what are the three main components of a strategic marketing plan

What is Strategic Marketing Planning? A Step-by-Step Guide

In today’s fiercely competitive business environment, understanding what is strategic marketing planning and creating a successful plan is crucial to achieving growth, profitability, and long-term sustainability.

This step-by-step guide will not only help you comprehend the importance of what is strategic marketing planning but also provide essential insights on how to develop and implement a well-rounded marketing strategy to stay ahead of the competition.

Short Summary

• Strategic marketing planning is a systematic approach to achieving business objectives and optimizing resources.
• Key components include market research, target audience identification, objective setting & utilization of the 4 Ps of marketing.
• The process involves effective execution & monitoring with regular reviews for successful results and continuous improvement.

Understanding Strategic Marketing Planning

Strategic marketing planning is a systematic approach that our agency follows to reach predetermined marketing objectives. It provides the essential foundation, guidelines, and steps to achieve those objectives. Strategic planning plays a pivotal role in optimizing marketing efforts and achieving better results, ultimately leading to business growth and profitability.

Definition and significance

Strategic marketing planning is defined as a systematic approach to achieving marketing goals through the analysis, segmentation, and identification of competitive advantages. Efficient marketing operations are crucial for the successful strategic marketing implementation of the successful strategic marketing plan. By employing successful strategic marketing planning , businesses can ensure that their marketing plan is well-executed and delivers the desired results.

Crafting a successful marketing strategy primarily emphasizes the marketing mix, which consists of the following:

Incorporating price into a strategic marketing plan is essential to guarantee that the value of the product is justified to prospective customers.

Key components

The essential elements of strategic marketing planning include:

• Market research
• Identification of the target audience
• Establishment of objectives
• Formulation of the marketing mix
• Assessment of performance

A SWOT analysis is a tool used to evaluate a company’s internal strengths and weaknesses in comparison to external opportunities and threats.

Defining the ideal customer profile is crucial in creating efficient marketing communication strategies, conserving time and resources by concentrating on the requirements of the current consumer, and serving as the foundation of any marketing campaign.

The Strategic Marketing Planning Process

The strategic marketing planning process is a comprehensive approach to achieving business objectives by conducting market research, identifying the target audience, and setting marketing goals that align with overall business objectives. This process enables marketers to gain an understanding of the business’s current standing and craft suitable marketing strategies, optimizing marketing efforts and achieving better results.

By following this process, marketers can ensure that their marketing efforts are aligned with the overall business objectives.

Market research and analysis

Market research and analysis play an essential role in understanding external factors, market trends, and consumer behavior and conducting a competitive analysis to identify potential opportunities and threats. By analyzing the business environment, prevailing market trends, and consumer behavior, the likelihood of the marketing plan’s success is enhanced.

A competitive analysis assists in identifying opportunities for improvement in the largest competitors’ marketing strategies, enabling the agency to focus on areas where they are lagging behind.

Identifying target audience

Identifying the target audience involves:

• Defining the ideal customer profile based on similarities between existing clients and prospective customers
• Recognizing the target audience is significant in the strategic marketing planning process
• Assisting businesses in creating efficient marketing communication strategies
• Conserving time and resources by concentrating on the requirements of the current consumer
• Serving as the foundation of any marketing campaign

It is important to understand the target audience in order to create effective marketing campaigns that will reach the target audience.

Setting marketing goals

Setting marketing goals requires using prior data and desired business outcomes to establish realistic objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). In strategic marketing planning, specific marketing goals may include acquiring a certain number of new clients, growing followers on social media, or sourcing additional leads for the sales funnel.

Establishing marketing objectives enables the ability to:

• Assess performance
• Assign resources
• Maintain a clear direction
• Make decisions based on data
• Ultimately leads to improved marketing results.

Developing Marketing Strategies

Developing marketing strategies involves crafting the marketing mix and selecting appropriate marketing channels to reach the target audience effectively. The marketing mix is a combination of product, price, promotion, and place, which can be utilized to select marketing channels by determining which channels are most effective at reaching the target audience.

By understanding the target audience and the marketing mix, marketers can determine which channels are most effective.

Crafting the marketing mix

Crafting the marketing mix involves focusing on the four Ps of marketing to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. The components of the marketing mix are:

A successful marketing strategy primarily emphasizes the marketing mix.

Each of the four is one of the four. Ps of marketing must be carefully considered when creating a marketing strategy. Product refers to a product.

Selecting marketing channels

Selecting marketing channels involves choosing the most effective digital and traditional channels to boost brand recognition, draw in new customers, and accomplish marketing objectives. Digital channels such as websites, social media, email, search engine optimization, and online advertising are available, as well as traditional channels such as television, radio, print, and outdoor advertising.

Choosing marketing channels can assist businesses in:

• Connecting with their target audience
• Maximizing visibility
• Utilizing resources effectively
• Increasing brand recognition
• Monitoring and assessing outcomes.

Implementing and Monitoring the Strategic Marketing Plan

Implementing and monitoring the strategic marketing plan involves executing the plan, managing projects, and measuring performance to ensure success. Execution and project management are essential components of the strategic marketing plan, which can be ensured by using tools such as Teamwork or Plaky to assign tasks, set timelines, and track milestones.

These tools can help ensure that the plan is executed on time and that all tasks are completed.

Execution and project management

We utilize project management tools such as Teamwork or Plaky to assign tasks, set timelines, track milestones, and ensure the successful implementation of the marketing plan . These tools offer a convenient solution to marketing planning by providing capabilities for task management and assignment, as well as a pre-made marketing strategy plan template.

With these tools, teams can easily collaborate on tasks, assign deadlines, and track progress. This is a very good article.

Performance measurement

Performance measurement entails tracking progress, assessing effectiveness, and making data-driven modifications to marketing strategies, tactics, and KPIs/OKRs. Monitoring progress assists in assessing the efficacy of marketing strategies and tactics and in recognizing areas that require adjustment.

Assessing effectiveness enables us to recognize which strategies and tactics are successful and which are not and to make adjustments as needed.

Adapting to Market Changes

Adapting to market changes in the strategic marketing planning process involves:

• Modifying the marketing strategy to remain competitive
• Consistently reviewing and updating the marketing plan
• Recognizing and responding to the changing needs of the target market.

It may also include product adaptation to appeal to a new or evolving customer base.

Regular review and updates

To avoid potential implementation issues caused by fluctuating internal and external factors and to guarantee compatibility with corporate objectives, it is essential to regularly review and revise the strategic marketing plan.

Regular review and updates of the strategic marketing planning process are essential for the following:

• Assessing effectiveness
• Responding to changing market conditions
• Ensuring alignment with business goals
• Optimizing resources.

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement involves executing, monitoring, and refining the marketing plan to reach goals, increase competitiveness, and foster strategic thinking. Launching, executing, reporting, and iterating the marketing plan should be done in an orderly fashion to ensure objectives are met, competitiveness is increased, and strategic thinking is promoted.

Ongoing improvement is fundamental for any effective strategic marketing plan. It guarantees that the plan is current and that objectives are being achieved. Moreover, it encourages strategic thinking and boosts competitiveness.

In conclusion, a successful strategic marketing plan is pivotal to achieving business growth, profitability, and long-term sustainability. Through a step-by-step approach involving market research and analysis, target audience identification, goal setting, marketing strategy development, implementation, monitoring, and continuous improvement, businesses can adapt to market changes, stay competitive, and achieve their objectives.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the marketing strategy planning.

Strategic marketing planning is the process of creating a plan to achieve a specific marketing goal, such as increasing revenue and profits or improving the brand’s visibility. Companies use this process to outline their objectives, the programs they’ll use to reach them, who is responsible for those metrics, and when they’ll be achieved.

These objectives are typically broken down into short-term and long-term goals, each goal having its own set of strategies and tactics. The plan should also include a timeline for when each goal should be achieved, as well as a budget.

What is the purpose of a strategic marketing plan?

Strategic marketing planning is an essential process that involves creating a plan to reach specific marketing goals. This plan outlines objectives, programs, who is responsible, and when the goals need to be achieved in order to increase revenue and profits, gain visibility, discourage competitors, or improve their appearance.

What are the five parts of a strategic marketing plan?

A strategic marketing plan consists of five core components: product, price, promotion, place, and people. These are the key elements that you need to focus on in order to create a successful plan that will help your brand reach its goals.

Each of these components should be carefully considered and planned out in order to ensure that your plan is effective. The product should be tailored to meet the needs of your target audience, while the price should be reasonable.

What are the 4 phases of strategic marketing planning?

The 4 phases of strategic marketing planning are formulation, implementation, evaluation, and modification. This process involves setting goals and objectives, analyzing internal and external business factors, product planning, implementation, and tracking progress to ensure successful outcomes.

Setting goals and objectives is the first step in the process. This involves identifying the desired outcomes and the resources needed to achieve them. Internal and external business factors must be considered.

What are the key components of strategic marketing planning?

Strategic marketing planning involves market research, target audience identification, goal setting, creating a marketing mix, and assessing performance. It is essential for businesses to have an effective strategy in place to be successful.

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2.3: Purpose and Structure of the Marketing Plan

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Learning Objectives

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

• Explain the purpose of a marketing plan.
• 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?

Link to Learning: 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.

Link to Learning: 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.

In which section of the executive summary of a marketing plan would you describe the current marketplace and industry sectors within which you sell your products or services and the innovations currently taking place within the market?

• 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

In a SWOT analysis, which factors are internal to the organization?

• Strengths and opportunities
• Weaknesses and threats
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Opportunities and threats

What is a perceptual map, and how is it used?

• 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.

In which section of the marketing plan would you identify key internal and external influences on the company’s current position?

• Objectives and issues
• SWOT analysis
• Buyer personas
• Current marketing situation

In which section of the marketing plan would you include a competitive analysis and discussion of the company’s top competitors?

• Target market
• Mission statement

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GILL Solutions

Growing your business..Should be Strategic!

Nov 21 2017

9 Key Elements of a Successful Strategic Marketing Plan

The marketplace in most industries has grown very competitive over the years. To dominate in your industry,  you need a detailed and refined strategic marketing plan.

What Is a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A strategic marketing plan is a detailed framework. It’s used to prepare a company for a targeted and systematic application of its marketing efforts. Such plans are very precise and are developed using data sourced from and for your industry, for better targeting.

When mapped out effectively, your strategic marketing plan will provide growth in conversion by eliminating any initiative that hasn’t proven beneficial for your business.

When preparing an effective strategic marketing plan for your company brand there are several components that must be considered.

Let’s take a look now at 9 of the Key Elements of a Successful Strategic Marketing Plan.

Analysis of current market position.

Sales and analytics reports from the past year should be reviewed to evaluate your business brand’s position in the market. They will also reveal the marketing plans that worked as expected, and those that underperformed.

Measurement is key, and often underutilized. It’s important that you’re gathering the right data to be measured, in order to make solid marketing and business decisions. You should be relying heavily on your Google Analytics, to gather the necessary data.

Doing this will help to evaluate the success of marketing efforts against financial results gathered.

This is one of the best ways to discover your strength and weaknesses. Allowing you to clearly identify what parts of your business you need to keep promoting, and what parts need to be worked on.

Although this is ideal, unfortunately for many businesses, this data is not systematically recorded and reviewed, so can be limiting in its guidance. Lack of measurement is one of the reasons why your marketing struggles to achieve the results you aim for .

Market Opportunities

There’s always a new opportunity for you to make sales, but they need to be identified first.

Your marketing team should engage themselves in extensive buyer research . Identifying emerging and existing customer groups that can be the focus of your marketing efforts. This will help determine what type of marketing efforts will be applied to each group, the expected length of the sales process, and their overall customer lifetime value.

Marketing resources are usually limited, and expending them on the wrong leads will bring in poor ROI.

Goals, Mission and Vision

Every action taken to promote a business should reflect their mission and vision. These are integral parts of a business as they are the building blocks of the brand’s image.

And the goals of any business are usually centred around growth. Those goals will serve as a driving force for implementing any strategic marketing plan.

Goals are not always big, long-term aims. You can also set small goals (like conversion goals) to give your team a clear view of what you’re all working towards.

Interest of Stakeholders and Shareholders

More people than just the owners of a business have a vested interest in the success of the said business.

Your stakeholders, which includes your customers, employees, boards, industry, targeted public, and even government organizations, should be considered when developing your strategic marketing plan.

Detailed Description of Target Market

Your marketing team should be able to identify the groups of people who have needs that your products and services can solve. They can do this by conducting market and customer research that will provide the needed information when preparing marketing plans.

This information could include:

• their demands in the market,
• an insight into their buying decision process,
• their demographics,
• and even their preferences on a wide number of things.

Potential customers are drawn to your company and brand when they believe that you understand them. They also want to know that you can provide the solution to their needs and challenges.

Your overview of the market should also cover existing customers. This will supplement your understanding of their needs, and keep them loyal to the brand.

Use of Media

The media is a critical tool in your marketing plan. It provides an opportunity for direct communication between you and your potential and existing customers.

Media, in this case, includes both traditional and digital media options.

The media options that take a majority of your marketing efforts should be those that are largely common among your target audience. Strategic marketing is focused on being precise with targeting your ideal audience. Meaning that every marketing effort to be taken, including traditional and online media efforts, should align directly with the groups of people you are trying to reach.

Timeline for Implementation

Timeline for implementation doesn’t just cover the period the marketing strategy will be active. But also includes all actions geared towards it.

For example:  If a video is needed for a campaign, the person or team in charge should project a turnaround time. This will keep everyone accountable. It also helps your marketing team create an overview of the length of time needed to create and implement your marketing plan.

There are situations where people envision a great marketing plan, but forget to factor in how much time will be needed to execute the plan. The results are usually half-baked efforts, or abandonment when the process feels rushed and unproductive. A specific amount of time should also be allowed for correcting errors, in a situation where one or a few are detected.

Expected Risks

Whenever money, time and other resources are invested in a new marketing effort, there’s always the knowledge that it might not produce the expected results.

With strategic marketing, risks are not just expected, they are also planned for. A brand cannot completely insulate itself from mishaps, but it can be proactive about fixing them as quickly as possible.

Your brand should have a practical step-by-step guide. Documented guidelines help employees when they get into situations that can cause them or your company potential harm. This will help them to react immediately and prevent further damage, rather than looking around helplessly for someone who can provide direction.

Budget Being Allocated

Any and all expenditures required to execute your marketing strategy should be considered when developing your plan.

A strict budget should be laid out for all departments to see. However, not all departments in a company are allocated equal resources, that’s okay – that’s how it works. As long as each department knows what their allocated budget is, and works within it, then you’re on the right track.

Note: Creativity is sometimes needed to effectively manage funds provided. Producing solid growth results can often mean surpass the resources that were made available. That’s when you need to take a step back and re-evaluate to see where you can shuffle funds (so as not to go over budget completely).

If your strategic marketing plan is implemented effectively, your company will grow its market share in your industry. Which also means a growth in revenue and profit.

Once your plan is in place, you should continue to monitor it closely. You’ll want to identify errors or initiatives that are not functioning as expected and fix them as quickly as possible.

Listen; creating and implementing a strategic marketing plan isn’t always easy. You’re going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. As long as you identify early on why your marketing strategy isn’t working , and take the necessary steps to get back on track.

Have we missed something? Let us know in the comments below, the components you use in developing your strategic marketing plan.

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About George Gill

George Gill is the founder of GILL Solutions. He lives in Peterborough Canada, and is an avid learner, passionate trainer and speaker. For over 20+ years, he's helped businesses implement growth strategies and systems to consistently out perform their expectations. Measurement is always key!

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• How to Write a Strategic Marketing Plan (With Free…

How to Write a Strategic Marketing Plan (With Free Templates)

Businesses come in two forms: companies starting with a marketing plan and companies that languish without growth or progress for months or years.

