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Maybe you have no idea where to start when it comes to creating your marketing plan and don’t want to leave out something important. Or you might be refining one you’ve already created. If you’ve done a simple Google search for marketing plan samples for inspiration, you’ve probably found it difficult. So, I thought you’d appreciate these 21 examples you can follow. This post is split into two sections. One with a list of marketing plan samples, and another with 12 exercises to help you write an awesome marketing plan step-by-step. Let’s get started. Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog? Download Your CoSchedule Marketing Plan BundleWith your marketing plan bundle, you’ll be able to build a complete marketing plan. It includes a marketing plan template (Excel), a template to help you figure out your standards of performance (Excel) and a user persona worksheet. Get Your Free Marketing Plan Kit!
21 Marketing Plan Samples And Ideas To Make Yours Stand OutYou’ll learn tons of tips, ideas, and exercises to create your own marketing plan throughout this blog post. Some of these marketing samples are hypothetical and some are from real companies. Others are just marketing samples. Here are 21 great examples:
12 Exercises To Help You Write An Awesome Marketing PlanThe following twelve exercises will show you how to build each piece of your marketing plan. They are based on just some of the examples linked above. Exercise #1: Table Of Contents With Numbered Pages To Easily Navigate Through The PlanDocumented marketing plans can end up being lengthy, so having a table of contents will help you and others find their way around your plan. Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog? At a glance, these are the things that are typically included:
And a couple of cool things that you might want to include in your marketing plan to spruce it up:
You can go into as much detail as you’d like with your table of contents. Here is a great example, of a detailed table of contents by the Palo Alto Software:  The more in-depth you go with your table of contents, the easier it will be to find your way around your marketing plan especially if it’s on the long side. Exercise #2: Executive Summary To Sell Upper Management On Your PlanThe executive summary provides a high-level overview of your marketing objectives. Write the executive summary last. Leave a spot at the beginning of your marketing plan for your executive summary. (Or make things easier, by downloading the complementary marketing plan template in this post.) Ask yourself these questions as you work on your executive summary:
“Why now?” is one of the most important questions you’ll need to answer mainly because it makes your project timely. Make it urgent. Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog?
Exercise #3: Write A Mission Statement To Show What Is Most Important To Your BusinessHaving a mission statement will remind you and your team of what is important. In order to do any of these marketing plan exercises, you’ll have to ask yourself a ton of questions. You might have already noticed that.
Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog? Recommended Reading: The Simple 6-Step Social Media Workflow That Will Get You More Organized Exercise #4: Figure Out What Your Goals AreIt’s also super important that you state your company’s goals (financial and non-financial) so you know where you are headed and how much you can afford for certain things. Blue Sky also provided a great example of their goals. Figure Out Your Financial Goals
Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog? Figure Out Your Non-Financial GoalsWriting your goals is one of the first steps to reaching them. First off, you’ve probably seen blog posts on SMART goals many times before, but they are really good to mention again. How to make your SMART goals:
 Your SMART goals can be for anything! What do you want to do better? Now write your goals and add them to your marketing plan. Exercise #5: Standards Of Performance To Direct Content DevelopmentWhen writing your marketing plan, it’s important to know what your standards of performance are so you can continue bringing in bigger results or change up your current process to improve your content. To figure out your standards of performance, make a list of your latest content.  This awesome spreadsheet will help you figure out your standards of performance. You could even include a screen shot of this in your appendix. Make sure you download the marketing plan kit to get this awesome ready-to-use spreadsheet and more. Once you’ve entered your data into each field, ask yourself:
For example, there are four pillars that we make sure to implement in all CoSchedule content:
Grade each piece of content against your standards of performance with a scale from 1 to 3. A score of 3 means it’s awesome and 1 is not so good. For more information on figuring out your standards of performance, check out our post on rocking your data-driven content calendar template. Exercise #6: Core Competencies To Help You Choose The Right ProjectsRemind your company about what they do well, and show them how you plan to stand up against rivals. If you don’t know what your company does well, find out by meeting with your team and discussing it.  Ask yourself unique questions to get yourself thinking about your core competencies in a different light, rather than just wondering what you and your company do well. David Meerman Scott has a great example of this. Get out an Excel spreadsheet and type out the answers to these questions:
Instead Of Planning Another Meeting You Could Also Send Your Team A Google FormFirst off, go to Google Forms. Pick out the kind of Google Form you’d like to send.
Once you click there, it will open to something like this depending on which one you chose:
You will be asked to give the Google Form a title and a description. Add your first question and press on the gray bar to the right of the question to change up the type of questions you want to ask.
Pick “paragraph” to let your team write as much as they’d like. Ask these questions:
Click on the plus sign to add another question. You can also add pictures or videos here. Once you are done you can send an email to your team members with the Google Form link. But, before sending the email make sure you read and include the questions from Exercise #7. Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog? Exercise #7: SWOT Analysis To Understand How You’ll Differentiate YourselfIt’s important to have your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats at a glance. Then you can see what you need to improve.
