad. He worries about the glyphosate that's doused on industrial wheat right before harvest and the harsh pesticides often sprayed on thin-skinned fruits like strawberries (he opts for organic whenever he can, but even that's not a guarantee of safety). "I think that the more you know about food, the more it shapes your diet," he said.

'Plant-based' is just a marketing trick from Big Food

Pollan's new documentary (in select theaters now, and streaming on Amazon Prime) is a follow-up to his Academy Award-nominated 2008 release "Food, Inc." "Food, Inc. 2" focuses on the few mega-companies that dominate our grocery stores and often end up deciding what we put in our mouths.

The film explores what happened at a Tyson meat processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, during the first days of the COVID-19 outbreak (spoiler alert: it wasn't great.) It also features the voices of tomato pickers in Florida fighting for fair pay, Taco Bell employees asking for the same, one inventive farmer bringing a regenerative gizmo called the "clustercluck " to his cornfields, and Democratic Senator Jon Tester, who (when he's not in Washington) works an organic farm in Montana.

Over 90 minutes, the documentary takes you on a rather bleak journey through time, highlighting the many ways our food system has actually gotten worse since the release of the first Food Inc. 16 years ago.

And yet, it ends on a head-spinningly optimistic note. The shift is so stark it's almost funny. Just before the credits roll, the film encourages viewers to join the "movement" on its website, which encourages us to (surprise, surprise) eat fewer ultra-processed foods, support our local farmers by shopping at their markets when we can, reduce meat and dairy consumption, and then in our spare time, lobby for more antitrust law enforcement against the handful of big food companies that dominate the market for baby formula , meat, cereal, and other staples. Simple.

"The industry has a strong interest in complicating our relationship to food, creating problems that it can then solve — but it's a lot simpler than people think," Pollan says.

Is it though? Speaking to Pollan made me feel even more strongly than before that, even in a best-case scenario , for the thin slice of Americans who have the time, money, plus institutional and cultural support to adopt all of these grand ideas, some of the worst parts about our big, bad food system cannot be avoided. The emulsifiers that may mess with our gut bacteria in weird and poorly understood ways are sorely needed to keep food shelf-stable. And even if we stick to organics, the soil quality ain't what it used to be around here, meaning we derive less nutrients from the foods we eat.

"If you do eat food, not too much, mostly plants, you're going to be fine," Pollan tells me, doubling down on his old phrase.

But even he admits some caveats with his next breath. He's frustrated by the misleading "aura of health" that has sprung up around everything plant-based. That's a whole new game of whack-a-mole we have to play in the grocery store aisles. After all, sugar cane is a plant, and so is the corn that so many of our stabilizers, artificial sweeteners, flavors, and added ingredients come from. Plant-based diets aren't necessarily a beacon of health.

"I don't regard a lot of the stuff in the supermarket as food," he tells me.

But it's what we have.

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IRS delivers strong 2024 tax filing season; expands services for millions of people on phones, in-person and online with expanded funding

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IR-2024-109, April 15, 2024

WASHINGTON — With the April tax filing deadline here, the Internal Revenue Service highlighted a variety of improvements that dramatically expanded service for millions of taxpayers during the 2024 filing season.

Through Inflation Reduction Act funding, the IRS continued to expand taxpayer service levels not seen in more than a decade with double-digit gains occurring in critical areas. Compared to a year ago, the IRS answered over 1 million more taxpayer phone calls this tax season, helped over 170,000 more people in-person and saw 75 million more IRS.gov visits fueled by a new and expanded Where’s My Refund? tool.

“Taxpayers continued to see major improvements from the IRS during the 2024 tax season,” said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. “A well-funded IRS is like night and day for taxpayers. With the help of more funding and added resources, service for taxpayers this filing season eclipsed levels seen during the past decade. This tax season meant real-world improvements for people looking for help, whether calling, visiting in-person or using IRS.gov.”

“We still have much more work to do, both to finish the 2024 tax season as well as put in place continued improvements made possible by Inflation Reduction Act funding,” Werfel said. “But this filing season marks another important chapter where we’ve improved service for taxpayers, continuing an accelerating trend in the story of transforming the IRS.”