A strategic marketing plan is a decisive, detailed document encompassing a plan to grow the business over time. It might sound like a lot of work, but it's necessary to build a brand.

After all, you wouldn't set out to climb a mountain with nothing but a walking stick, and you wouldn't try to play golf without knowing how to swing a club, so why would you run a business without knowing where to take it?

What Goes into a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A strategic marketing plan is three things.

1. First, it's a set of business goals. These are SMART goals, meaning they're specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. I  go into greater detail on setting clear goals in this post , so I won't dig deep into it here.

Imagine you're planning to drive from Los Angeles to New York City. You have a starting point and an ultimate destination, but you still need to know what route to take and where to stop along the way. Your business objectives are your destination and the stops you make along the way.

2. Second, your strategic marketing plan is your method . This is how you're going to get to your goals. I will spend the bulk of this post talking about it, so read on to learn more. Mostly, it's about itemizing your digital marketing channels, identifying how you plan to use them, and figuring out how they all work together to improve your overall business synergistically.

3. Third, your strategic marketing plan is the KPIs you use to reinforce the first two parts . It's the metrics you identify that form your key performance indicators, and it's how you measure them. How do you know what success means?

Your goals help you define what metrics to track and what levels they should reach using the channels you define in your plan.  It all works together .

Channels and Methods in a Strategic Marketing Plan

As a core part of your strategic marketing strategy, you need to outline the marketing channels you plan to use and how you plan to use them.

Setting your goals here is essential because it helps you identify your target audience. Once you know your target market, you can pinpoint where that audience exists and how you can reach them across various channels.

It doesn't do you any good to advertise on TikTok if none of your potential customers use the app, right?

You can generally divide your marketing channels into specific groups and categories. Each of these categories is broken down into particular channels, and each channel includes what you need to do using that channel, how to do it, and how often you'll be doing it, along with any other relevant information.

1. Paid Marketing Channels

Technically, all marketing activities are paid marketing. You decide between paying with your time or paying with your money.

For this section, though, think about the channels you use by fueling them with money.

• Google search ads.
• Google display ads.
• Facebook display ads.
• Facebook boosted posts.
• Twitter boosted tweets.
• YouTube video ads.
• Twitch video ads.
• Ads on other social networks.
• Ads on non-social advertising platforms.

Paid marketing is generally where a large portion of your marketing budget is going to go, so you need to be able to spend extra time on these. It would be best if you were careful with picking the KPIs you measure as well.

2. Social Marketing Channels

There are a ton of social networks out there, and they're all free to sign up, post organically, and interact with your community.

• Facebook , organic feeds, business pages, groups, and events.
• YouTube , both for longer videos and for shorts.
• Instagram , primarily for photos and videos.
• TikTok , for that added dose of micro-video marketing.
• Twitter , which is still one of the best customer service networks despite imploding.
• Reddit , which ties in with content marketing and social marketing.
• Tumblr  is experiencing a resurgence due to the aforementioned Twitter implosion.
• LinkedIn , which can still be used for marketing in specific markets.
• Pinterest , another heavily visual network specializing in certain markets.
• WhatsApp  is one of the most extensive non-US-centric networks.

This selection is a very US-centric list, and it still just scratches the surface. But this is critical: you don't need to pick all of them.

In fact, the more you try to do at once, the less likely you are to pull off any of them effectively.

I recommend picking at most 3-4 of the networks most heavily used by your target audience and starting there. Once you've established patterns, habits, demographics, content pipelines, and practical strategies on those networks, you can expand into others for added reach.

3. Content Marketing Channels

Content marketing is the foundation of other kinds of marketing because all effective marketing relies, to some extent, on the content you produce. But, more than just "the content of the ads you run," content marketing requires you to create long-form blog posts, eBooks, videos, podcasts, and other media, to post for free on your website and around the web.

Content marketing requires a keen knowledge of SEO and how Google's search engine algorithms work. Your content plan also requires investment in content production, which often means hiring teams or gathering freelancers to do the work.

We create blog content that converts - not just for ourselves, but for our clients, too.

We pick blog topics like hedge funds pick stocks. Then, we create articles that are 10x better to earn the top spot.

Content marketing has two ingredients - content and marketing. We've earned our black belts in both.

That's paid work, of course.

Content marketing can also include your email marketing channels as well. You write content for your blog and share it across the web on social media.

You gather sign-ups for your newsletter and spread your news and content links in those regular email digests.

This also overlaps with paid marketing in the form of sponsored content , where you pay for your content to be published on other sites, often those with more exposure to your niche than you would have on your own.

4. Partnership Marketing Channels

Partnership marketing can include marketing channels where you create the content and marketing channels where you don't.

Channels, where you create the content, include things like guest posting . Guest posting is your content published on other sites because of a partnership or agreement you make with those other sites. Of course, if you pay money for it, it goes right back up into paid advertising. See how it all muddles together?

On the other hand, channels where you  don't  create the content include things like:

• Affiliate marketing , where you offer monetized links to anyone who is a content creator and wants to promote your content through their preexisting channels.
• Referral marketing , where you allow your customers to earn rewards, points, or money for promoting you to others they know.
• White label reselling , where you offer a version of your product with the serial numbers filed off for someone else to slap their brand sticker on and sell on their own, with you getting a cut.

Which (if any of these) are effective for  you  depends on  your  business, your audience, and your marketing plan. Your analysis of the niche and industry will help you determine whether or not it's worth pursuing any of them.

5. Putting It All Together

As you can see, there's a significant amount of overlap between all of these channels.

Every channel can work, but they all work better together than they do apart. Small businesses that try to create "the social media team," "the blog team," and "the SEO team" are generally doomed to have disjointed marketing and inconsistent content. Instead, you need teams that work together as one whole, overarching marketing team .

Experimentation  is key.

Part of your strategic marketing plan should be identifying which channels are most important and focusing on them first and foremost. Then, develop a roadmap of which channels to expand into (and when) when those metrics reach specific milestones. There's always going to be some flexibility here, but you need to be able to handle what's on your plate before you take on more.

Other Elements of a Strategic Marketing Plan

Of course, plenty goes into a strategic marketing strategy that isn't part of the marketing channels section.

Let's run down what else you need.

• Goals . I already mentioned this above, so head over to this link to learn more about setting marketing goals for your business.
• A SWOT analysis. SWOT is a two-part, two-axis analysis of the Strengths and Weaknesses of your brand and the Opportunities and Threats of your position in the industry. Knowing these helps you identify where you can leverage your marketing efforts for the best effect and what you need to do to defend yourself against the competition edging in on your territory.
• Executive Summary, Mission Statement, Values, and Vision. This is all high-level introductory content, meant not necessarily for you but for the people in your management team who work with you to implement the strategic marketing strategy. It's a bird's-eye level overview of what your company is, what you're trying to do, and the driving forces behind you.
• Market Analysis. A specific itemized list of competitors, new and old. This can tie in with your SWOT analysis, or it can be its own set of information. You want some level of awareness of  what the competition is doing  and who they are, kept in one place for easy reference later.
• Audience Information and Buyer Personas. This is information about who your audience is , who your ideal customers are, where to find them, what they like, what they dislike, and the value of reaching them. It's all very standard stuff for marketing, and I've written extensively on the subject.
• Budgets. Money makes the world go-'round, and that's more true than ever in the realm of marketing. Whether you're bootstrapping yourself with growth hacks or you're leveraging venture funding to saturate a market, you have a finite amount of money, and you need to know where to spend it for the best effect.

All of this is put together into one comprehensive living document that grows, changes and is edited as information in it needs to change.

How to Set Your Marketing Budget

Budgeting your plan is an essential part of making sure that your plan is successful.

The most popular business promotion strategies are organic marketing, advertising, and partnerships.

Each has its unique advantages and disadvantages. Organic marketing is a cost-effective way to increase brand awareness and reach new customers. Advertising can be a powerful tool for reaching specific audiences and creating urgency around products or services. Partnerships leverage each other's networks and resources to promote both brands.

Let's break these down in more detail to help you determine your budget for each:

• Organic marketing is a great way to build trust with potential customers by providing helpful content while creating an organic search presence. Organic marketing involves content creation , social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and influencer marketing. These activities build relationships with customers and leads without requiring additional investments in advertising or partners. Organic marketing takes time and effort but can pay off in the long run. For this reason, I wouldn't recommend that newly established companies invest all of their marketing dollars into organic marketing strategies. Some of these don't pay off for months or years, and it's important to start building traction in parallel with some of the other marketing methods.
• Advertising is a more targeted approach that helps businesses reach their target audiences quickly and more effectively than organic marketing. You can focus ad campaigns on specific demographics, regions, interests, or products. With this type of campaign, businesses can ensure their message reaches the right people at the right time. It's essential to track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns to ensure that you're getting the most out of your budget. Ads are effective at generating sales immediately, and you'll know pretty quickly if they aren't working. I think it's a good idea to invest in ads and slowly taper off by investing into other organic marketing strategies as your company grows.
• Partnerships involve two companies working together to promote each other's brands, whether affiliate, referral, whitelabel, collaborations, private label, and so on. These collaborations are great for leveraging each other's networks and resources to gain exposure to new customers and drive traffic. This strategy can benefit both companies if they target similar audiences and have complementary products or services. However, it's necessary to ensure that both parties get something out of the partnership to remain mutually beneficial.

Organic marketing, advertising, and partnerships are all valuable tools for any business. Each has its benefits, but finding the right balance between them is necessary when developing your marketing strategy. The combination will depend on your target market, budget, and goals. Ultimately, maximizing your return on investment (ROI) is the goal.

Strategic Marketing Plan Templates and Examples

It's one thing to give you a bunch of theories and tell you to have fun, but it's another to give you tangible examples of what you can put together.

Here are a bunch of examples and marketing plan templates from around the web.

• Ten Templates from Visme.co . This post, in addition to running down through all the elements of a strategic marketing plan, also includes ten templates you can use to get started. The templates are based on a core concept, like the kind of business (restaurant, real estate ) or the kind of marketing (content, social), but they can give you a great idea of what you should be putting together for yourself.
• A Plan and Template from Vital . There's only one template here, but it's one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen, and the article that accompanies it is fantastic.
• Mayple's Marketing Plan Spreadsheet . This is a great example of how you don't actually need all of the wild graphical design and typography that some of these plans use in their templates. It's fine to work on that aspect, but making your plan look good doesn't have nearly as much of a tangible benefit as making it function properly.
• HubSpot's Templates . It's HubSpot. If you don't already trust their expertise, I don't know what to tell you. Their templates range from basic to advanced, so there's something in there for everyone, though you may have to find related posts to dig into deeper templates and guidelines for some of the strategies they mention.

Do you have a favorite example or template of a strategic marketing strategy you've used? Have you put together something you're proud of or consider impressive? Feel free to let me know; I'd love to see it!

James Parsons is the founder and CEO of Content Powered, a premier content marketing agency that leverages nearly two decades of his experience in content marketing to drive business growth. Renowned for founding and scaling multi-million dollar eCommerce businesses through strategic content marketing, James has become a trusted voice in the industry, sharing his insights in Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Journal, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, and other leading publications. His background encompasses key roles across various agencies, contributing to the content strategies of major brands like eBay and Expedia. James's expertise spans SEO, conversion rate optimization, and effective content strategies, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.

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List of the Components of a Strategic Marketing Plan

• Small Business
• Advertising & Marketing
• Strategic Marketing
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Elements of Integrated Marketing Communication

The impact of planning on business growth, what are the observations of a goals-based evaluation.

• About Business Financial Planning
• Difference Between Mass Marketing and Differentiated Marketing

The strategic marketing plan for a business is much like a coach’s playbook in football. It describes what must be done for the company to win in the competitive marketplace in the upcoming year. The plan shows what the company does particularly well that will allow it to beat out the competition. And it highlights soft spots in each competitor’s “defense” that the company should be able to exploit through its marketing campaign.

Analysis of Current Situation

The management team looks at the company’s financial results for the past year and determines which marketing strategies worked well and which did not achieve the expected revenue results. The strengths and weaknesses of the company compared to its competitors are analyzed as well to determine how to position the company’s marketing message in the upcoming year. In all forms of communication with potential customers, the company’s competitive strengths will be emphasized as will the perceived weaknesses of competitors.

Opportunity Assessment

The management team searches for opportunities to reach new or emerging customer groups, to expand into new geographic markets and to sell more products or services to customers the company already has. The management team must make difficult choices about where to devote marketing resources--both money and people. In most companies, there are more marketing opportunities than resources, so the companies that succeed are those that were most adept at selecting the right ones to pursue.

Target Markets

The management team identifies which customer groups are most likely to purchase the company’s products or services. They must gather enough information about each group to understand what motivates these potential customers to make a purchase. Having a highly targeted marketing message that addresses each specific group’s particular needs is more effective than a strategy of trying to be all things to all people. To grow the business, it is critical that the marketing plan not only be directed to the company’s existing customer groups but to new potential groups as well.

Goals drive the strategic marketing plan forward. They should challenge everyone in the marketing organization to greater revenue production and efficient use of resources. Numeric goals include unit sales and total revenue for each product or service the company offers. The marketing plan includes less quantifiable goals such as increasing brand awareness or enhancing the company’s image with consumers or the media.

Strategies are actions taken to convert the goals into actual results. Pricing strategies are determined, such as where the company will position its products price-wise versus competitors. Distribution strategies are chosen (how the company intends to get its products in front of target customers). Promotion strategies are the methods the company will use to gets its marketing message disseminated as widely as possible given budgetary constraints. Selecting the media to be used to deliver the message is part of this process.

Implementation Time Line

The time line answers the questions of who is responsible for implementation of each strategic action to be taken, and over what time period will the implementation take place. An example would be determining who is responsible for producing advertising copy to be used in print media, when the copy is to be ready, which print publications will be chosen and when the advertising will run.

Marketing Budget

Implementation of the strategies requires expenditures for marketing. Companies operating under strict budgetary limitations often have to revise the initial marketing budget downward in light of available funds. This involves making difficult choices, because each budget cut can have an adverse impact on whether the marketing goals can be achieved.

• "Simplified Strategic Planning: The No-Nonsense Guide for Busy People Who Want Results Fast"; Robert W. Bradford and J. Peter Duncan; 2000

Brian Hill is the author of four popular business and finance books: "The Making of a Bestseller," "Inside Secrets to Venture Capital," "Attracting Capital from Angels" and his latest book, published in 2013, "The Pocket Small Business Owner's Guide to Business Plans."

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How To Build a Strategic Marketing Plan (+ a Free Template!)

You know what you want your campaigns to achieve, but you’re not quite sure how to get there yet.

Sound familiar?

For even the most experienced marketing teams, it can prove difficult to turn aspirational business objectives into actionable steps. While you’re busy trying to figure out what actually works, resources are being spent left and right while showing minimal returns. Fortunately, you can avoid falling victim to this common trap.

Read on to learn how to create a strategic plan to hit your own marketing goals — plus, since you’re already here, be sure to grab your free template to get the ball rolling.

What Is a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A strategic marketing plan is a comprehensive outline for the advertising and marketing efforts of a brand or organization. Founded on audience research and industry trends, this ultra-focused, strategic plan formalizes the steps an organization will take to promote its offerings to a target market of existing and potential customers.

The strategic marketing planning process follows 6 key components:

• Know where you are .
• Know your audience .
• Know where you want to go .
• Pick your channels and tactics .
• Develop your budget and your revised tactics .
• Measure and adjust your strategy periodically .

By following these steps, your team will be well on their way to achieving a sustainable competitive advantage — all while making sure each marketing dollar is well spent.

Why Is a Strategic Marketing Plan Important?

Planning for any major undertaking is essential for success.

The modern media landscape is crowded; researchers have estimated that most Americans see between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements per day .

A strategic marketing plan lays the groundwork for your brand to delight and satisfy your customers. As the old saying goes: “Proper prior planning prevents poor performance.”