When you meet, discuss these questions as a team: Strength (internal): What are your company and/or product’s strengths? On a few of the different marketing plans I’ve seen, they put their SWOT quadrant into their appendix section. To see an example, scroll to extra tip #1. Pro Tip: When you write your SWOT analysis in your marketing plan, go in depth in each of the categories. Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog? Exercise #8: Connect Your Message With Your Target MarketYou’ll need to take a look at your Google Analytics to figure out your target market. You’ll want to find the answers to these questions:
First off, it’s super important to know who is currently following you. Read on to find out who your current audience is. Want To Find Out Who Your Current Audience Is?Click into Google Analytics. On the left side, you’ll see Audience. Click on it and scroll down to click Demographics and Overview.
For more in-depth information on each of the demographics, you can click Age and Gender.
If you click on the Age tab underneath demographics, you’ll see a more in-depth graph.
Hover over one of the blue dots to see how many sessions you had and how old each of those people were. If you click on the “Interests” tab on the left side, you’ll be brought to this page, which will show you their interests.
In that same audience section, of Google Analytics, you can click on overview and then you’ll see a button underneath demographics that gives you a choice to look at which countries people are tuning in from. Then you’ll know their location. After you know your current audience, it’s important to take a look at who you’d like your target audience to be. Here’s how: How To Find Your Target AudienceAsk yourself these questions to figure out who your target audience is:
There’s so much more on finding your target audience, that we haven’t covered yet. It would take a whole post to discuss that. Wait! You are in luck! We have a post on that here. Exercise #9: Create An Audience Persona To Help You Know Who You’re Writing Content ForTake the information you found in the target audience exercise and ask yourself these questions to figure out who your audience persona is. Want to use Click to Tweet on your blog? An awesome persona answers these questions:
Recommended Reading: Using Google Analytics To Write Smarter Content It’s easy to forget to ask questions that will really open up the psyche of your persona so you can really pull the emotion into your content and business. Emotion sells.
Go in deep when you are figuring out who your user persona is. Then go online to find a picture of them.  Buffer did a really good job with this by including an image and the write up of their audience persona in their marketing plan. Recommended Reading: 3 Hidden Google Analytics Reports To Help You Understand Your Audience Exercise #10: Find The Four Marketing Ps To Help You Understand Your Go-To-Market StrategyIn order to do marketing efficiently, you need to keep the four P’s of marketing in mind: product, place, price, and promotion. What Product Are You Marketing? (Product)Set your user persona and target audience next to you when you fill out these questions:
Where Should You Sell Your Product? (Place)
How Much Should You Sell It For? (Price)
How Are You Going To Promote It? (Promotion)
Here’s a helpful video that is thorough and simple: To illustrate the whole idea a little better for you let’s imagine you’re selling some rad shoes with wings that you’ve created. Product:
Place:
Price:
Promotion:
So even though I used a mythological product idea in this example, you get the point. But, man, I’d love to have a pair of those shoes. Create your 4 Ps for your product and make it jump off the page at your audience. Exercise #11: Get An Ongoing Marketing PlanWhat will be your ongoing marketing plan? What do you want to do? And where do you want to do it? In order to plan your future marketing, you have to know these things. Set up an ongoing marketing plan for the year. What things will need to be done. I found this great sample example from the Agricultural Development Center at the University of Tennessee. It’s so easy to see it all at a glance. You’ll know exactly what goals you’ll need to hit monthly.
Exercise #12: Budget To Understand Where You’ll Spend Cash And Find GapsYou need to estimate how much your marketing projects are going to be. You’ll be able to put together a budget to keep everyone on track over the course of the year. Marketing costs and needs vary quite a bit. There is no easy way to figure out what your marketing budget should be. But starting with your needs and wants is a great place to start.
What’s important is that you know what your needs and wants are. Answer these questions:
Next to the needs and wants, write down how much it’s going to cost. After doing that for all of your needs, you can start to see how much you can budget for your wants. Scroll down for a great example of what you could include in your appendix that has to do with budgeting and your financial goals. Recommended Reading: How To Do Outstanding Marketing On A Limited Budget 3 Extra Tips You Can Add That Will Spruce Up Your Marketing PlanHere are a few other things that will really add to your marketing plan. Some people don’t add these, but I think it really brings out a lot of information and also freshens up your marketing plan so it isn’t just a bunch of words. Extra Tip #1. Include some graphics and/or graphs: Include tables, diagrams, and even pictures. In Blue Sky Clothing’s example, they’ve included the actual SWOT quadrants. This is a cool idea to include in yours. Even think about including some color in yours. Extra Tip #2. A one-page marketing plan: This is basically a one-page sheet you can glance at to see the most important information from your marketing plan. It’s a good thing to have on hand. UncommonlySocial has a great example of how having a one-page marketing plan can easily simplify things. Having one of these would be great to quickly reference to. Extra Tip #3. An Appendix: This is good if you have graphics, graphs, or want to link to a source or something. Here are a couple examples: This is a great example from Palo Alto Software. It would be a great way to show what countries your target market is tuning in from, as well as showing their gender, or some other thing you might be tracking. Here is another great example. Include in your appendix, an outline that goes deeper into your financial goals. Then you can refer to them in your financial goals section as well. People will know they can find more information on that in the appendix. UW Oshkosh Small Business Development Center has a great example of how your financial goals will fit perfectly in your marketing plan appendix. Now You Know What It Takes To Write An Awesome Marketing PlanSince you have a ton of marketing plan samples—and also the awesome marketing plan download—you’re set to be a rock star in the marketing realm. Just make sure you wear your shoes with the wings. |
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