What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a document that details how you’re going to execute your strategy. It’s written for a specific period of time and explains both your current situation and your future plans.

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

A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan. A solid online marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written marketing plan. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, without a sound strategic foundation, it is of little use to a business. It has to have a set of concrete tasks and marketing tactics to follow.

Why do you need a marketing plan?

There are a ton of reasons why every brand and marketing team needs a good marketing plan.

Here are the top 3 reasons:

Create better goals

When you have specific goals to achieve you can plan your way to achieve them. Having too general goals like “growing my business” VS. measurable KPIs like “I want to grow my revenue by $600K, and to do that I need 1,000 new customers” is different.

Actual KPIs can help you plan exactly what will get you there. We recommend you set up some SMART goals – which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-framed.

Improve your focus

Marketing without focus can be very messy and super ineffective. The best tip we can give you is to focus on specific activities and have them done well. A digital marketing plan will help you focus on exactly the tasks that will impact your success.

Of course, things will change and your plan will change as well. But as long as you are using a good marketing plan outline you will have your next month’s tasks written down and your work will become that much more effective.

Stay consistent

Success doesn’t happen overnight.

Consistency is key in marketing and is favored by all the social media platform algorithms. Once you’re consistent with your marketing activities you will see tremendous results.

That means posting 1 post every day or running a PPC campaign that builds more and more traction over time. A good marketing plan can help you build on the momentum and stay consistent.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to ensure that marketing activities are relevant and timely to achieve the organization’s business objectives. It’s a plan defining a sustainable competitive position and defining the resources necessary to achieve it.

Now that you know what a marketing plan is and what’s used for let’s talk about the many components that it’s built out of.