By taking the time to develop a thoughtful marketing strategy, you’ll gain several benefits, including:

• A better understanding of your brand’s value proposition.
• Deeper knowledge of your audience’s needs and desires.
• A roadmap for how to manage your brand’s growth.
• Methods for measuring your marketing performance.

Creating an effective plan takes time, but when you see the results, you’ll know it was well worth the effort.

4 Basic Marketing Strategies: The 4 P’s of Marketing

Today’s digital marketers have a long pedigree of great thinkers who have shaped the way we think about appealing to customers.

We may be producing content for distribution on digital channels that few people could have predicted several decades ago, but the basic principles combining human psychology and economics are still relevant and powerful today.

In fact, the marketing mix commonly deployed in any modern campaign was first conceived by Harvard Business School professor Neil H. Borden and subsequently expanded upon by University of Minnesota professor E. Jerome McCarthy.

Though first published in 1960, McCarthy’s four P’s of marketing are still the common starting point of an effective marketing strategy.

A product can be a tangible item or an intangible service that satisfies a need or want.

B2B and B2C marketers need to possess a firm grasp of both what the product is and how it provides value to customers. The more specifically you can define these aspects, the more confident you will be in your marketing strategies.

For example, when selling products and services to other businesses, you’ll need to know what challenges your customers face and understand how your offering solves those problems.

Importantly, marketing and sales departments need to be aligned so that every customer encounter can occur within the same context.

The cost of your offerings has an obvious influence over your customers.

Having a complete understanding of the product and its features will help stakeholders determine the best possible pricing strategy.

You may need to determine if it’s better to offer your product on a subscription basis or as a one-time purchase.

Your product’s price point will impact your organization’s profit margins, inventory requirements and more. The marketing team can work with other business units to determine the best course of action.

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3. Promotion

With deep knowledge of the product, it’s value and price point, you can more effectively promote the offering in the marketplace.

This is where your strategic marketing strategy will come into play.

As you’ll see a little further on, your marketing plan should include the various channels you’ll use to communicate with your customers.

These days, the avenues for communication are much more varied than when the four P’s were developed, but the advice remains the same. Whether you’re promoting your product on a billboard or on Instagram, you need to ensure that each touchpoint supports your brand’s goals and addresses key customer needs.

The fourth P can refer to a physical location, a digital touchpoint or a mindset.

As the old saying goes, it helps to be in the right place at the right time. Marketers can control this factor by developing thoughtful buyer journeys – or sales funnels – and lead nurturing campaigns that help customers make a purchase decision.

For example, if you find that your customers are most inclined to buy once they understand the cost-saving benefits of your offering, you can construct a marketing funnel that places your audience in that position before making the hard sell. So, if customers read a blog and then download a white paper about cost savings, you could include a call to action at the end of the white paper, encouraging readers to call for more information.

6 Steps of the Strategic Planning Process

When making a marketing plan, it’s a common mistake for new marketers to start with the deliverables. Full of enthusiasm, they’ll dash off several blog articles, social media posts and pay-per-click ad headlines. Often, their eagerness will begin to wane when they don’t see huge results from their efforts.

This happens due to a lack of foundation.

The best marketing strategies aren’t built on gut feelings, enthusiasm or brute force; they’re built on carefully researched information, scientific analysis and psychological understanding.

An effective strategic marketing process includes:

• Deep knowledge of your organization’s goals and how your marketing plan promotes those objectives.
• Researched findings about your customers’ needs and desires.
• Campaign-specific marketing goals (E.g. building thought awareness or driving sales) supported by measurable performance indicators.
• Tangible collateral and associated distribution channels.

Follow these 6 steps to create an actionable marketing plan for your business:

1. Know Where You Are

Before you can make a plan, you need to know where your organization stands today.

Work with relevant stakeholders to define the goals of the business and how the marketing department currently supports them. Consider the brand’s current search engine optimization strategy and how it will benefit the organization’s marketing efforts.

Conduct a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to pinpoint what you’re doing right, what you can improve on and how external market factors will affect your customer relationships. This process can open up areas in need of further analysis.

The beginning of the planning stage is the time to consider everything that might influence your market position.

2. Know Your Audience

Understanding your organization is one side of the coin, knowing your customers is the other side.

Segmenting your audience is a good way to identify the number of marketing tactics you’ll need to employ. For example, if you find that only half of your customer base uses social media, you’ll need to spread your efforts across multiple channels.

The importance of scientific research at this stage cannot be overstated. Even if you have years of experience in the field, you can’t fully predict how your customers’ expectations, needs and wants will evolve over time.

Conduct surveys, do research and – most importantly – talk to your audience!

3. Know Where You Want to Go

With a firm understanding of your offerings and your audience, you can start thinking about next steps.

Define your goals for the year, then break them down into quarterly, monthly and weekly objectives. Tie these goals to the organization’s long-term goals. For example, if your organization wants to increase revenue by 10% over four years, what marketing objectives must be accomplished for that to happen?

Be optimistic when setting goals, but never lose sight of real market conditions.

For every target you establish, you should define metrics by which to judge your success. Metrics can tell you when to adjust your course of action.

4. Pick Your Channels and Tactics (Think Big)

An effective marketing strategy addresses the entire sales cycle.

For B2C brands, that might be as simple as making customers aware of your brand. For more complex B2B brands, you may need to build thought leadership, spread awareness, develop engaging relationships with potential buyers and more.

There are many unique ways to appeal to B2B customers .

At this stage, you should think big.

• How would you market your product or service if you had an unlimited marketing budget?
• What channels would you use?
• What type of content would you create?

Get all of your ideas out so you can consider each one carefully. At this stage, you may need to conduct further research into the cost and ROI of each tactic.

5. Develop Your Budget and Your Revised Tactics (Pare Down)

Now it’s time to solidify your plans into actionable tactics.

Decide which channels you want to use and create a calendar of content you want to promote. If you’re using paid advertising like billboards, radio ads or pay-per-click display networks, you’ll need to create budgets and bidding strategies.

Compared with the previous step, this is where you get realistic.

To maximize your marketing budget, and choose the ideal mix of collateral, you’ll need to be confident that each investment of time and resources is relevant to your business goals and your customers’ needs.

6. Measure and Adjust Your Strategy Periodically

Implementing your marketing plan isn’t the end.

Once your strategy is off the ground, you’ll need to watch it carefully to determine if it’s meeting expectations. By giving every tactic a metric by which to judge its performance, you can make valuable adjustments to your strategy over time.

These alterations may be small, like posting to your social media accounts at a different time of day; they might be big, such as swapping out one tactic for another. The important thing to remember is that any change you make should be informed by keen analysis of your current progress.

Your Free Strategic Marketing Plan Template

Use this template to structure your own marketing plan. It’s designed to be extensible and easy to use. Simply make a copy of it and add or delete fields as they apply to your needs. By filling it out, this template will help you visualize your strategy more clearly and ultimately become more confident in your ability to grow your brand’s footprint in the marketplace.

Your ability to clearly plan your marketing strategy will determine your future success. The more detailed your plan, the better your chances of success. Map out your goals, choose your metrics and commit to adjusting your strategy based on scientific evidence.

[Company name]

Marketing mission statement.

Briefly outline how your marketing strategy will support your organization’s business objectives.

SWOT Analysis

What are you currently doing that’s giving you an edge over your competitors? What do your customers like about your brand?

What do your competitors do better than you? What can you do more efficiently? Where do you struggle to fully support your customers?

Opportunities

How is your industry changing? How can you prepare for the future? How can you better define your value proposition to engage new customers?

What could draw your customers away from your brand? What industry disruptions are on the horizon? What could slow the growth of your organization?

Marketing actions

Overview: Briefly describe the initiative. (E.g. We’ll build a library of infographics to help our customers understand market trends.)

Desired outcome: What’s your goal? (E.g. We want to increase organic traffic to our resource library by 3% over the next quarter)

KPI / Metric: How will you objectively measure your outcome? (E.g. Page visitors, time-on-site, clicks, etc.)

Desired outcome:

KPI / Metric:

Market segments

[segment 1].

Demographics: Superficial details about your audience. (E.g. gender, age, income and marital status.)

Psychographics: What motivates your audience? (E.g. personal interests, attitudes, values, desires.)

Challenges: What problems do they need to overcome?

Preferred channels: Where do they absorb industry news? Where do they go to ask questions and seek professional insights?

Preferred content types: How do they prefer to gain new knowledge? Do they prefer video, audio or written content?

[Segment 2]

Demographics:

Psychographics:

Challenges:

Preferred channels:

Preferred content types:

[Segment 3]

Buyer personas, [persona 1].

Name: Each persona should have a unique name.

Age: What’s the average age range of this persona?

Job title: List a few common job titles.

Motivations / goals: What do they hope to achieve? What drives them?

Personal interests: What do they like to do outside of work?

Challenges: What business challenges do they face? What’s stopping them from achieving their goals?

[Persona 2]

Motivations / goals:

Personal interests:

[Persona 3]

Competitor analysis, [competitor 1].

Company name:

Competing products: How are their offerings similar to your own? How are they different?

Areas of overlap: How do they market their offerings? Are you competing for space in the same channels ?

[Competitor 2]

Competing products:

Areas of overlap:

[Competitor 3]

Strategy overview, [product / service 1].

Price: What’s the current pricing strategy? How do customers perceive the price in relation to the value of the product?

Promotion: How will you communicate the offering’s value proposition?

Place: Which channels will you use to promote this offering?

[Product / Service 2]

[product / service 3], website / content.

Channel Name:

Intent: What’s your goal? (E.g. We will promote brand awareness through a series of blog posts written by our senior leadership.)

KPI / Metric: How will you measure your progress? (E.g. Organic traffic, bounce rate, conversions.)

Social media

Influencers.

Editor’s Note: Updated November 2021.

Alexander Santo

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Alexander Santo is a Brafton writer living in Washington. ​He enjoys searching for the perfect cup of coffee, browsing used book shops and attending punk rock concerts.

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The Definitive Guide to Strategic Marketing Planning

By Joe Weller | June 23, 2017

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In this article, we’ve researched and outlined the key components of a strategic marketing plan that will help you align your overall marketing and business goals.

Included on this page, you’ll find the essential steps to develop a strategic marketing plan with free downloadable templates, examples of how various marketing processes work , and how marketing automation can give you a competitive edge .

5 Essential Steps for a Successful Strategic Marketing Process

The strategic marketing process is a deliberate series of steps to help you identify and reach your goals. Even more, you’ll discover what your customers want and develop products that meet those needs. Here are the steps to a successful strategic marketing process.

• Situation Analysis
• Marketing Strategy/Planning
• Marketing Mix
• Implementation and Control

Strategic marketing planning involves setting goals and objectives, analyzing internal and external business factors, product planning, implementation, and tracking your progress. Consider the example of Apple, winner of the CMO Survey Award for Marketing Excellence for the past seven years. Here’s an example of the strategic marketing plan for one of the most successful companies in the world.   Mission: Apple is dedicated to making innovative, high-quality products.

Situation Analysis: Apple’s competitive advantage is driven by its commitment to understanding customer needs, focusing on the products that are core to its mission, and fostering a collaborative work culture.

Marketing Strategy: Apple usually is first to the marketplace with new products and the company relies on brand loyalty from existing customers as a strategy when launching new products and services.

Marketing Mix: While Apple offers a range of products, it values premium pricing and relies on strict guidelines for distribution.

Implementation and Control: Each Apple product complements the others and work within the same ecosystem, so customers tend to stay with the brand, creating loyal consumers.   The strategic marketing process puts all the pieces together so that everything you do contributes to the success of your business. Rather than executing haphazard activities and ideas, developing a solid plan that weaves goals and tactics into a seamless experience is essential. You can follow these steps to create products and services that will delight your customers and beat out your competitors.

Step One: Mission

First, identify and understand the company’s mission. Maybe it’s written down and promoted throughout the organization. If not, talk to stakeholders to find out why your company exists. A mission statement explains why a company is in business and how it can benefit consumers. Sometimes, the mission statement is aspirational, motivating staff and inspiring customers. Or it is simply a straightforward statement about who you are. Either way, you can’t plan a marketing strategy without knowing clearly what business you are in and why.   Here are some example mission statements:   Citigroup: Our goal for Citigroup is to be the most respected global financial services company. Like any other public company, we’re obligated to deliver profits and growth to our shareholders. Of equal importance is to deliver those profits and generate growth responsibly.   IKEA: At IKEA, our vision is to create a better everyday life for many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.   Universal Health Services: To provide superior quality healthcare services that: PATIENTS recommend to family and friends, PHYSICIANS prefer for their patients, PURCHASERS select for their clients, EMPLOYEES are proud of, and INVESTORS seek for long-term returns.   Unlike the other steps in the planning process, senior leaders or the board of directors typically develop the mission statement and corporate objectives. Your role is to identify those objectives in the planning process to ensure that your efforts stay aligned with corporate leadership.   The mission statement is a core message that guides and influences your marketing strategy. Questions to ask when evaluating the mission:

• Why is your company in business?
• What is the purpose of your business?
• What is the strategic influence for your business?
• What is the desired public perception for your business?
• How does your mission statement clarify your strategy?
• How does your mission statement unify your team?

Step Two: Situation Analysis

The second step of the strategic marketing process is to evaluate internal and external factors that affect your business and market. Your analysis will illuminate your strengths and the challenges you face — either with internal resources or with external competition in the marketplace. Situation analysis provides a clear, objective view of the health of your business, your current and prospective customers, industry trends, and your company’s position in the marketplace.   There are several methods to conduct this analysis. A typical analysis is called a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors, under your company’s control. What do you do well? What needs to be better? Opportunities and threats are external factors, such as interest rates or a new competitor in the market. Here are some questions that can help you identify internal and external factors:

• Strengths: What do you do well? What are the factors that you control? What is your competitive advantage? How are your products and services superior to others in the marketplace?
• Weakness: Where are you underperforming? What is limiting your ability to succeed? Where do limited resources affect your success?
• Opportunities: What are untapped markets? Where is the potential for new business? Can you take advantage of any market trends?
• Threats: What are the obstacles? Which external factors (political, technological, economic) can cause a problem?

Download SWOT Analysis Template With Summary

WORD | Smartsheet

A 5C analysis (Company, Customers, Competitors, Collaborators, Climate) is another way to evaluate the market environment. Like SWOT, it includes an internal analysis as well as an exploration of external factors.

Here are some questions you can ask when working on a 5C analysis:

• Company: How successful are your product lines? What is your image in the marketplace? How effectively are you achieving your goals? How does your company’s culture affect your performance?
• Customers: Who is your audience and what is the market size? How much is your customer base growing? What motivates customers to buy your product or service? What are overall sales trends and how is the buying process changing? 
• Competitors: Who are your direct, indirect, and future competitors? What are their products and market shares? How are they positioned in the market? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• Collaborators: Who are your suppliers, distributors, partners, and agencies? How can they help you grow your business? How does the stability of their business affect the success of your business?
• Climate: What are the governmental policies and regulations that affect the market? What economic factors (inflation, interest rates) are at play? What trends influence your customers? What is the impact of technology on the demand for your product or how could technology give you an advantage over your competitors?

Download 5C Analysis Template

Excel   |   PDF

You can also conduct a PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, Technological), which is similar to the climate section of a 5C analysis. This method provides a comprehensive analysis of external factors that could affect your company.

Here are some questions you can ask when performing a PEST analysis:

• Political: What laws and regulators affect consumers? What’s the impact of trade regulations, employment laws, and tax guidelines? How stable are the foreign markets and countries in which you sell products, contract with suppliers, or offer services?
• Economic: How do interest rates, inflation, taxes, and exchange rates affect your customers and your bottom line? What is the impact of the stock market on your business? What are the local business cycles and overall economic growth?
• Social: What lifestyles and attitudes affect the buying habits of your consumers? What are the demographics of your customers (age, gender, education, etc.)? How are they changing?  
• Technical: What patents, innovations and licenses can influence your company? Which manufacturing trends can increase your production levels or drive down costs? How can information technology help or hurt your product placement, positioning, and promotion?

