What Is A Marketing Plan? A Quick Guide + Infographic.

Conversations about marketing plans often don’t include everything that you need to know. Or worse, they might include irrelevant details that send you down a rabbit hole of misinformation and wasted time.

This can keep you from reaping the rich and bountiful rewards of an expertly laid-out and well-executed marketing plan.

So let’s jump right into the million-dollar-question: What exactly is a marketing plan anyway?

A marketing plan is an in-depth, comprehensive blueprint. It outlines the specific, targeted marketing strategies that a company will use to reach its audience, in a specified timeframe.

What Are The Elements Of A Marketing Plan?

There are a few different areas that are used in practically every professional marketing plan.

1. Research on the target audience and decisions on what platforms/modes of media will be best to reach them. 
2. Analysis of the current marketplace with a comparison to competitors, and potentially some research on their current or past marketing strategies.
3. Tactics that you will execute as a part of your strategy based on the budget and resources you’ve set aside to promote your business.
4. Timeline of sequential actions to be taken with expected results (goals) and estimated expenses for the resources you’ll need.
5. Metrics that will be used as your reporting to measure performance, with targets for each respective activity that you execute

Why Should You Use A Marketing Plan?

A good marketing plan contains a lot of detailed information that takes time to put together. But, in the end, the payoff for all that research (and investment) will be worth it.

According to a study by CoSchedule, companies that use a full marketing plan are 313% more likely to report that their marketing campaigns were successful!

In addition to boosting your chances at success, these marketing plans empower your company to do lots of things that it otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

The benefits of a strategic marketing plan include:

• A straightforward way to objectively measure, and track, the success of each marketing action you take
• A timeline to give you a clear picture of progress that keeps the company on track to accomplish specific goals
• A detailed measure of expense, that can provide you a scientific ROI score for all your efforts
• A reference to use for future marketing campaigns to be even more successful as you’ll have historical records on what worked, what didn’t work, and why

What Is A Marketing Plan & What Is A Marketing Plan Not?

Now, to quickly summarize what we’ve discussed so far:

A marketing plan is a well-researched blueprint for everything you plan to do to reach your targeted audience, what you intend to sell them, and what payoff you’re expecting for your efforts.

Most importantly, your marketing plan will keep everything on a detailed timeline to ensure the momentum continues at the pace that you want.

But a marketing plan doesn’t include every single detail about your marketing operations from A to Z. It’s not the end-all-be-all of everything you’ll do. You’ll need to have business goals in place along with processes to ensure you can deliver your products or services with relative ease.

In addition to this, you should have separate documents that detail exactly how you will execute specific tactics outlined in your plan. For example, you might indicate that you will use organic posts on social media in your marketing plan. Still, you may have an additional plan that details exactly how you will create your social media content, the topics you’ll discuss, and how/when it will be published.

When you put in the work, and make the investment of time and money to document the details, you’ll be certain to get the best results.

In Summary

A good marketing plan will launch the success of your company into warp-speed. When you make smart investments to get strategic support with your planning you’ll see serious results.

So- are you ready to take your business to the next level? Do you want to watch your sales surge, as you execute a professional, deadly-precise series of targeted actions to promote your business?

It will be tempting to move forward without taking the time to build a plan. People may even try to convince you that as a small business, your plans will change so frequently there’s no use in writing everything down.

Yet time and time again it is proven that planning is key to success. No matter if you make $100 a month in your business or $1,000,000, it’s easier to grow and scale with a strategic plan.

Do you have a marketing plan documented for your business? If yes, how has it changed things? If no, what is stopping you from building one? Tell us in the comments below.