Through April 6, the IRS processed more than 100 million individual tax returns. Tens of millions more will come in advance of the April deadline, the busiest time of the year for tax returns. The IRS also projects about 19 million taxpayers will file extensions, which will be due Oct. 15.

Since the start of the January tax season, the IRS has delivered more than $200 billion in refunds through early April. The average refund was $3,011, a 4.6% increase from last April’s average of $2,878.

Here are major filing season numbers in 10 key areas. These numbers, generally from late March and early April, reflect the historic 2024 tax season taking place at the IRS:

• Improved phone service . Continuing a trend seen last year following the addition of 5,000 new telephone assistors, the IRS level of service on its main phone lines reached more than 88%. That’s above the 84% level seen last year and more than a five-fold increase from the phone service levels seen during the pandemic era period, when the level of service was at just 15% in 2022.
• More calls answered. The IRS answered more taxpayer calls on its live assistor lines this year, a 16.8% increase from 2023. IRS assistors handled 7,608,000 calls, up from 6,513,000 the year before. IRS automated lines handled another approximately 7 million calls, 280,000 more than the previous year.
• Faster response times. Taxpayers waited, on average, just over three minutes for help on the IRS main phone lines. This is down from four minutes in 2023 and 28 minutes in filing season 2022.
• More callback options. The IRS offered callback options on 97% of the phone lines this filing season. The agency offered call back for over 4 million taxpayers this tax season, more than double the 1.8 million calls in 2023. This option, offered when phone lines were busy, saved taxpayers nearly 1.4 million hours of wait time on the phones.
• More in-person help. The IRS helped 170,000 more taxpayers in-person this filing season than in 2023. IRS employees at Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs) served 648,000 taxpayers this year, up from 474,000 in 2023, a 37% increase.
• Expanded in-person hours . The IRS added extended hours at 242 TAC locations across the nation, generating more than 11,000 extra service hours for taxpayers during the 2024 filing season. In addition to extended service hours, IRS also offered taxpayer assistance on Saturdays in more than 70 locations. These evening and Saturday hours made it more convenient for thousands of hard-working taxpayers to get help.
• Additional free help at volunteer sites. The IRS saw tax return preparation work at volunteer sites increase to more than 2.3 million returns this tax season, up 200,000 from last year following work at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE) sites.
• More taxpayers file for free. In addition to volunteer sites, the IRS saw more taxpayers file for free this year; in all, there were over 450,000 more returns filed between volunteer sites, Direct File and Free File. The new Direct File pilot, offered on a limited basis in 12 states, generated more than 60,000 tax returns after opening widely in mid-March. At the same time, the IRS partnership with the Free File partners offering free private-sector software via IRS.gov saw growth with more than 2 million tax returns filed, an increase of 11.2% or more than 200,000 more Free File returns than 2023 .
• Higher usage of IRS.gov. Driven by increased use of the expanded information on the Where’s My Refund? for the 2024 filing season, IRS.gov saw large increases in traffic. The website had nearly 500 million visits, an 18% increase. And Where’s My Refund? accounted for more than 275 million of those visits, up 62 million from 2023 representing a 29% increase.
• More chatbot use. The IRS saw more use of its virtual assistant tool on key IRS.gov pages. There were 832,000 uses this filing season, up nearly 150% from 330,000 uses in 2023.

“These numbers illustrate the strength of this year’s filing season, but the IRS needs to continue working hard to make more improvements and continue transforming to serve taxpayers – not just through the April tax deadline but throughout the year and into the future,” Werfel said.

With the April deadline approaching, the IRS reminds taxpayers there are many ways to get last-minute help. They can visit the special free help page on IRS.gov.

For taxpayers who need an extension of time to file their taxes, there are several options to get an automatic extension through Oct. 15. Although an extension grants extra time to file, it does not extend the obligation to pay taxes due on April 15, 2024. To avoid penalties and late fees, taxpayers who owe should pay either their full tax bill or at least what they can afford to pay by the April 15 deadline.

The IRS estimates 19 million taxpayers will file for an automatic extension.

Taxpayers in Maine and Massachusetts have until April 17 to file and pay taxes due this year. This is because these states observe the Patriots’ Day holiday on April 15 this year and April 16 is the Emancipation Day holiday in the District of Columbia.

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