Download PEST Analysis Template

Your analysis, no matter which method you use, will help you list the most critical problems and relevant opportunities, as well as show you how well your company can tackle projects. Once you have a clear picture of your business, you can identify potential markets and products.

Step Three: Marketing Plan

Now that you’ve identified opportunities through your analysis, you should prioritize and map out which ones you are going to pursue. Writing a marketing plan will specify your target customers and how you will reach them, and should also include a forecast of the anticipated results. These questions can help:

• How will customers respond to your marketing efforts? 
• How much will the plan cost? 
• How will your competition respond? 

The data from your market research and situation analysis will help you build these projections into your plan.   Define Your Target Audience

Few companies can meet the needs and wants of the entire market. You want to split the market into a segment that aligns best with your strengths and opportunities. Your goal is to identify customers. You can select your target market by choosing all kinds of characteristics, behaviors, and demographics. The important thing is to make sure the audience is clearly defined and large enough to support your product or service.  

  Even though you may have some information about your customers based on your situation analysis, you may need to conduct more research on their needs and wants. With research, you can create detailed profiles or personas of your ideal customers. The more you know about your target audience, the more effectively you can offer them value through your product or service. Nothing matters more than how you make customers feel about your company.   Set Measurable Goals 

How will you know if your plan succeeds? You need specific, measurable goals with milestones that measure your progress. Do you want to increase your sales? The goal you set should specify how much you want to grow the sales number, and the timeframe for meeting that target. Each goal should be actionable and attainable through tactics you control. At this stage, avoid contingent goals, which are dependent on circumstances beyond your control. With each goal, list the tactics or steps you will take to achieve it. Combine simple, clear, and precise goals (whether it’s gaining customers, improving brand recognition or something else) with a detailed plan that defines the tactics to meet your goal. For more information on writing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals, read this article .    Identify and Set a Marketing Budget 

Now it’s time to allocate the resources that will turn your plan into action. Your budget will outline all the expected costs for implementing your marketing plan, including advertising, online content, branding, public relations, staffing costs, and more. Depending on the size of your budget, you may have to make some tough choices about which goals and tactics are the top priorities. Or you may have to adjust your tactics until you reach a budget that’s affordable. By creating the budget, you can finalize and stick to your plan. For more help with marketing budgets, read 12 Free Marketing Budget Templates .

Step Four: Developing Marketing Mix Decisions

At this stage of the strategic marketing process, it’s time to focus on the “how” of planning. Your marketing mix is based on the 4Ps of marketing, including Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.  In 1960, E. J. McCarthy first expressed the 4Ps, and it is probably the best-known way to describe the marketing mix. The 4Ps will guide the way you convey the value of your product to your customers. You are positioning your product and its competitive advantage. You need to be clear about what you are marketing: convenience or quality? And you need to know who is likely to buy your product or service.    By using the market research conducted in step two, you can develop the ideal marketing mix for your target audience and the type of product or service you sell. Although there are dozens of marketing channels, you will want to choose the tactics that will reach your prospects when they’ll be most receptive to your message.  

  Product: A product is a good or service that meets the needs of your target market. Even more, products solve problems. Whether you are developing a marketing plan for Coca-Cola, a luxury hotel, or a cell phone, you have to know what problem it solves and why your product is a unique solution. Make sure you have a clear understanding of all the details of your product, including its features, branding, and packaging.

• What is the product or service?
• What does the customer want from it?
• What needs does it satisfy?
• What features does it have to meet these needs?
• How and where will the customer use it?
• How does it compare with similar products?
• Who are the competitors? 

Price: The price is the amount of money your target market is willing to pay for your product. Factors for price include any discounts, payment periods, and list price, as well as how much it costs your company to produce the product. You also need to consider overall marketplace conditions and your competition. How healthy is the economy? How much are your competitors charging for a similar product? Do they have the same business model?   The marketing message around your price depends on your market and your audience. Maybe it’s a way to position your product in a crowded marketplace. It might be a competitive advantage or a way of demonstrating the value of your product.

• What is the value of the product to the customer?
• Are there existing price points for similar products? If so, what are they?
• Will a small decrease give you extra market share? How much will that affect the product’s perceived value?
• Will discounts to certain market segments be part of your strategy?

Promotion: The way you communicate with your target audience about the value and benefit of your product is promotion. Think of promotion as an opportunity to educate your customers about your products and services. You teach them the value of what you offer and how your product meets their needs or solves their problem. There are countless ways to educate them through marketing channels including direct marketing, paid search and social, advertising, public relations, and sales promotions that create brand awareness. This extends to almost every aspect of how you present the product to your target market, and is everything that teaches your audience about your product or brand. 

• Where can you get your marketing messages across to your target market? Options include advertising on TV and billboards, direct marketing, public relations, sponsored events, and promotions. Consider the details you used when segmenting your audience.
• What marketing channels does your target market use on a regular basis? Where and when are they most ready to buy your product?
• When is the best time to promote?
• How do your competitors do their promotions?

Place: Consider place as product distribution or how you plan to get your product to your customers and make the buying process easy. Place includes distribution channels, outlets, and transportation to get the product to the target market.

• Where do customers look for your product? In a store? Online? Through a catalogue?
• Do you need a sales force to reach customers or should you sell directly to your target market?
• What are the best distribution channels?
• Where are your competitors reaching customers?

Step Five: Implementation and Control

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. Identify how and when you will launch your plan. At this stage of the strategic marketing process, you will reach out to customers to inform and persuade them about your product or service. Your next steps include getting the resources (cash and staffing) to market your product, organizing the people who will do the work, creating calendars to keep the work on track, and managing all the details for each goal. It will help you stay focused and energized if you create monthly benchmarks and projects, weekly action steps, and daily marketing appointments.   Remember, the strategic marketing process is dynamic. You need to regularly measure and evaluate the results of your plan in order to succeed. This will help you see whether you are accomplishing your goals and where you need to adjust tactics to improve your results. This can include looking at revenue, sales, customer satisfaction, the number of views your website receives, or other metrics. If the numbers aren’t meeting your projections, you can make changes to get back on track. You also need to monitor the actions of your competitors. How does the success of your product affect the price of similar items on the market? Are new products being released that could be perceived of greater value by your audience? Use this information to make informed decisions about the 4Ps for your product.

What Is the Definition of Strategic Marketing?

A marketing plan establishes the goals and tactics of every marketing campaign. It keeps everyone in your organization on the same page about the direction and purpose of your marketing efforts. A marketing plan also provides a way for you to measure your success. Without a plan, you won’t really know whether you’re succeeding.

While every individual campaign should have a plan, your company also needs a strategic marketing plan to guide your overall efforts. A strategic plan identifies your business goals, the marketplace in which you compete, your target audience, the ways you want to reach them, and how you will evaluate your success. It integrates everything you say and do to grow your company. A strategic marketing plan is not a static document that gets tossed in a drawer once it’s written. Instead, a plan is a living document that guides your work and is regularly updated to reflect changes in your business, your customers, and your competition.

The process of developing a strategic marketing plan is crucial to your business. You cannot create strategic marketing without strategic thinking. This planning helps you clarify your goals and identify where you see your business in the future, which ultimately strengthens your strategy. A strategic marketing planning process also helps with:

• Providing a clear map of your company’s goals and how to achieve them.
• Getting all stakeholders to share a common goal and a have a common understanding of your company’s opportunities and challenges.
• Identifying and meeting customer needs with the right products in the right places.
• Growing your market share and product lines, leading to more revenue.
• Enabling smaller companies to compete with bigger firms.

One caution: A strategic marketing plan focuses on your goals for your products and customers. The overall business plan, which outlines all of your company’s goals, should support the marketing plan. If they don’t work together, neither plan will succeed.   What Problems Should You Anticipate in the Strategic Marketing Process 

Every manager knows to expect the best but plan for the worst. In the marketing planning process, here are some challenges you may face:

• Confusing Strategy with Tactics: A strategic marketing plan outlines your larger goal. Sometimes, this can be confused with a tactical marketing plan. The difference between the two is that the strategy identifies your goals and objectives and the tactical marketing plan outlines the details for how you’ll reach those goals. Your strategy may be a larger goal, such as increasing your market share. Tactics are the action steps, such as lowering your prices, so more people buy your product. A successful plan needs both, implemented at the proper stage of the process.
• Lack of Resources: Maybe your goal is to increase sales, but you don’t have the workforce to meet all the incoming orders. Perhaps you don’t have the resources to hire experienced people who can adequately staff the marketing pipeline. The strategic planning process will help you identify the resources you have and the best way to put them to work for the good of the company.
• Assumptions About Your Customers: Market research can help you identify your target audience. Sometimes the audience changes, and your planning process should include steps for adjusting to the evolving tastes of consumers.

How Do Specific Marketing Processes Work?

The steps of the strategic marketing process (mission, situation analysis, marketing plan, marketing mix, and implementation and control) are different than the process for a specific marketing effort. Specific efforts may support one goal or business line, but the strategic process supports the entire mission of your organization.   Target Marketing Process

Target marketing identifies the specific market segments that will help your business grow. The three main activities of target marketing are segmenting, targeting, and positioning. Organizations use this S-T-P approach to pinpoint the best prospective customers.

• Segmenting: Segmenting divides the overall market into smaller groups based on demographics, geography, lifestyle or behavioral approaches.
• Targeting: Choose the segment of potential customers that offers the most business opportunity for you.
• Positioning: The final step is to position your product in a way that will appeal to the needs of your target audience and encourage them to buy your product.  

Content Marketing Process 

Content marketers generate demand for a product by generating a steady flow of content that focuses on the problems and desires of potential and current customers. Here are the five steps of the content marketing process: 

• Plan: Develop a plan that specifies the details of creating, publishing, distributing, and measuring a content marketing program.
• Create: Take key ideas and themes, and turn them into raw material.
• Publish: Turn raw material into various kinds of content assets, including articles, blog posts, whitepapers, online events, videos, printed documents, and podcasts.
• Distribute: Use a range of promotional tactics to distribute content assets.
• Analyze: Track and measure the results so you can publish more effective content in the future.

Product Marketing Process

The product marketing process is the pipeline from strategy to implementation for a product marketing campaign. To be successful, this process focuses on making sure the product continues to meet the needs of customers throughout the product cycle. Here are the stages of this process:

• Product: Research new ideas for meeting customer needs from a wide variety of sources, including customer feedback, sales requests, and competitor products.
• Reach: Work with other departments to implement new ideas and develop marketing plans to deliver new products to consumers.
• Audience: Track response through metrics and direct customer feedback.
• Pricing: Prioritize innovation based on the customer value, the cost of implementing them, and the revenue they will generate. 

Inbound Marketing Process

Inbound marketing draws prospective customers to your product by providing useful and quality content that entices them to find out more. The inbound approach includes content marketing, social strategies, and search engine optimization, all tactics that bring your target audience to you. It’s different than outbound marketing, a traditional approach in which you advertise your product or service, typically through television and radio, print ads, and direct mail. Here’s how inbound marketing works:

• Attract and Engage: Create targeted content that answers your customers’ questions and be readily available online. This includes blog content, a social media presence, keywords that guide prospective customers to your site when they are searching for answers, and a well-designed and helpful website.
• Convert: Get more information about your prospective customers so you can guide them through the sales funnel. Start collecting details about your customers through sign-up forms and landing pages, email newsletters, ebooks, whitepapers, and tip sheets. The key is to deliver targeted marketing to the right audience at the right time.
• Close: Once you’ve collected detailed information about your prospective customers, you can customize the marketing that leads them to buy your product or service. This includes email messaging, which is typically done using marketing automation software that responds to the actions of a prospective customer.
• Delight: While an immediate goal may be the sale of one product, your strategic goals focus on brand loyalty and long-term value. In this stage, you should be staying in touch with your customers, monitoring the conversations on social media, asking for feedback through surveys, and finding ways to provide rewards for customer loyalty. 

Email Marketing Process  

  Email marketing is one of the most powerful drivers of sales for many businesses. It has an advantage over direct mail because you can track and measure your results, and it tends to be less expensive than other marketing channels. Here’s an overview of the email marketing process:

• Define: Identify your goals and your audience. Base the content of your email on who you want to reach and what you want them to do.
• Test: Email marketing has a range of variables that can affect the performance of your campaign. You need to choose the best design, content, and format for the message you want to send.
• Send: Email is one of the largest drivers of sales for many products. Each email you send has to align with your brand, connect with your audience, and offer a clear call to action.
• Measure and Report: You want to understand how people interact with each campaign. Track the open rate for your email, the number of clicks through to your site, and when they read your marketing. This data will help you create a more effective campaign next time.

How Is Marketing Automation Changing the Strategic Marketing Process?

Marketing automation is about software that streamlines, automates, and measures marketing processes and tasks. It reduces the amount of manual effort and tracking that marketing campaigns require. Automation makes your marketing, and your company, more efficient, effective, and profitable. Whether you have a small company or a large organization, you can gain a competitive edge by automating your ability to target your audience and track and measure your results. Here’s how:

• Marketing automation helps you nurture prospects for the long-term. Automation connects multiple digital channels, including social media, email, and content marketing. You can create and deliver a comprehensive plan in which every consumer touch point is optimized for conversion.
• Marketing automation makes your communication stronger. Once you’ve collected user data, you can add dynamic content that adds personal touches to your campaign. You’re not blasting customers with broad or irrelevant advertising messages. Instead, you’re guiding prospects through the sales funnel. With every action by your prospective customer, you can automate a response.
• Marketing automation can help your company find an effective approach for email campaigns. You can test different variables like email send times, subject lines, and ideas for personalization.
• Marketing automation improves your ability to segment your customers. As you gather data about their behavior, interests, and demographics, you can refine your messaging.
• Marketing automation helps you listen to your customers. You can map sales cycles, collect email data (unsubscribe rates, open rates, spam complaints), and customer service feedback.

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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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• Authors: Dr. Maria Gomez Albrecht, Dr. Mark Green, Linda Hoffman
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Principles of Marketing
• Publication date: Jan 25, 2023
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/principles-marketing/pages/1-unit-introduction
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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 this 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.

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Blog > Tools Marketing Tips

11 Main Components of Successful Marketing Plans

Posted by Hailey Jennato | September 27, 2021

Marketing is often an overlooked business function. Entrepreneurs push it to the side so they can focus their full efforts on starting a business and creating a great product or service. However, if you can’t find the right audience, satisfy their needs, and sell enough of your product in a cost-effective way, you won’t have a sustainable business. Marketing is all about creating, communicating, and delivering value to your target audience. In order to do so successfully, you need a comprehensive plan to guide your vision. Your marketing plan is a roadmap, detailing where you want to be and the exact steps you need to take to accomplish your goals. Backed by data and research, marketing plans help you make informed business decisions. Instead of scrambling at the last minute, they force you to think about the future and identify strategies with the highest chance of success. Marketing plans give you the confidence to be proactive, instead of reactive. They reduce confusion, unite your marketing team around a set of shared goals, and ensure everyone knows exactly what tasks they need to complete on any given day.

Why are marketing plans important?

Sometimes startups and new founders approach marketing with a “ throw everything at the wall and see what sticks ” approach. While experimentation is great, this type of strategy can be detrimental in the long run if your marketing decisions aren’t backed by research and data. Without a strategic plan, it’s easy to waste resources on tactics with low returns, missed opportunities, fall behind your competition, and respond too slowly to market changes. Although marketing plans are time-consuming and can be challenging to create, there are many benefits you should consider:

Anticipate trends and industry changes - constantly analyzing your industry helps you capitalize on trends and pivot your business plan if necessary. For example, consider that Blockbuster and Netflix used to mail rented DVDs to customers. While Netflix anticipated the popularity of online streaming services and pivoted accordingly, Blockbuster failed to shift fast enough , filed for bankruptcy, and now basically ceases to exist.

