Without a plan, marketing is like driving in the dark: there’s a sense of mystery and excitement. However, there’s also a danger. To grow your business, it’s essential that you invest in both a business plan and a marketing plan.

Such plans, perhaps based on existing marketing plan examples, will help you organize your efforts and put your resources to the best use. Also, since they help you effectively carry out your marketing strategy, these plans are the only way to start a business.

In this article, not only do we define what a marketing plan is, but we showcase five excellent marketing plan examples (mostly in template form) targeted for several different businesses. If you’re even slightly unsure on how to go about developing your marketing plan, this is the guide for you.

In this post, we dissect the components of a marketing plan to help you build the ideal marketing road map for your business.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap, a first step used by a business to organize, execute, and track its marketing strategy over a given time. You might create multiple marketing plans, each of which includes separate marketing strategies for your different marketing teams within your company, but they all work towards the same business goals.

Before diving into the five marketing plan examples included in this article, it’s important for you to decide how granular you want your marketing plan to be. While you might find variation for some companies, there is a specific set of eight steps every marketing plan needs to go through during its creation.

8 Steps to Writing a Marketing Plan

1. What is the Mission of Your Business?

Your first step in putting together a marketing plan is to be clear on your mission statement. Although this statement is specific to your marketing department, it should clarify your business’s main mission, its purpose.

While you want to be specific, you shouldn’t be too specific. There will be space left in your marketing plan to elaborate on how you’ll acquire new customers and accomplish your mission.

For example, in the case of sweetgreen’s mission statement, “To inspire healthier communities by connecting people to real food,” it lets us know that the company has a focus on connecting its growing network of farmers growing healthy local food ingredients with us—the customer.

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

Every good marketing plan describes how it will track its mission’s progress. In carrying out this tracking, your business will need to determine its key performance indicators (KPIs.) These are individual metrics used to measure the various components of a marketing campaign.

These units help you establish the short-term goals within your mission and to communicate your progress to business leaders.

Using the example marketing mission from sweetgreen above, if part of our mission is “to connect people to real food,” you might want to track websites visits using what are known as “organic page views.” In this example, the number of organic page views is one KPI. Over time, and you will be able to see how the number of page views grows over time.

3. Identify your buyer personas.

A buyer persona can be thought of as a “ fictionalized characterization of your best customer” whom you want to attract. Age, gender, location, family size, job title, and many more characteristics can be defined.

Each buyer persona is more than just a clever name. It provides a description that helps you attract more buyers just like them, by personalizing your marketing message to attract them.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

You need to cover the main points of your marketing and content strategy. According to OptinMonster, there are 15 content formats and channels available to you today to boost audience engagement.

Choose wisely, especially early on, and make it clear as to how you plan to use this section of your marketing plan to define content and channels.

To outline just a few, your content strategy could include:

The types of content you plan on creating. Initially, these may consist of blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks, but more can be added as your plan matures.

How much of it you plan to create. Give some thought to your volume of content daily, weekly, monthly, as well as even at quarterly intervals: your workflow and short-term goals will decide the content.

The channels where you’ll distribute this content. Some popular channels available include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and Podcasts.

5. Clearly define what your plan is to exclude.

While a marketing plan explains what the marketing team is going to focus on, it should also explain what the marketing team is going to exclude.

These omissions help to identify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. It isn’t possible to include everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn’t to be accountable for something, you need to make it known.

6. Define your marketing budget.

Your business marketing budget is an essential component of your marketing plan. Its purpose is to outline the costs of how you are going to achieve your marketing goals within a specific timeframe.

Forbes outlines 6 six steps to developing a marketing budget as part of your marketing plan.

Any content strategy will probably leverage many free channels and platforms. You’ll also need to keep in mind that there may be several hidden expenses that a marketing team needs to consider. These could include freelance fees, sponsorships, or that new full-time marketing hire, and they all need to be considered as part of your marketing budget.

7. Identify the competition.

One challenge associated with marketing is finding out against whom you’re marketing. You need to research the key players in your industry and carefully profile them. Competitive analysis is the name given to this step.

Of course, not every competitor will pose the same array of challenges to your business. For example, one competitor might be ranking highly on search engines for specific keywords, while another might make heavy use of a social media network where you plan to launch an outreach campaign.

8. Describe your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.

With your marketing plan comprehensively defined, you’ll be able to assign responsibilities where you make it clear as to which teams will be in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

5 Marketing Plan Examples That Will Help You Write Your Own

You may already have found that many companies are very public in sharing their own marketing plans or templates or in providing step-by-step guidance for putting together almost any type of marketing project.

Qlutch highlights at least 45 types of marketing plans that can be copied or where templates are available for you to build your own.

For content marketing websites which go beyond being simply a blog attached to the main website, IZEA offers five examples of content marketing websites all of which can be studied, and from where ideas can be copied.

Features you will find these websites have in common is to include great SEO tactics, easy navigation, uncluttered design, useful content, and be high quality.

Before jumping into the five marketing plans outlined below, keep in mind that HubSpot offers you a free make-your-own marketing plan template that you might find to be a great tool.

1. Author’s Book Marketing Plan

The challenge Shane Snow faced in bringing his new book, Dream Team, to market was a workable marketing plan, one that was data-driven.

Using data to optimize this content strategy spread more awareness for the book, encouraged more people to subscribe to the content, converted more subscribers into buyers, and encouraged more buyers to recommend the book to their friends.

2. Buffer’s Content Marketing Strategy

While not an actual detailed strategy but more of a template, Buffer decided to offer the content marketing community an example it could follow.

You will find Buffer’s template to be a thoroughly detailed step-by-step guide, with real-world examples for each section. For instance, in the audience persona section, there are case studies of real potential audience personas.

This process of creating a marketing guide or plan will remove much of the overwhelm that often accompanies the task.

3. Contently’s Content Methodology

With its mission is to help brands create engaging, accountable content that drives business results, Contently leverages the strategy of previous marketing campaigns to drive its future initiatives.

The focus here is on learning from each marketing campaign and spinning continual energy into whatever you choose to publish next.

4. Forbe’s Marketing Plan

A marketing template that has amassed almost four million views since late 2013 is the popular marketing plan template published by Forbes.

The marketing plan, you’ll discover, covers 15 key sections of a marketing plan, so you are never left guessing on what to include or exclude.

5. HubSpot’s Content Marketing Strategy

The current content marketing strategy or plan at HubSpot has evolved over a period of time. To illustrate insights gained, the company generously shares it all in a blog post to teach marketers all about developing a successful content marketing plan.

One thing emphasized by HubSpot is that, to truly deliver what your audience wants and needs, you’ll likely need to test out some different ideas, measure the success or failure of these, and be prepared to change your goals as you go.

The marketing plans included in this article should only be considered as the initial resources for you to consult in getting your content marketing plan started. To make sure you deliver what your audience really wants and needs, you’ll likely need to test out some different scenarios, measure their success, and then continue to refine your goals along the way.