What is a Marketing Plan and How Do You Create One?

Let’s face it, it’s a bit of a jungle out there when it comes to marketing.

We’re constantly asking ourselves (or being asked) all the ‘who, what, when, where, why, and how’ questions, and guess what?

Developing a thorough marketing plan is the main ingredient to answering all those questions – and to make it thorough, you need good data to contextualize it, optimize it and strategize it.

In this post, we’ll cover the basics, including how to write a marketing plan… and the mistakes to avoid.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a roadmap that outlines your marketing strategy and defines how you will attract and convert (and often, retain) customers. In your marketing plan, you’ll spell out your target audience, your goals, your marketing tactics to achieve those goals, and how you’ll measure its success.

We’ll talk more about how to write a marketing plan further down.

5 types of marketing plans

Marketing plans come in all shapes and sizes, depending on your goals, timeframe and team working on it. Here are some of the common types of marketing plans:

1. Business marketing plan: The big-picture marketing plan that looks into how marketing can (and will) support your business goals over an extended period of time.
2. Digital marketing plan: Focusing on the digital side of marketing, consider how you can leverage online channels (website, social media and email) to reach your target audience and achieve your marketing goals.
3. Campaign marketing plan: More of a specific marketing push, a campaign marketing plan outlines the tactics and executions of a single campaign eg. a product launch or building brand awareness for a seasonal event.
4. Content marketing plan: A content plan that will outline the different content types you will use to reach and resonate with your target audience, to hit your ultimate marketing goals.
5. Social media marketing plan: Defining which social media platforms you’ll use, the content you will push on it, and how to make sure you’re getting engagement from the *right* audience.

How to write a marketing plan

1) Understand your company marketing OKRs

Before you get started on actually writing your marketing plan, you need to have a good understanding of what your company marketing OKRs are.

OKRs = objective and key results and together, they’ll look something like:

[Insert your objective here], as measured by [insert key results]. 

Without marketing OKRs like this, there is no real marketing strategy – let alone a marketing plan – to drive forward to your business’ chosen ‘destination’.

Top tip: Your business doesn’t operate in a vacuum – you will need to benchmark your marketing goals, efforts and performance against others in your industry before committing to your standalone goals to ensure they’re realistic in your competitive landscape.

For more insight into marketing benchmarking, download our recent report covering how the biggest industries use marketing channels to their advantage (and sometimes, disadvantage).

2) Choose marketing activities to support OKRs

To support and achieve these OKRs, your marketing plan will need to define the marketing activities that you’ll focus on to get you there.

This is where you might split your strategy into different marketing channels and assign them to the specific team, or – if you have a smaller marketing team – you will segment your strategy into different focus areas.

For example, say you’re looking to achieve more visibility on search. The marketing activities to support this would look something like:

• SEO: Optimizing existing content, as well as new content produced
• PPC: Creating a series of ads for business-critical keywords
• Content marketing: Creating a series of SEO content and thought leadership

But of course, the marketing channels you use will vary depending on your goal – and so will how much time you spend on each, particularly if you’re working solo or in a smaller marketing team.

3) Set KPIs to measure success

• Overall marketing goals: ✅
• Marketing activities to support these goals: ✅
• Tracking your progress: Pending

Now you’ve got a vague plan of action in place, you hitting those marketing goals is on the horizon. But to make sure you’re heading in the right direction and at the right pace, it’s important to set your team (or teams) KPIs.

Not only is this important to making sure everything’s on track, but it’s also important for motivation.

Here are just a few examples of marketing KPIs, across the different marketing teams:

• • Pipeline contribution
  • Traffic to MQL
  • Click-through rate
  • Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares and views)
  • Number of subscribers
  • Amount of content published
  • SERP rankings
  • Conversion rate
  • Traffic distribution

• Impressions and reach
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Don’t forget to use your market and competitor research to set your team achievable KPIs that make sense for the industry you’re in and the target audience you’re going after.

Here, you can see the website engagement metrics of asos.com and its competitors.

4) Identify buyer personas

… to make sure your KPIs make sense for the target audience you’re going after, you also kinda need to know who your target audience actually is.

You might be working with one buyer persona or you might be working with multiple buyer personas – either way, it pays to have this detailed in a buyer persona template.

This will make sure your team is aligned on who you’re targeting, including things like:

• Buyer behaviors
• Hobbies and interests
• Pain points
• Motivations
• Brand affiliations

By aligning on buyer personas or the “who” your marketing is targeted at (admittedly, being a little bit stereotypical), your team can then mold the ‘what, when, why, and how’ of their marketing too. This will make sure your marketing efforts resonate with the right audience, and get you the engagement you’re after – for example, choosing the right marketing channel for the persona.