Beat your competitors at their own strategies - you likely won’t be able to outbid a major corporate competitor, but you can stand out by sending personalized videos to every new customer. Before you make your own marketing strategy, you should consider what your competitors are doing. What channels do your competitors use, and which are they missing? What type of content and keywords are they focused on, and can you outrank them? Can you take inspiration from their past successful campaigns?

Understand your business’ weaknesses and shortcomings - no business is perfect, but great businesses focus on turning their weaknesses into strengths. This self-awareness helps you focus on issues customers are upset about (poor customer service, broken products, late shipping, slow website, etc.) rather than improving something that doesn’t actually need to be fixed.

Improve employee onboarding - a solid marketing plan and good documentation reduces confusion and makes employee onboarding much easier. New employees get an overview of the marketing vision, see what tasks they need to work on, and immediately help the team achieve their objectives.

Track success and determine what strategies are underperforming - marketing plans require you to compare your actual results against your goal or expected results. This way, you can see if you’re making progress. Tracking metrics and collecting data also helps you abandon unsuccessful strategies and extend more resources to campaigns with high returns.

Get everyone on the same page - regardless of the size of your business or marketing team, you need collaboration and efficiency for success. With a detailed marketing plan, everyone knows their role and works towards the same goals. It also reduces idle time, simplifies processes, and prevents employees from (accidentally) working on the wrong task.

You can create an overall marketing plan for your entire business, but you should also make plans for smaller campaigns, like product launches, events, new partnerships, limited time discounts, and major company updates. In other words, you should create a marketing plan whenever you want to communicate something important with your target audience or persuade them to take a certain action, like sign up for an event, make a purchase, or refer a friend.

11 Key components of a marketing plan

The size, granularity, and elements of a marketing plan differ for every business, depending on its industry, goals, and available resources. However, there are some elements that are common in most marketing plans :

1. Executive summary

The executive summary explains the overall purpose of your marketing plan and briefly describes all the relevant components. It includes an overview of your marketing and advertising goals, a description of your current marketing position, an overview of your campaign’s timeline, and a description of your product/service and target market.

2. Mission statement

A mission statement is a short statement reflecting the purpose of your business at that point in time. It can talk about what you do, the types of products and services you offer, your target market, or your competitive advantage. Here are some mission statement examples:

• “ To become the number 1 fashion destination for 20-somethings globally. ” - ASOS
• “ To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. ” - LinkedIn
• “ Offering all women and men worldwide the best of cosmetics innovation in terms of quality, efficacy and safety. ” - L'Oréal
• “ To make unique sports cars that represent the finest Italian design and craftsmanship, both on the track and on the road. ” - Ferrari

3. Market analysis

A market analysis asks you to look deeply at your business and industry. For this section, you will reflect on where your business and your marketing strategy stand right now. You should include what you’re selling, your unique selling proposition (what separates you from competitors), your best performing marketing channels and campaigns so far, and your current marketing objectives.

4. SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis looks at the internal and external environment your business operates in.

Strengths refer to what your business does well, your tangible assets and internal resources, and what sets you apart from the competition.

Weaknesses include areas where your business needs to improve, resource limitations, and places where your competitors are excelling.

Opportunities refer to your industry as a whole, including underserved markets, lack of competitors, growing popularity for the products/services you provide, and positive media coverage of your industry.

Threats include parts of the external environment that could potentially harm your business, like new laws and regulations, negative media coverage, decline of your industry, and emerging competitors.

5. Competitor analysis

If you offer a similar product or service to other companies, you need to communicate why your offering is more valuable. To do so, you must understand what your competitors are selling, who their audience is, and how they’re communicating with that audience. The best place to start is your competitors’ website and social media accounts. Buy their products, sign up for their newsletter, or attend one of their events. Read their customer reviews and media coverage to learn more about their successes and failures.

6. Target market and buyer personas

Create your buyer personas with Growth Channel’s free template or customize a pre-populated template in the Persona Builder .

Your target market represents the ideal customers of your product or service. You may have one ideal customer, or you may market to a few different personas. When thinking about your target market, consider these attributes:

Demographics - age, gender, income, education, occupation, marital status

Geographics - location (country, region, state, city, town), climate, culture

Psychographics - lifestyle, attitudes, risk tolerance, aspirations, personality, values, struggles, pain points, goals

Behavioral attributes - preferred channels and content types, loyalty, frequency of purchases, affiliations

7. Marketing objectives and KPIs

Your objectives are the goals of your campaign, or what you hope to accomplish. Your KPIs, or key performance indicators, are the metrics you will track to determine if you met your objectives. It’s also important to track how your KPIs change over time. Here are some example KPIs to track based on your campaign:

Social media - followers, engagement rate, mentions, reach, ROAS

Content - comments, shares, downloads, conversion rate, leads, search ranking

Website - organic traffic, paid traffic, keyword rankings, session duration, bounce rate, conversion rate, CPA

App - weekly active users, activation rate, conversion rate, churn rate, CLTV

8. Pricing strategy

You need to consider how you will price your products and services. There are many types of pricing strategies , but these are the main three:

Price skimming - price above competitors to recapture your margins, and lower the price as time passes. With this strategy, you will likely sell fewer products at a higher price point.

Competitive pricing - base your pricing off of what competitors are charging

Penetration pricing - price below competitors to increase market share, gain customers, and sell more units. With this strategy, you try to sell a large volume at a lower price point and then raise prices as time passes.

9. Marketing channels

Consider the best channels to promote your business on. You may even decide to create a separate social media and/or content marketing strategy within your overall marketing plan, including your editorial calendar, content types and topics, and the channels you’ll be posting on. When choosing marketing channels, think about where your target audience spends their time and what type of information they engage with. You also need to decide whether to use free channels, paid channels, or a combination of both. Here are some examples of popular channels:

Social media - Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, Pinterest, TikTok, Clubhouse

Content marketing - blogs, infographics, tutorials, guides, case studies, newsletters, webinars, demos, events, presentations, guest blogs, whitepapers, podcasts

Communities - Industry specific websites, forums, and social media groups

Media coverage - press, features in other websites and publications, partnerships, tags or mentions on social media

Partnerships - Referral or affiliate programs, integration partners

• Company website - live chat, SEO, FAQs, resources, landing pages

Not sure what channels you should be focusing on? Growth Channel’s free customer journey template can help you decide where to focus your resources.

10. Growth strategy

Growth strategy refers to your long term plans and goals. Think about where you want your business to be in six months, a year, or even five years. How does this individual campaign or plan fit in with your overall marketing or business strategy? If your plan is successful, what project will you take on next? If your plan is unsuccessful, will you move on or try a different approach?

11. Budgeting

In order to actually execute your marketing plan, you will need a realistic budget. Your goal is to execute your plan in an affordable and cost-effective way. In other words, you should be seeing more returns, sales, or benefits than what you’re spending. There are many free budgeting templates online you can use to track your expenses. However you decide to create a budget, it’s important to build in a little flexibility for unexpected changes in your plan.

Tools to help you create your marketing plan

Want to build your own marketing plan? Growth Channel has a free marketing template resource that walks you through every step of the process!

Organizing your marketing plan and tracking success can be challenging. Luckily, there are a lot of great tools out there specifically designed to help marketers and businesses create robust marketing plans. At Growth Channel, we’ve built a Growth Library of hundreds of marketing tools and resources. You can even filter by customer journey stage, marketing objective, and industry. Here’s a snapshot of some of our favorite marketing planning tools:

For organization and visualization

Trello is a visual project management platform that breaks down complex tasks into customizable boards, lists, and cards.

With CoSchedule’s simple drag and drop marketing management software, you can schedule projects, track progress, and see everything your marketing team is working on.

Source: CoSchedule

Visualize your customers’ journey with Funnelytics . Map funnels, calculate stats that make them profitable, and identify bottlenecks that prevent conversions.

For launching and managing campaigns

SocialBu is the ultimate social media management and automation platform, letting you run all your social media accounts in one location.

Trumpia offers the easiest platform to create a variety of targeted and automated text messaging marketing campaigns.

Get instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews and more with Brand24 .

Source: Brand24

Unstack's content marketing platform is designed to help you rapidly build, measure, and scale your digital presence without code or developers.

Attract more leads, manage contacts, deliver personalized experiences at scale, and automate your marketing campaigns with Freshmarketer .

For branding

Design like a professional with Canva . You can use Canva’s customizable templates to organize, create, export, and share your marketing plan and other promotional assets.

1Brand creates shareable brand guidelines within minutes from your business’ website, so all your campaigns and promotional materials remain consistent.

Source: 1Brand

For competitor analysis

Monitor your competitors’ keyword and SEO strategies with SEMrush .

Competitors App automatically monitors your competitors and alerts you of any major changes to their marketing strategy. Competitors App tracks their keyword rankings, website changes, newsletters, social posts, reviews, and more.

Use Visto AI to get a top view of the latest marketing trends and direct access to your competitors' top ad campaigns. Easily filter thousands of new ads or millions of archived ones, and access key performance metrics.

Source: Visto

For tracking progress and measuring ROI

With Apteo , you can segment customers, monitor lifetime values, identify cross-sell opportunities, and track product journeys.

Get real-time visibility into your data, understand the full story behind every customer journey, and automatically uncover how each marketing activity impacts your KPIs with InfiniGrow .

Plannuh , an AI-driven marketing management software, lets you create agile marketing plans, budgets, and accurate ROI reports. You can even automate budget import, invoice entry, and expense reconciliation.

Source: Plannuh

For automating the entire marketing planning process

Growth Channel collects your market research from over 500 data sources and simulates thousands of campaigns, presenting the strategy with the highest chance of success for your business. Generate a plan today .

Source: Growth Channel

Listnr helps you to convert text into High Quality Speech. You can then use your synthesized Speech to add voice overs to videos, distribute blog posts as podcasts, or convert an ebook to an audiobook.

Convert, retain, and grow your customers with delightful personal video emails with Bonjoro . By connecting Bonjoro to your existing tools, you can send personalized video emails at key moments in your customer’s journey.

Source: Bonjoro

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

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

Written 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
• Conduct a monthly social media report to track progress

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 and strategic marketing plan are (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.

For B2C brands, you can target Facebook and Instagram. Gain Instagram likes to build trust for your brand’s profile and post engaging content on both platforms

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:

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• 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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What Are The Major Components of a Marketing Strategy?

Creating an effective marketing strategy entails more than just writing out some bullet points about what you think you might produce or aim to achieve over the next couple of weeks, months or a year. In order to market successfully, you need to have a number of solid components to focus on. 

What is a marketing strategy? 

A marketing strategy is a methodically designed plan created to outline and guide marketing activities with the aim of achieving specific outcomes. It’s the foundation upon which marketing decisions are made. The ultimate function of a marketing strategy is to focus your marketing objectives and campaigns and keep these efforts aligned with the wider company goals. 

Any good marketing strategy has to take into consideration factors that are both internal and external. Internal factors include the marketing mix , performance analysis, budgetary constraints, etc. External factors are elements like customer experience, competitor analysis, the socio-economic environment, and so on. That’s why most marketing strategies are partially planned and partially reactive to the market.

It’s all well and good to have an overall understanding of what a marketing strategy is, but knowing and implementing the fundamental components that make up a great strategy will keep you at the top of your game.

What Are The 5 Major Components of a Marketing Strategy?

1. target audience.

Your target audience describes the group of individuals who are most likely to identify with your brand and use your products or services. It’s important that you confidently establish your ideal audience so that you can convert leads and, of course, turn a profit. 

There are brands out there that utilise mass marketing i.e. they target anyone and everyone. Take IKEA as an example. They sell homeware, household appliances and flatpack furniture, and have the right product at the right price for almost every consumer. Mass marketing is only typically achievable for those businesses that sell products that are universally needed, which is why this strategy works so well for IKEA. 

Most brands, especially  small businesses will need to target several different audiences or concentrate on specific, niche groups of people for maximum success. To define, redefine, or re-establish your ideal target audience, you need to action market segmentation . 

There are four main types of market segmentation:

• Demographic (age, gender, income, marital status, etc.) 
• Geographic (location, urbanicity, climate, culture, language)
• Psychographic (values, likes, dislikes, lifestyles, opinions, etc.)
• Behavioural (actions made within a website, in-app, in-store)

You can collect demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural information by conducting interviews, looking at census data, creating online surveys, exploring social media analytics, analysing the actions that customers and prospects make in-app or on your website and so on. 

Once you have dynamically segmented your customers and prospects’ data, you can create your buyer personas (or redefine/re-establish them, if you have already created some).

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, created by utilising your data. You attribute this character with details such as their age, income, touchpoints, pain points, goals and buying patterns. The idea of creating a persona (or multiple personas) is to provide structure to your careful audience targeting.

Source: MLT Creative 

Actioning market segmentation and creating buyer personas provides a real-world context for your business. This will allow you to learn about your ideal customer and help with your content creation, product development and alignment of resources. Solid audience research of this kind ensures that your company message attracts those who will find it the most valuable and bring value in return.

2. Goals & objectives

A goal is something that you want to achieve and is a broad, overarching statement that typically refers to the long-term. An objective is more specific, precise and involves the action or actions that will be taken in order to achieve the overall goal. 

If you feel a little lost or aren’t sure where to start, the SWOT analysis method is a great way to dive deeper into your company (as well as the wider market environment) and identify some actionable goals and objectives. 

Conducting a SWOT analysis encourages you to identify your business and/or marketing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will give you a clear picture of where you excel, where you can improve, your potential opportunities and the challenges that you will need to tackle.  

Say, for example, your marketing material is receiving a lot of interaction, and, as a result, your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are increasing significantly. This is, of course, a strength . But there’s a problem - your MQLs are growing, but they’re not converting. Marketing aims to generate leads to grow your business, so acquiring leads that don’t convert would be marked down as a weakness. However, you can turn this weakness into an opportunity by making it your goal to increase your MQL conversion rate over the next four quarters. 

Here’s an example of 3 clear-cut objectives that will help you achieve your new goal:

• Create a pillar page that is specific to the product or service that you offer and includes 20+ pieces of supporting content: 12x blogs, 6x infographics, 6x videos, 6x guides.
• Create new product-focused website content that clearly details each aspect of your product/service and its benefits.
• Analyse and re-write your workflows to include updated content and more product-focused information for the lowest-performing emails.

Of course, what you want to achieve and the objectives you need to attain to get there don’t have to be major or span a whole year like the example I’ve given above. They can be as extensive or as minimal as you like. 

Having strong goals and objectives is super important for any business, regardless of company size, budget or offerings. The focus of your goals and objectives can be to inform your content, explore different avenues with your social media, bridge the gap between sales and marketing, increase email open rates, improve lead quality, etc. 

A key thing to remember here is to ensure that your goals and objectives are S.M.A.R.T.:

• Relevant/realistic 
• Time-bound 

So, whether it’s acquiring new users, focusing on revenue, growing your brand or venturing into new markets, the overall aim of setting goals and objectives in your marketing strategy is to achieve business targets as seamlessly as possible.

3. Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is a process where you research to identify brands that are a potential threat to your business and analyse their products, sales and marketing strategies, social media presence, website, etc. By conducting a competitor analysis, you will gain knowledge and an understanding of: 

• The market you operate within
• Your target audience 
• Market forecasting and potential opportunities
• Competitor products & product development horizons
• Pricing structures 
• Acquisition trends 

This enables you to get a clear idea of where you sit in the market compared to others and provides a benchmark against which you can measure your business’s growth.

The more you get to know your competition, the easier it will be to identify potential opportunities and areas in which you can out-perform and overtake them to gain an advantage. So studying your market competitors will not only help you to stay on top, but it will also enhance your insight into what kind of marketing works within your industry and what doesn’t. 90% of Fortune 500 companies already use competitive intelligence to gain a competitive advantage. 

