One of my favorite ways to break through writer’s block, whether the assignment is a marketing plan or a short story, is simply reading more examples. (I also recommend taking a long walk; you’d be surprised.)
![Download Now: Free Marketing Plan Template [Get Your Copy]](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/53/aacfe6c7-71e6-4f49-979f-76099062afa0.png)
All fields are required.
Click this link to access this resource at any time.
A marketing plan is a strategic road map 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.
Your marketing plan lays out 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, and you can figure out what works and what doesn’t.
To learn more about creating your marketing plan, keep reading or jump to the relevant section:
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.
A marketing plan is a subset of a business plan; it shows how marketing strategies and objectives can support overall business goals. And if you need an assist executing a marketing plan, might I recommend HubSpot’s marketing hub?
A marketing strategy is the part of your marketing plan that describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission.
This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software you’ll use to execute that mission and track its success.
A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It's the framework from which all your marketing strategies are created, and it helps you connect each strategy 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 sign-ups.
The department decides to launch a topical blog, debut a YouTube series to establish expertise, and create new X and Instagram accounts to join the conversation around this subject. All this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into software users.
To summarize, a business' marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software product to the marketplace and driving sign-ups for that product. The business will execute that plan with three marketing strategies: a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and an X account.
Of course, the business might consider these three things as one giant marketing strategy, each with its own 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.
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 as your business' main mission statement.
In 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.
For those of you running startups or small businesses, HubSpot’s starter bundle is a great all-in-one solution — it can help you find and win customers, execute content marketing plans, and more.
If your business' mission is “to make booking travel a delightful experience,” your marketing mission might be “to attract an audience of travelers, educate them on the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform.”
Need help building your mission statement? Download this guide for examples and templates and write the ideal mission statement.
Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission‘s progress. To do so, you need to decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.
Let's take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travelers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.
Also, make sure to check whether your current reporting software facilitates the KPIs you need. Some reporting tools can only measure a set of pre-defined metrics, which can cause massive headaches in particular marketing campaigns.
However, other tools, like HubSpot’s analytics software, can offer full flexibility over the KPIs you wish to track.
You can generate custom reports that reveal average website engagement rates, page visits, email, social media traffic, and more.
These KPIs will come into the conversation again in step 4.
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' current and potential customers. All business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.
Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.