If your product or strategy doesn’t change too much, you can leave this step out when it comes to a new planning cycle.

5) Define your budget

First, you need to define the budget you have to achieve this marketing plan of yours. Then, you’ll need to allocate the budget across each of the teams working toward the ultimate goal.

It’s likely that this allocation will require some research (and often, some compromise), for example, your PPC team will want to determine the average cost-per-click for the target keywords you’re going after to get the best ROI.

With the right kind of data, you can even spy on how much your competitors are spending on their pay-per-click advertising.

6) Identify your competitors

In order to make your marketing plan competitive, you’ve got to understand your competitive landscape – that includes who you’re up against, and what they’re up to.

So, here are two words we talk about constantly: Competitor + analysis.

A competitive analysis tool like Similarweb (which – may we add, is an all-in-one tool) can provide you with all the data you need to run a thorough competitive analysis.

So thorough in fact, that it can reveal your competitors’ complete marketing strategies and how your marketing performance compares – which is great for inspiration, and even better for gaining the competitive edge in your industry.

You can even set up a Competitor Tracker to make sure you never miss a beat on your competitors’ next moves. See it all on an interactive dashboard, and get emails sent straight to your inbox.

7) Outline your plan

Now you’ve got everything you need to outline your plan of action and get started.

With good data, you have all the keyword research and competitor research you need to dominate the market. Plus, you have all the information you need to brief each of your teams (eg. PPC, SEO and content) to make sure they’re aligned and going in the right direction, at the right time.

Similarweb can help you with all of that, and more. The thing is, with a marketing plan, the world around us never stays still – the digital world included. With real-time and real-user data – like Similarweb – you can ensure your marketing plan still adapts with the landscape.

6 mistakes to avoid when creating a marketing plan

When creating or writing up your marketing plan, there are a few common mistakes you want to avoid, including:

1. Not conducting thorough market research 
2. Not benchmarking effectively and setting unrealistic goals
3. Not having a clear definition of your target audience
4. Underestimating your competition and the competitive landscape
5. Failing to allocate resources (and budget) effectively
6. Not regularly reviewing and updating your marketing plan

What’s the difference: Marketing plan vs. Business plan

When you’re in a marketing team, the business plan and marketing plan may feel very similar – and they certainly do touch. In reality, you can’t have one without the other.

A business plan should be considered as the “big picture”, whereas the marketing plan is the roadmap; the map – or sat nav – towards that big picture.

The marketing plan or marketing map zooms in on how you’ll reach and engage your target audience, which requires knowing your ideal customer profile and buyer personas, as well as the best channels and tactics to get their attention.

That attention from your target audience is crucial to the bigger business plan, which will outline your company’s:

• Mission and vision
• Financial goals
• Competitive landscape

What’s the difference: Marketing plan vs. Marketing strategy

A very common question for marketing generalists: what’s the difference between a marketing plan and marketing strategy?

While your marketing plan acts as your roadmap that gives your team direction and a clear plan of action (often with timelines, deliverables, and budgets in tow), your marketing strategy is the “why” behind your marketing efforts.

For example, your marketing strategy is to double your website traffic in a year and improve your engagement rates as an online business. Your marketing plan here might be to improve your SEO across your existing pages to get your content ranking higher on search, as well as investing in PPC for some more short-term impact into your brand awareness.

Smarter planning, smarter marketing, smarter reporting

… you want all that? You need smarter data.

A marketing plan isn’t a good marketing plan without the right kind of data – and Similarweb can give you that data.

With Similarweb, you can make sure your marketing plan and strategy is up to scratch – that means fully optimized and efficiently prioritized.

If that sounds good to you, try the platform for free today and watch it transform your marketing strategy.

FAQs

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a comprehensive document that outlines a company’s marketing objectives and strategies for achieving them. It typically includes an analysis of the target market, competitive landscape, marketing goals, tactics, and budget allocation.

Why is a marketing plan important?

A marketing plan provides a roadmap for achieving marketing objectives and helps ensure that marketing efforts are aligned with overall business goals. It helps in allocating resources efficiently, measuring progress, and adapting strategies based on market changes.

What should be included in a marketing plan?

A marketing plan should include an executive summary, a situational or competitor analysis, clear marketing objectives, target audience identification, marketing strategies and tactics, budget allocation, timeline, and metrics for measuring success.

How often should a marketing plan be updated?

Ideally, a marketing plan should be reviewed and updated regularly to reflect changes in the market, consumer behavior, and business goals. Quarterly or annually are common intervals for updates, but it ultimately depends on the pace of change in your industry.

How do you measure the success of a marketing plan?

The success of a marketing plan can be measured using various metrics, including sales revenue, customer acquisition and retention rates, website traffic, social media engagement, brand awareness, and return on investment (ROI) for marketing activities.