Source: Forbes Side note: It doesn’t matter how niche your brand, product or service is, there will always be some form of competition to contend with. It may not be direct, but you will happen upon competition regarding some aspect of your company; it could simply be alternative areas where potential customers are spending their money, interacting on social media or reading blogs that contain similar content to yours. 

It’s important for you to project the qualities that make your brand different and why customers and prospects should choose you over other market options. 

Conducting a thorough, usable competitor analysis takes more than just a quick search on Google; you need to work your way through a number of specific steps and utilise the helpful tools that are available to you. 

Related content: How to Complete Your First Competitor Analysis: Step-by-Step Tutorial

4. Content creation

Content creation is a truly significant part of modern marketing. Why? Because there’s more to marketing nowadays than just pushy promotional tactics and brash advertisements. Great content marketing shows your target audience that you are knowledgeable, trustworthy, and can bring them the value they’re searching for.

Source: DemandMetric

Research by Hubspot showed that, in 2020, 70% of marketers claimed to be actively investing in content marketing. This is because the content on a brand’s website now operates as more than just a slogan or a promotional article; it is a business strategy that functions to project thought leadership, to build an audience, to convert , to retain loyalty and much, much more. 

Content marketing comes in many forms, including (but not limited to):

• Infographics

Whilst the influence of content marketing is growing year-on-year, it’s not enough to just write about anything; there is a difference between content that’s valuable and content that’s there just for the sake of it. You can’t expect to convert leads with a piece of writing or media that’s poorly targeted or inadequately researched. Content like this will come across as amateur, a waste of time for the viewer and can actually do real harm to your brand. 

Creating a Search Insights Report (S.I.R.) is a great way to ensure that the content you create is worthwhile, valuable to your target audience and competitive on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). A search insights report is essentially a mix between a keywords research report and a content calendar that acts as a roadmap for your content creation.

If you have never conducted a search insights report, here’s a quick rundown of  the four things you need to do: 

1. Select your focus topics: these should be based on the product or service you provide and they act as your main keywords (for example, with Hurree, one of our main topics is ‘Market Segmentation’ and another is ‘Marketing Strategy’ ). 2. Identify content competitors: these aren’t your normal, physical competitors; they’re brands who rank on SERPs for the same keywords as you, i.e. when I search for “Market segmentation + blogs” in a search engine, I won’t necessarily see our direct competitors (those who offer a similar product or service). I will see brands that write about the topic of market segmentation.

To find your content competitors, go to your search engine and type in “[focus topic] + blogs”,  “[focus topic] + websites”,  “[focus topic] + tips”,  “[focus topic] + examples”.

3. Run a content competitor analysis: once you have identified who your content competitors are, it’s time to analyse them using a keyword research tool so you can see the terms they’re ranking for that your site potentially is not. There are many great tools available such as Ahrefs , SEMrush and Moz . Or you can try The Hoth , which is free for a limited number of keywords. Add your content competitors to the keyword research tool of your choice and what you should see is a long list of topic-specific keywords.

You can treat every keyword as a potential piece of content so long as the keyword is relevant to your audience and there isn’t an overwhelming amount of competition - to gauge this, look at the monthly search volume (MSV). A score between 50 - 1000 monthly searches is good/achievable. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword that has an MSV of 25K then it will be significantly more difficult.

Take my example of market segmentation . The keywords that appear in my keyword research tool are: “types of market segmentation”, “market segmentation strategies”, “psychographic segmentation”, and their MSV is between 50 - 1000, so we would be wise to create content using these keywords: 

• 4 Main Types of Market Segmentation and Their Benefits
• Market Segmentation Strategies to Grow your Startup
• How Psychographic Segmentation Can Improve your Marketing Strategy

4. Lastly, fill out your search insights report: It can seem like a daunting task, but you’re not alone - I recommend using Hubspot’s search insights report template.

Hubspot also has an Academy course which is super helpful. If you don’t have access to this, there are other free resources available. 

As well as conducting in-depth research like a search insights report, you need to ask yourself these questions to ensure that your content is significant and worthwhile for your customers and prospects:  

• Is this content authentic (i.e. is it genuinely trying to be of service to your audience and not just manipulative)? 
• Is this information accurate (does it contain correct material and up-to-date statistics)?
• Is this content in line with my brand (tone of voice, design, etc.)?
• Does it offer my target audience answers to their questions?
• Is it well-targeted for the stages of my customer’s lifecycle?  

Creating well-structured content that aligns with your company’s purpose will strengthen your brand by adding continued value to your customers. 

5. Measurement

You put so much time, thought and effort into your marketing. Don’t let it all go to waste. You can have the most intricate, creative, logical marketing campaign out there, but if you don’t measure the results, how are you going to know whether or not you’re hitting your targets? You need to make sure that your input is equal to, or more than, what you’re gaining in return. 

Utilising your data, regularly reviewing your actions and measuring your growth will ensure that your tasks, objectives and marketing efforts are being efficiently managed. 

So take into account things like:

• Industry benchmarks: compare your data against industry averages for MQLs, traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, etc. 
• MQLs: how many leads are you receiving per week/month? What’s the quality of your leads? How many of them convert? 
• Website traffic: which pages do they visit? How long do they spend on your site? What’s the average bounce rate? 
• Social media: are you gaining new followers or losing them? Do your posts receive enough interaction? Do your social media pages get users to visit your website? 
• Emails: analyse your click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, conversions, your CTAs (call-to-action), etc.
• Advertisements: are you generating leads from your paid ads? 

Measuring the impact of your marketing activities gives you the ability to track your success and analyse what you’re doing well and where you need to improve. This ensures you maintain consistent growth and competitive advantage. It also helps to streamline your objectives, keeping them in line with your business goals. 

Related content: The 40 Most Important KPIs for Marketers

A well-thought-out marketing strategy provides a multitude of opportunities for businesses big and small. 

Things that we all strive to achieve like enhanced customer loyalty, increased sales and ROI, a strengthened brand and the ability to triumph over market competitors become far more obtainable with a structured strategy in place. So implement these five critical components that I’ve outlined above, regularly revisit them and allow your marketing to thrive. 

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The Marketing Planning Process: Step-by-Step Breakdown

Erica Chappell

Managing Editor

September 7, 2023

Want to learn about the different steps that go into the marketing planning process? Managing a marketing project is a bit like managing a fast-food restaurant.

You have a very limited time to prepare the product (campaign). And you have to coordinate with staff members who are handling completely different duties. If it’s done right, you’ll be attracting a ton of loyal (and hungry) customers.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the strategic marketing plan process , how you can implement it in your business, and the best tool to help you with the entire process.

What Is a Marketing Plan?

Benefits of the marketing planning process, 1. document your business goals, 2. conduct a marketing audit and research, 3. define your buyer persona, 4. set a budget, 5. identify a marketing tactic, 6. schedule the marketing campaign , who benefits from using a marketing plan.

Order up! Let’s go.

A marketing plan is a document that showcases your company’s marketing strategy for the upcoming month, quarter, or year.

Here’s what a marketing action plan contains when you unbox it:

• Your current marketing activity and position
• A detailed overview of your marketing goal and business goal
• A description of customer needs
• The metrics you need to track (ROI, number of potential customers, etc.)

And what happens when you create an amazing marketing plan? You’ll be able to stay focused on your marketing goal and also create an equally amazing marketing strategy. Here’s how you can create a marketing campaign that can make even the pros jealous!

Marketing efforts, when done right, can result in significant positive effects that can kickstart your business’s success. Here are a few benefits of proactive marketing planning .

Learn about the top marketing tools for new businesses !

Provides benchmarks and accountability

Through the planning process, you will be able to set benchmarks and create a roadmap for your marketing strategy to reach business goals. Making this visible allows the entire team to be accountable for their actions and tasks. It will also ensure everything runs smoothly as everyone knows what’s happening and how they need to work together.

Encourages team collaboration

Because the marketing planning process will likely run across departments and need a fair bit of collaboration, it opens up cross-departmental communication and unifies the organization. Also, getting your team involved early allows you to be realistic with your planning.

Reduces risk

Now, you have a marketing strategy. By having a planning process in place, you now have a framework to gain an overview of the target market, competitive advantage, and market segmentation. This allows you to be better prepared for risk factors that you might not have foreseen.

Challenges your beliefs and assumptions

Since business is always changing, having a marketing planning process allows you to keep adapting more effective strategies. By continually honing your marketing efforts, you might run across new tools and techniques, incorporate new ideas from different team members, and challenge your standard operating procedures .

What Are the Steps in the Marketing Planning Process?

Creating a marketing plan for the first time might seem like a convoluted process, but it’s actually super simple. The planning process becomes 100x easier to deal with when you break it down into these six steps:

• Document your business goals
• Do market research
• Define your buyer/client persona
• Set a marketing budget
• Identify a marketing tactic
• Schedule the marketing campaign  

Let’s take a closer look at each step.

Before planning a marketing strategy, you and your marketing team should ask your senior management to highlight your corporate objectives. 

Ideally, every large-scale business goal and objective should span 18-24 months. This gives you enough time to develop marketing initiatives that align with these overall business objectives.

Let’s say you’re the marketing manager for Los Pollos Hermanos from Breaking Bad. The business owner, Gus Fring’s business goal might be to increase restaurant revenue to $3 million in the next year.

You’ll need to create a SMART marketing goal that can contribute to his business goals. For example: 

• Gain 20% more repeat customers
• Increase hot chicken sandwich sales by 35%
• Boost shipment and distribution revenue for other products 😉

Curious about SMART goals? Check out our guide for tips on how to create a great business goal.

After you’ve decided on the goal, marketing project management tools like ClickUp can help you document and track them. In ClickUp, Goals are high-level containers that can be broken into smaller objectives, known as  Targets. Targets can be measured by units like numbers, $$$, true/false, and task lists.

Bonus: Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

When you meet your Targets, you achieve your marketing goal too. ClickUp automatically updates the progress percentage as you meet Targets in real-time. This can motivate your sales and marketing teams as they see the numbers rising every day!

Want to monitor more marketing metrics? 

ClickUp is loaded with features that your teams need to manage your project or marketing program. Its Dashboards are the way to go. Each unique dashboard offers a lot of Custom Widgets that let you track marketing KPIs and every marketing objective.

Track sales, conversion rates, social media engagement, and more, with a Line Chart, Bar Chart, Pie Chart, Battery Chart, or however you best visualize data!

Want to get there faster? Use the ClickUp Content Management Template to easily track your content goals, budgets, and resources all within one space. Get this content branding template for free !

It’s time for a serious throwback. You need to take a look at all the marketing decisions and initiatives that you’ve taken in the past few years. Additionally, you’ll also have to go through old reports to see which marketing tactics worked and which didn’t.

With the help of a marketing audit, you’ll be able to avoid the issues your marketing department has faced in the past. Take it from Gus: ClickUp Docs let your team collaborate in real-time on your audit, marketing research , and annual marketing plan documents; it’s like Google Docs , but way better!

Not only can you embed lists, tables, images, and videos, but you can also assign actionable tasks directly within a ClickUp Doc. And to make your job even easier, ClickUp lets you save your work as a marketing plan template that you can use later!

After the audit, you’ll need to determine where you’re currently placed in the market and market trends. Ask your team:

• Are your customers price-sensitive?
• Have new competitors slowed down your business growth?
• Do you have a competitive advantage over other businesses?

But why just limit feedback to your company?  Your customers and clients’ opinion matter too. 

After all, they’ll be using your products or services. With the Form view , you can create detailed customer survey forms faster than you can say Heisenberg . 

Choose from different fields of text, labels, questions, and more. ClickUp allows you to publicly share these forms, and it then collects responses within the tool. This way, you can directly take action on their responses by including their inputs in the marketing plan.

How well do you know your customers, really? In this phase, you’ll need to embrace market segmentation. What’s that?

Essentially, you’ll need to identify the different kinds of customers in your target market. Then you’ll have to narrow your focus to a specific target audience. After that, you’ll have to create a buyer persona. These are fictional representations of your ideal customer in your target market. Ask your team:

• Who is this person?
• What are their needs and priorities?
• How do they make decisions?
• Where do they work?
• How much do they earn?
• What do they like, and what do they absolutely hate?
• What media do they consume?

You’ll need to really get into their minds, so you can tailor your marketing strategy that appeals best to them. For example, Los Pollos Hermanos settles on a buyer persona named Walt, who’s a middle-aged high-school chemistry teacher. 

Now that you have an idea of who he is, how he behaves, and what he wants, you can market to him better! But how do you come up with a buyer persona? Two words: Mind Maps .

Drawing Mind Maps in ClickUp can help your marketing team organize your thoughts and ideas when creating a persona . Just place a central idea and add relevant thoughts when they pop up. 

And remember the more detailed the persona Mind Map, the better. Knowing your customers well will allow you to create a personalized yet strategic marketing plan that connects to your target audience.

You might have tons of cool strategic marketing ideas, but if they don’t fall into your marketing budget, it would be almost impossible to execute them. And even if you do break the bank to work on them, there are no guarantees that you’ll be rolling in dough in the end.

So how much should you spend on your strategic marketing plan? Allocating 7-15% of your company’s income to your marketing department is ideal, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all rule. 

However, keep in mind that any initial marketing activity can be expensive. This includes getting a logo , branding , and creating a campaign from scratch. How do you track all your marketing expenses?

In ClickUp, every task can have additional details called Custom Fields . With these fields, you can record data like phone numbers, labels, checkboxes, and more.

In this case, you can track the budget, and cost of each marketing activity and task with the ‘Money’ field. What’s more is that with Column Calculations , you can automatically add up your spending to see whether it’s in line with your budget.

So no more half-measures when you’re creating your strategic marketing plan!

Bonus: Marketing calendar software !

Now that you know exactly what your customers are like, it’s time to choose the right distribution channels where they spend most of their time. After all, your target audience has to see your ad, right?

Let’s take a few platforms where you can implement your strategic plan , and the best tactics for each:

• Blogs: Content marketing + Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Facebook/Instagram : Social media marketing + Influencer marketing
• Google: SEO + Search Ads
• Newspapers: Print advertising 
• Television: Commercials + Sponsorships

Let’s look back at Walt’s persona. Since we determined that he gets all his news from TV, our marketing effort should focus on creating a wonderful commercial:

Remember that the message of your strategic marketing campaign should reflect customer needs. In this case, this commercial should reassure their target audience that their food is high-quality and fresh—99.99% fresh.

However, you don’t have to focus all your tactics on one single platform. A healthy marketing mix between offline and online media ensures everyone gets your message. Now, it’s up to your marketing team to decide which route they want to take.  For example, you can create and publish new content on your blog, host automated webinars , and at the same time promote offline content to convert your audience. With ClickUp’s Chat view , you can discuss tactics, and sales deals, attach images/videos, and assign tasks in your marketing mix.

Now we’ve finally reached the end of the strategic marketing planning process . After you’ve got the marketing plan locked down, it’s time to list all the tasks that need to be done in order to pull it off.

How do you do it?

With ClickUp’s Gantt Charts , you can create a dynamic timeline of your marketing campaign activities from start to finish. The Gantt view lets you visualize the start and end dates for each task, and any important milestones along the way.

With Task Dependencies , you can indicate the sequence in which you want to complete your tasks. All you have to do is draw a line between two tasks, and you’re done!

Now, your marketing team won’t be able to work on a dependent task until they’ve cleared the preceding task. Need to work on a digital marketing calendar ? You can schedule all your marketing activities through ClickUp’s Calendar view .

It’s super easy to schedule posts or tasks, and adjust due dates—all you have to do is drag and drop.

Note: Since the strategic marketing process requires your team to be quick on their feet, ClickUp offers marketing plan templates for your content calendar , SEO management , campaign tracking , promotional calendar , A/B testing , and graphic design processes . 

Just apply the marketing plan template, and you’re ready to start planning in seconds! However, note that ClickUp isn’t just built for the strategic planning process ; it can help with every marketing process from execution to monitoring. 

So, ClickUp has more features ? Here’s what ClickUp has to offer:

• Flexible views : visualize your tasks in a to-do list , Kanban board , or a Calendar
• Assigned comments : change a comment into an actionable task and assign it to a team member
• Collaboration Detection : know when your coworker is working on the same task or Doc as you
• Pulse : see what your team is doing in real-time; great for remote teams
• Agile Dashboards : monitor Agile and Scrum metrics with diagrams like Velocity Charts , Burndown Charts , Burn-up Charts , etc.
• Team Reporting : track and monitor your team’s performance and progress
• Automations : speed up your strategic marketing process by automating repetitive tasks and marketing workflows
• Integrations : allows you to connect with other important work software like Slack, Google Drive , and Outlook
• Mobile Apps : dynamic iOS and Android apps to help you manage projects on the run
• Restaurant Marketing Plan
• Starting a Business Marketing Plan
• Bookkeeping Marketing Plan
• Service Business Marketing Plan
• Creative Agency Marketing Plan
• Marketing Agency Marketing Plan
• Design Agency Marketing Plan
• Advertising Agency Marketing Plan

Get Planning on Your Marketing Strategy With ClickUp

So what’s the secret behind running a great strategic planning session? All you need to do is figure out what your customers want, set a time and resource budget, brainstorm the best way to serve your customers, and that’s it. We told you, it’s just like the restaurant business. 😁 

And as most restaurants have sophisticated equipment to help you out, you’ll need a dedicated marketing automation software and project tool like ClickUp to help you out too! From Goal Trackers to Dashboards and Timelines , it’s got everything you need you to get started with your marketing plans.

Get ClickUp for free today, and cook up the perfect marketing campaigns!

Want more tips? Read our expert roundup to get more marketing management ideas .

Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.

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Here’s how to make sure both you and your patients know what makes your practice special .

REBECCA ANWAR, PhD, AND JUDY CAPKO

Fam Pract Manag. 2001;8(10):39-43

For many physicians, marketing is simply a matter of putting an advertisement in the local newspaper, redecorating the waiting room or conducting a direct mailing to people in the community. But this is a haphazard approach that will accomplish little more for your practice than draining its marketing budget.

The key to successfully marketing your practice begins with developing a strategic marketing plan in which each activity is based on solid research and specific goals, and is implemented and carefully evaluated in a timely manner. The plan serves as a road map to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Why should you market your practice?

Some physicians still feel that marketing is at best unprofessional and at worst unethical. In fact, good marketing is no more than educating your patients and your community about your expertise and services, and there are a wide range of reasons for doing it, not all of which have a purely financial basis. However, if you do want to determine the value of each new patient to your practice, calculate the average of the revenue that 10 new patients generated during their first 12 months with you.

You might consider marketing your practice for any or all of the following reasons: to increase your income, expand your patient base, discourage competition, improve your practice image, promote current and new services, introduce new providers, enter a new marketplace or gain or retain market share. Whatever your motivation, make sure to get your staff involved right from the start. Share your reasons for marketing with them, and ask them for their ideas. If your staff is not involved early, it will be difficult to convince them to support the marketing plan and take on any additional work that comes with it.

The elements of a plan

There are nine major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic marketing plan: set your marketing goals, conduct a marketing audit, conduct market research, analyze the research, identify your target audience, determine a budget, develop specific marketing strategies, develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and create an evaluation process.

1. Set your marketing goals. Once you’ve decided to market your practice, you need to set realistic and measurable goals to achieve over the next 18 to 24 months. This time span allows you to plan activities around community events that are in line with your marketing goals. For example, you might help sponsor an annual walkathon for breast cancer or speak at your community’s annual health fair. Because of the rapid changes occurring in the health care environment, we don’t recommend planning specific activities more than two years in advance. One way to define your goals is to separate them into the following three categories: immediate, one to six months; short-term, six to 12 months; and long-term, 12 to 24 months. Here are some examples of measurable goals:

Increase the number of new patients seen in the practice by 5 percent within the first six months and 10 percent by the end of the first year.

Shift your patient mix by expanding the pediatric and adolescent patient base from 15 percent to 25 percent of total patient visits within 18 months.

Increase your gross revenue by 30 percent within 24 months.

Improve your practice’s image, which may be measured by “before” and “after” scores on a community survey or by reviews from focus group participants.

It’s important to share these goals with your staff members. They can tell you from their perspectives whether they believe the goals are reasonable. If you want your marketing plan to be successful, your staff needs to support your efforts to achieve the marketing goals.

Marketing can increase your income, introduce new providers or improve your practice image, among other things.

A strategic marketing plan requires you to define your practice in terms of what it does for patients.

Every goal, strategy and action in your marketing plan is subject to change as you evaluate your progress.

2. Conduct a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a review of all marketing activities that have occurred in your practice over the past three years. Be as thorough as possible, making sure to review every announcement, advertisement, phonebook ad, open house, brochure and seminar and evaluate whether it was successful.

3. Conduct market research. The purpose of market research is to draw a realistic picture of your practice, the community you practice in and your current position in that community. With this research, you can make fairly accurate projections about future growth in the community, identify competitive factors and explore nontraditional opportunities (such as offering patients nutritional counseling, smoking-cessation programs or massage therapy). Your research may even bring to light some problem areas in your practice as well as solutions you can implement right away. (See “ A guide to market research ” to find out what kind of information you need to gather and where to find it.)

Conducting market research is often the most time-consuming step in this process. However, it’s also one of the most important steps. It’s from this research that you’re able to find out what your practice does best and what you need to work on, what the needs of your community are, who your practice should be targeting and how you should go about it.

4. Analyze the research. Next, you need to analyze the raw data you collect and summarize it into meaningful findings that will be the foundation for determining which marketing strategies make the most sense and will get the best results for your practice The research will identify the wants and needs of your current and potential patients and will help you to define your target audience (for more on target audiences, see step 5, below). This is also a good time to look back at the goals you’ve chosen. Based on your research findings, you may need to modify some of your goals.

A strategic marketing plan requires that your practice be defined in terms of what it does for patients. The research analysis will reveal your practice’s strategic advantages. After looking closely at your own practice as well as your competitors’, you can ask yourself some key questions: What are the similarities and differences between your practice and your competitors’? What sets your practice apart from your competition? Is your location more desirable than your competitors’? Do you offer a broader scope of services than the competition? Is there a service you provide that no one else in the community currently offers? Your competitive edge may lie in your style of practice, the range of services you offer, the ease of making an appointment or the way you and your staff communicate with patients.

A GUIDE TO MARKET RESEARCH

To gather the kind of information you need to develop a strategic marketing plan for your practice, you need to conduct market research on your practice, your competition and your community. You can’t rely on intuition, judgment and experience; your practice needs hard data. Although it will take some time to gather this information, a number of resources are available that can make the process easier for you.

Your practice

Much of the information you need about your own practice can be found through discussions with staff members and other physicians, or by reviewing your patient records. You can also find out about your practice and whether it’s meeting the needs of your current patients by asking them to fill out a patient survey about the practice. Here are some of the questions you need answered about your practice:

What is the background and history of your practice? Has it been in the current community for a long time?

What are your practice’s strengths and weaknesses? Are there problems with scheduling, cancellations, staff turnover or reimbursement management?

Who are your current patients in terms of their age, sex, ethnic origin, type of insurance coverage, chief complaints and where they live?

What are the services provided by your practice? Who needs these services? Are these needs changing?

How is your practice perceived by your patients?

Your competition

You need to find out who your competitors are and what they have to offer. Check with your county or state medical society and your local hospital to find out how many other family physicians, nurse practitioners and general internists are in your service area, how long they’ve practiced in that location and how many have moved into your area over the past five years.

Once you’ve determined who your competitors are, you need to assess them. This information may be a little harder to come by, but you can try to gather as much information as you can by simply asking other physicians, listening to your patients, friends and neighbors when they talk about their physicians and keeping your eye out for competitors’ advertisements. To assess your competition, you need to ask the following questions:

What are your competitors’ target audiences and niche markets?

Why do certain patients or groups of patients particularly like or dislike your competitors?

How are your competitors viewed within the community?

What marketing activities have your competitors tried?

Your community

In addition to gathering information about your practice and your competitors’ practices, you need to learn as much as you can about the people in your community. You can find answers to the following questions by contacting your local Chamber of Commerce, your state vital statistics department or the U.S. Census Bureau ( www.census.gov ). Census data is available for every state, county, city, ZIP code, neighborhood, etc.:

How many people live in your service area? Is the population expected to grow or shrink? What are the demographic characteristics of the population in your area?

How is your practice perceived in the community? Are you known in the community?

Who are your potential patients? Are their wants and needs being met elsewhere in the community? If not, how can your practice meet those needs?

5. Identify a target audience. With the help of your market research analysis, you should be able to identify your practice’s “target audience,” which is the specific group of patients to which you’d like to direct your marketing efforts. Your target audience might include patients of a certain age, gender, location, payer type or language/ethnicity and patients with certain clinical needs. Keep in mind that your target audience should not only be the patients you want to attract but also the people who can influence and provide exposure to that segment of the population. For example, if you wish to treat patients with arthritis, you might want to get involved in the local and regional Arthritis Foundation and explore senior organizations in the community. If you want to treat young athletes, you might consider giving talks on sports safety and first-aid tips to coaches and athletes at the local high schools, colleges and YMCAs. The key to marketing lies in targeting the audience that your practice can serve better than your competition – and communicating this to that group.

6. Determine a budget. Before you can decide what specific marketing strategies you want to implement to achieve your goals, you need to examine your financial information and come up with a marketing budget. Marketing budgets vary by the type of market a practice is in, the age of a practice and whether the practice has marketed before. There’s no standard for how much a practice should spend. However, in our experience, practices in open markets have spent 3 percent to 5 percent of their annual gross incomes on marketing. If your practice is new, in a highly competitive market or has never been marketed before, or if you intend to roll out an ambitious new program or service, you can expect to spend 10 percent or more of your annual gross income the first year you implement the plan.

Some of the initial marketing activities can be expensive. For example, it can cost more than $5,000 to have a corporate image package (i.e., logo, stationery and collateral pieces) developed by a professional and as much as $10,000 if you add a brochure. On the other hand, some of the best marketing activities cost practically nothing. For example, to build your referral network, you might try meeting with new physicians in your community and sending follow-up/thankyou notes to referring physicians. Big or small, these are all worthwhile investments that will give the community a positive image of your practice.

7. Develop marketing strategies. With your budget in place, you can begin to define specific marketing strategies that will address your goals, reach your target audience and build your patient base. Remember to focus your strategies on the elements of your practice that can be used to create a special value in the minds of patients and referral sources. Each strategy should be related to a specific goal and should be made up of numerous actions. For example, one strategy related to the goal of increasing patient satisfaction might be to make the office more patient friendly. The actions required for that strategy might include the following:

Provide patient satisfaction training sessions to staff;

Develop a patient self-scheduling system within the practice Web site to eliminate the need to telephone the office for an appointment;

Improve the reception-room decor;

Provide name tags for staff;

Require staff to introduce themselves to each new patient;

Conduct post-encounter telephone interviews with new patients within three days of their appointments.

[Watch for an upcoming article in FPM about specific, cost-effective marketing actions you can try in your practice.]

8. Develop an implementation schedule. An implementation schedule is a time-line that shows which marketing actions will be done when and by whom. The schedule should also include the cost of each marketing action and how it fits into the budget estimates for the 24-month period. When creating the schedule, carefully consider how the activities will affect the current practice operations and whether there are sufficient resources (such as staff, time and money) to accomplish the necessary tasks. In some cases, it may be necessary to whittle down the list or postpone some activities. In other cases, it might be best to go ahead with full implementation of your plan. If you want to fully implement the plan but don’t quite have the staffing resources, you might consider bringing in a consultant to coordinate the marketing activities and/or adding a part-time staff member to handle the majority of the marketing tasks. The implementation schedule will also give you a basis on which to monitor the progress of your marketing plan.

9. Create an evaluation process. The value of a marketing plan is its effectiveness, which requires deliberate and timely implementation and monitoring and evaluation of results. It’s important to measure your results against the standards you set in establishing your goals. Review your plan periodically (we recommend quarterly) by comparing your progress with the implementation schedule. There are several ways you can measure the results of your progress: patient survey scores, referral sources, increased income, increased new patients and decreased complaints.

If at any time you find your progress does not measure up to your expectations, you need to determine why. Perhaps the advertisement about a new service you are marketing has not attracted new patients. If the ad campaign has been carried out as directed without results, dump the campaign and try other actions. Perhaps you’ll want to try giving a series of seminars specifically targeted to the group you want to attract or developing a new segment on your Web site for patients that describes the benefits of the new service. You may even find that if each physician in the practice talks about the new service with his or her patients as merely informational conversation, favorable results will follow. In other words, the actions – and even the strategies and goals – in the marketing plan are not written in stone. By regularly monitoring and evaluating each action, you can always change and try new approaches.

As good as you make it

A good marketing plan outlines realistic marketing goals, strategies and actions based on sound information and research about your practice and your community. But the plan is only as good as your commitment to implementing it, dedicating sufficient resources to the endeavor, involving your staff and communicating openly with them. The marketing plan should not merely be written, reviewed and put away on a shelf. Instead, your practice marketing plan should be an evolving blueprint that guides your efforts and monitors your success. Marketing works when the dedication is there. It’s up to you!

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Copyright © 2001 by the American Academy of Family Physicians.

This content is owned by the AAFP. A person viewing it online may make one printout of the material and may use that printout only for his or her personal, non-commercial reference. This material may not otherwise be downloaded, copied, printed, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any medium, whether now known or later invented, except as authorized in writing by the AAFP.  See permissions  for copyright questions and/or permission requests.

Copyright © 2024 American Academy of Family Physicians. All Rights Reserved.

3.2 Components of the Strategic Planning Process

Learning objectives.

The objectives of this section is to help students …

• Explain how a mission statement helps a company with its strategic planing.
• Describe how a firm analyzes its internal environment.
• Describe the external environment a firm may face and how it is analysed.

Strategic planning is a process that helps an organization allocate its resources to capitalize on opportunities in the marketplace. Typically, it is a long-term process. The strategic planning process includes conducting a situation analysis and developing the organization’s mission statement, objectives, value proposition, and strategies. Figure 3.2 “The Strategic Planning Process” shows the components of the strategic planning process. Let’s now look at each of these components.

Figure 3.2: The Strategic Planning Process

Conducting a Situation Analysis

As part of the strategic planning process, a situation analysis must be conducted before a company can decide on specific actions. A situation analysis involves analyzing both the external (macro and micro factors outside the organization) and the internal (company) environments. Figure 3.2 “The Strategic Planning Process” and Figure 3.3 “Elements of a SWOT Analysis” show examples of internal and external factors and in a SWOT analysis. The firm’s internal environment—such as its financial resources, technological resources, and the capabilities of its personnel and their performance—has to be examined. It is also critical to examine the external macro and micro environments the firm faces,such as the economy and its competitors. The external environment significantly affects the decisions a firm makes, and thus must be continuously evaluated. For example, during the economic downturn in 2008–2009, businesses found that many competitors cut the prices of their products drastically. Other companies reduced package sizes or the amount of product in packages. Firms also offered customers incentives (free shipping, free gift cards with purchase, rebates, etc.) to purchase their goods and services online, which allowed businesses to cut back on the personnel needed to staff their brick-and-mortar stores. While a business cannot control things such as the economy, changes in demographic trends, or what competitors do, it must decide what actions to take to remain competitive—actions that depend in part on their internal environment.

Conducting a SWOT Analysis

Based on the situation analysis, organizations analyze their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, or conduct what’s called a SWOT analysis. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors and are somewhat controllable. For example, an organization’s strengths might include its brand name, efficient distribution network, reputation for great service, and strong financial position. A firm’s weaknesses might include lack of awareness of its products in the marketplace, alack of human resources talent, and a poor location. Opportunities and threats are factors that are external to the firm and largely uncontrollable. Opportunities might entail the international demand for the type of products the firm makes, few competitors, and favorable social trends such as people living longer. Threats might include a bad economy, high interest rates that increase a firm’s borrowing costs, and an aging population that makes it hard for the business to find workers.

You can conduct a SWOT analysis of yourself to help determine your competitive advantage. Perhaps your strengths include strong leadership abilities and communication skills, whereas your weaknesses include a lack of organization. Opportunities for you might exist in specific careers and industries; however, the economy and other people competing for the same position might be threats. Moreover, a factor that is a strength for one person (say, strong accounting skills) might be a weakness for another person (poor accounting skills). The same is true for businesses. See Figure 3.3 “Elements of a SWOT Analysis” for an illustration of some of the factors examined in a SWOT analysis.

Figure 3.3: Elements of a SWOT Analysis

The easiest way to determine if a factor is external or internal is to take away the company, organization, or individual and see if the factor still exists. Internal factors such as strengths and weaknesses are specific to a company or individual, whereas external factors such as opportunities and threats affect multiple individuals and organizations in the marketplace. For example, if you are doing a situation analysis on PepsiCo and are looking at the weak economy, take PepsiCo out of the picture and see what factors remain. If the factor—the weak economy—is still there, it is an external factor. Even if PepsiCo hadn’t been around in 2008–2009, the weak economy reduced consumer spending and affected a lot of companies.

Assessing the Internal Environment

As we have indicated, when an organization evaluates which factors are its strengths and weaknesses, it is assessing its internal environment. Once companies determine their strengths, they can use those strengths to capitalize on opportunities and develop their competitive advantage. For example, strengths for PepsiCo are what are called “mega” brands, or brands that individually generate over $1 billion in sales1. These brands are also designed to contribute to PepsiCo’s environmental and social responsibilities.

PepsiCo’s brand awareness, profitability, and strong presence in global markets are also strengths. Especially in foreign markets, the loyalty of a firm’s employees can be a major strength, which can provide it with a competitive advantage. Loyal and knowledgeable employees are easier to train and tend to develop better relationships with customers. This helps organizations pursue more opportunities.

Although the brand awareness for PepsiCo’s products is strong, smaller companies often struggle with weaknesses such as low brand awareness, low financial reserves, and poor locations. When organizations assess their internal environments, they must look at factors such as performance and costs as well as brand awareness and location. Managers need to examine both the past and current strategies of their firms and determine what strategies succeeded and which ones failed. This helps a company plan its future actions and improves the odds they will be successful. For example, a company might look at packaging that worked very well for a product and use the same type of packaging for new products. Firms may also look at customers’ reactions to changes in products, including packaging, to see what works and doesn’t work. When PepsiCo changed the packaging of major brands in 2008,customers had mixed responses.Tropicana switched from the familiar orange with the straw in it to a new package and customers did not like it. As a result,Tropicana changed back to their familiar orange with a straw after spending $35 million for the new package design.

Watch Video Clip: Tropicana’s Ad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDnkqlnhGGI

Tropicana’s ad left out the familiar orange with a straw.

Individuals are also wise to look at the strategies they have tried in the past to see which ones failed and which ones succeeded. Have you ever done poorly on an exam? Was it the instructor’s fault, the strategy you used to study, or did you decide not to study? See which strategies work best for you and perhaps try the same type of strategies for future exams. If a strategy did not work, see what went wrong and change it. Doing so is similar to what organizations do when they analyze their internal environments.

Assessing the External Environment

Analyzing the external environment involves tracking conditions in the macro and micro market place that,although largely uncontrollable, affect the way an organization does business. The macro environment includes economic factors, demographic trends, cultural and social trends, political and legal regulations, technological changes, and the price and availability of natural resources. Each factor in the macro environment is discussed separately in the next section. The micro environment includes competition, suppliers, marketing intermediaries (retailers, wholesalers), the public, the company, and customers. We focus on competition in our discussion of the external environment in the chapter. Customers, including the public will be the focus of Chapter 3 “Consumer Behavior: How People Make Buying Decisions” and marketing intermediaries and suppliers will be discussed in Chapter 8 “Using Marketing Channels to Create Value for Customers” and Chapter 9 “Using Supply Chains to Create Value for Customers”.

When firms globalize, analyzing the environment becomes more complex because they must examine the external environment in each country in which they do business. Regulations, competitors, technological development,and the economy may be different in each country and will affect how firms do business. To see how factors in the external environment such as technology may change education and lives of people around the world, watch the videos “Did You Know 2.0?” and “Did You Know 3.0?” which provide information on social media sites compared to populations in the world. Originally created in 2006 and revised in 2007, the video has been updated and translated into other languages. Another edition of “Did You Know?” (4.0) focused on changing media and technology and showed how information may change the world as well as the way people communicate and conduct business.

Watch Video Clip: Did You Know 2.0?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

To see how the external environment and world are changing and in turn affecting marketing strategies, watch “Did You Know 4.0?”

Watch Video Clip: Did You Know 4.0?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

To see how fast things change and the impact of technology and social media, visit “Did You Know 4.0?”

Although the external environment affects all organizations, companies must focus on factors that are relevant for their operations. For example, government regulations on food packaging will affect PepsiCo but not Goodyear. Similarly, students getting a business degree don’t need to focus on job opportunities for registered nurses.

The Competitive Environment

All organizations must consider their competition, whether it is direct or indirect competition vying for the consumer’s dollar. Both nonprofit and for-profit organizations compete for customers’ resources. Coke and Pepsi are direct competitors in the soft drink industry, Hilton and Sheraton are competitors in the hospitality industry,and organizations such as United Way and the American Cancer Society compete for resources in the nonprofit sector. However, hotels must also consider other options that people have when selecting a place to stay, such as hostels, dorms, bed and breakfasts, or rental homes.

A group of competitors that provide similar products or services form an industry. Michael Porter,a professor at Harvard University and a leading authority on competitive strategy, developed an approach for analyzing industries. Called the five forces model (Porter,1980) and shown in Figure 3.4 “Five Forces Model”, the framework helps organizations understand their current competitors as well as organizations that could become competitors in the future. As such, firms can find the best way to defend their position in the industry.

Figure 3.4: Five Forces Model (Porter, 1980)

Competitive Analysis

When a firm conducts a competitive analysis, they tend to focus on direct competitors and try to determine a firm’s strengths and weaknesses, its image, and its resources. Doing so helps the firm figure out how much money a competitor may be able to spend on things such as research, new product development, promotion, and new locations. Competitive analysis involves looking at any information (annual reports, financial statements, news stories, observation details obtained on visits, etc.) available on competitors. Another means of collecting competitive information utilizes mystery shoppers, or people who act like customers. Mystery shoppers might visit competitors to learn about their customer service and their products. Imagine going to a competitor’s restaurant and studying the menu and the prices and watching customers to see what items are popular and then changing your menu to better compete. Competitors battle for the customer’s dollar and they must know what other firms are doing. Individuals and teams also compete for jobs, titles, and prizes and must figure out the competitors’ weaknesses and plans in order to take advantage of their strengths and have a better chance of winning.

According to Porter, in addition to their direct competitors (competitive rivals), organizations must consider the strength and impact the following could have (Porter, 1980):

• Substitute products
• Potential entrants (new competitors) in the marketplace
• The bargaining power of suppliers
• The bargaining power of buyers

When any of these factors change, companies may have to respond by changing their strategies. For example, because buyers are consuming fewer soft drinks these days, companies such as Coke and Pepsi have had to develop new, substitute offerings such as vitamin water and sports drinks. However, other companies such as Dannon or Nestlé may also be potential entrants in the flavored water market. When you select a hamburger fast-food chain, you also had the option of substitutes such as getting food at the grocery or going to a pizza place. When computers entered the market, they were a substitute for typewriters. Most students may not have ever used a typewriter, but some consumers still use typewriters for forms and letters.

Figure 3.5: Substitute products

When personal computers were first invented, they were a serious threat to typewriter makers such as Smith Corona. (pclemens –Smith-Corona Classic 12– CC BY 2.0)

Suppliers, the companies that supply ingredients as well as packaging materials to other companies, must also be considered. If a company cannot get the supplies it needs, it’s in trouble. Also, sometimes suppliers see how lucrative their customers’ markets are and decide to enter them. Buyers, who are the focus of marketing and strategic plans, must also be considered because they have bargaining power and must be satisfied. If a buyer is large enough, and doesn’t purchase a product or service, it can affect a selling company’s performance. Walmart, for instance, is a buyer with a great deal of bargaining power. Firms that do business with Walmart must be prepared to make concessions to them if they want their products on the company’s store shelves.

Lastly, the world is becoming “smaller” and a more of a global marketplace. Companies everywhere are finding that no matter what they make, numerous firms around the world are producing the same “widget” or a similar offering (substitute) and are eager to compete with them. Employees are in the same position. The Internet has made it easier than ever for customers to find products and services and for workers to find the best jobs available, even if they are abroad. Companies are also acquiring foreign firms. These factors all have an effect on the strategic decisions companies make.

The Political and Legal Environment

All organizations must comply with government regulations and understand the political and legal environments in which they do business. Different government agencies enforce the numerous regulations that have been established to protect both consumers and businesses. For example, the Sherman Act (1890) prohibits U.S. firms from restraining trade by creating monopolies and cartels. The regulations related to the act are enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which also regulates deceptive advertising. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the labeling of consumable products, such as food and medicine. One organization that has been extremely busy is the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the group that sets safety standards for consumer products. Unsafe baby formula and toys with lead paint caused a big scare among consumers in 2008 and 2009.

Figure 3.6: The legal environment

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibits companies from using unacceptable levels of lead in toys and other house hold objects, such as utensils and furniture. Mattel voluntarily recalled Sarge cars made in mid-2000.

As we have explained, when organizations conduct business in multiple markets, they must understand that regulations vary across countries and across states. Many states and countries have different laws that affect strategy. For example, suppose you are opening up a new factory because you cannot keep up with the demand for your products. If you are considering opening the factory in France (perhaps because the demand in Europe for your product is strong), you need to know that it is illegal for employees in that country to work more than thirty-five hours per week.

The Economic Environment

The economy has a major impact on spending by both consumers and businesses, which, in turn, affects the goals and strategies of organizations. Economic factors include variables such as inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and whether the economy is in a growth period or a recession. Inflation occurs when the cost of living continues to rise, eroding the purchasing power of money. When this happens, you and other consumers and businesses need more money to purchase goods and services. Interest rates often rise when inflation rises. Recessions can also occur when inflation rises because higher prices sometimes cause low or negative growth in the economy.

During a recessionary period, it is possible for both high-end and low-end products to sell well. Consumers who can afford luxury goods may continue to buy them, while consumers with lower in comes tend to become more value conscious. Other goods and services, such as products sold in tradition at department stores, may suffer. In the face of a severe economic downturn, even the sales of luxury goods can suffer. The economic downturn that began in 2008 affected consumers and businesses at all levels worldwide. Consumers reduced their spending, holiday sales dropped, financial institutions went bankrupt, the mortgage industry collapsed, and the “Big Three” U.S.auto manufacturers (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors) asked for emergency loans.

The demographic and social and cultural environments—including social trends, such as people’s attitudes toward fitness and nutrition; demographic characteristics, such as people’s age, income, marital status, education, and occupation; and culture, which relates to people’s beliefs and values—are constantly changing in the global marketplace. Fitness, nutrition, and health trends affect the product offerings of many firms. For example, PepsiCo produces vitamin water and sports drinks. More women are working, which has led to a rise in the demand for services such as house cleaning and day care. U.S. baby boomers are reaching retirement age, sending their children to college, and trying to care of their elderly parents all at the same time. Firms are responding to the time constraints their buyers face by creating products that are more convenient, such as frozen meals and nutritious snacks.

The composition of the population is also constantly changing. Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority in the United States. Consumers in this group and other diverse groups prefer different types of products and brands. In many cities, stores cater specifically to Hispanic customers.

The technology available in the world is changing the way people communicate and the way firms do business. Everyone is affected by technological changes. Self-scanners and video displays at stores, ATMs, the Internet, and mobile phones are a few examples of how technology is affecting businesses and consumers. Many consumers get information, read the news, use text messaging, and shop online. As a result, marketers have begun allocating more of their promotion budgets to online ads and mobile marketing and not just to traditional print media such as newspapers and magazines. Applications for telephones and electronic devices are changing the way people obtain information and shop, allowing customers to comparison shop without having to visit multiple stores. As you saw in “Did You Know 4.0?” technology and social media are changing people’s lives. Many young people may rely more on electronic books, magazines, and newspapers and depend on mobile devices for most of their information needs. Organizations must adapt to new technologies in order to succeed.

Figure 3.7: The technological environment

Technology changes the way we do business. Banking on a cell phone adds convenience for customers. Bar codes on merchandise speed the checkout process. “first direct –first direct Banking ‘on the go’ iPhone App”

(front– CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; Paul Domenick –Lasered– CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 Natural Resources

Natural resources are scarce commodities, and consumers are becoming increasingly aware of this fact. Today, many firms are doing more to engage in “sustainable” practices that help protect the environment and conserve natural resources. Green marketing involves marketing environmentally safe products and services in a way that is good for the environment. Water shortages often occur in the summer months, so many restaurants now only serve patrons water upon request. Hotels voluntarily conserve water by not washing guests’ sheets and towels every day unless they request it. Reusing packages (refillable containers) and reducing the amount of packaging, paper, energy, and water in the production of goods and services are becoming key considerations for many organizations, whether they sell their products to other businesses or to final users (consumers). Construction companies are using more energy efficient materials and often have to comply with green building solutions. Green marketing not only helps the environment but also saves the company, and ultimately the consumer, money. Sustainability, ethics (doing the right things), and social responsibility (helping society, communities, and other people) influence an organization’s planning process and the strategies they implement.

Although environmental conditions change and must be monitored continuously, the situation analysis is a critical input to an organization’s or an individual’s strategic plan. Let’s look at the other components of the strategic planning process.

The Mission Statement

The firm’s mission statement states the purpose of the organization and why it exists. Both profit and nonprofit organizations have mission statements, which they often publicize. The following are examples of mission statements:

PepsiCo’s Mission Statement “Our mission is to be the world’s premier consumer products company focused on convenient foods and beverages. We seek to produce financial rewards to investors as we provide opportunities for growth and enrichment to our employees, our business partners and the communities in which we operate. And in everything we do, we strive for honesty, fairness and integrity (2).”

The United Way’s Mission Statement “To improve lives by mobilizing the caring power of communities (3).” Sometimes SBUs develop separate mission statements. For example, PepsiCo Americas Beverages, PepsiCo Americas Foods, and PepsiCo International might each develop a different mission statement.

• A firm must analyze factors in the external and internal environments it faces throughout the strategic planning process.
• These factors are inputs to the planning process. As they change, the company must be prepared to adjust its plans.
• Different factors are relevant for different companies.
• Once a company has analyzed its internal and external environments, managers can begin to decide which strategies are best, given the firm’s mission statement

(1) PepsiCo, Inc., “PepsiCo Brands,” http://www.pepsico.com/Company/Our-Brands.html (accessed December 7, 2009).

(2) PepsiCo, Inc., “Our Mission and Vision,” http://www.pepsico.com/Company/Our-Mission-and-Vision.html (accessed December 7, 2009).

(3) United Way Worldwide, “Mission and Vision,” http://www.liveunited.org/about/missvis.cfm (accessed December 7, 2009).

Porter, M. E.,Competitive Strategy(New York: The Free Press, 1980), 3–33.

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