20 Marketing Plan Samples and 7 Marketing Strategy Templates for your Product and Business
“Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.” – Joe Chernov
Marketing is the function responsible for the success and growth of a product/company by connecting customer needs to capabilities.
Marketing is dynamic and constantly changes its character with the ever-changing consumer and technology reality. This is why marketing should be well planned, over and over again, with defined milestones and objectives. Once you have the right map, the chances you’ll reach the goals you’ve set to your business, are much higher.
The value of Marketing comes from its deep understanding of markets, customers and their needs. it’s crucial to have a solid marketing plan in place, which will precisely outline how you’re going to make your millions.
We have adding some good Samples/examples of Marketing plan and templates for Business Strategy. Some of these marketing samples are hypothetical, some are from real companies, and others are just marketing samples. In any case, you’ll get a good feeling for what your own marketing plan should look like and how to lay it out.
20 Marketing Plan Samples
1- Sample Marketing Plan – Houghton Mifflin Company
2- Plan Your Marketing Like a Pro – Business.com
3- Digital Marketing Plan Example – Smart Insights
4- Multi-channel Marketing on a $2,000 Budget: A Sample Plan – BusinessTown
5- How to Build a Marketing Plan 2020 – Credo
6- New Market Marketing Plan – Lush Cosmetics
7- Marketing Plan Outline – University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Small Business Development Center
8- Great Marketing Plan Template – Marketing Donut
9- Marketing Plan Template – Vital Design
10- Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template – Nancy And Kivi
11- Developing A Marketing Plan Example – Agricultural Extension Service at the University of Tennessee
12- Marketing Plan Template – The Business Victoria
13- Marketing Plan Outline – QuickMBA
14- Marketing Plan Example - Addthis
15- The Marketing Plan – Massachusetts Small Business Development Center Network
16- Small Business Marketing Plan Template – ProfitWorks
17- Marketing Strategy Template – David Meerman Scott
18- One-Page Content Marketing Plan – UncommonlySocial
19- Marketing Plan Template – Marketer Gizmo
20- Marketing Plan Template – Forbes
Marketing Strategy Template (Excel): Map out every part of your strategy in one place (complements this guide).
6 Marketing Strategy Templates
1- Simplify Your Content Marketing Strategy With a One-Page Plan – Content Marketing Institute
2- Examples of Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses – ThriveHive
3- Nike’s Marketing Strategy: A Guide to Selling Benefits and Not Products – CoSchedule
4- Red Bull Marketing Strategy: What You Need to Know (And How to Copy It) – CoSchedule
5- Starbucks Marketing Strategy: How to Create a Remarkable Brand – CoSchedule
6- How to Create a Marketing Strategy That Will Skyrocket Your Results By 9,360% – CoSchedule
7- Marketing Strategy Template (Excel): Map out every part of your strategy in one place (complements this guide).
Bonus Content-
Sharing the Guide How to Write a Marketing Plan: A Comprehensive Guide with Templates from Vital Design.
This marketing plan will heavily focus on digital marketing (what we call “inbound marketing”) — but the strategies and concepts discussed can be expanded to encompass your entire marketing department.
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular mission or goal. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, etc. that they'll use to execute on that mission and track its success.
While A marketing plan****contains one or more marketing strategies. It is 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.
Step by Step Guide to write a Marketing Plan
From the following exercises, we will show you how to build your marketing plan. These steps are extracted from the above templates.
- Business's and the Marketing mission.
- Figure Out What Your Goals Are
- Determine the KPIs for this mission.
- Identify your buyer personas.
- Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
- Define your marketing budget.
- Identify your competition.
- Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.
1. 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.
For example, if your business's mission is "to make shopping online a delightful experience," your marketing mission might be "to attract an audience who buy daily needs grocery, educate them on the benefits of buying online, and convert them into users of our eCommerce platform."
2. Figure Out What Your Goals Are
It’s also super important that you state your company’s goals (financial and non-financial), so you know where you are headed and how much you can afford for certain things. Blue Sky also provided a great example of their goals.
Figure Out Your Financial Goals
- What are your business goals?
- How much do you have to generate from your marketing efforts?
- What is your budget?
- What are some of the things you’d like to do?
- How many sales do you need to reach those goals?
Figure Out Your Financial Goals
Writing your goals is one of the first steps to reaching them. First off, you’ve probably seen blog posts on S.M.A.R.T. goals many times before, but they are really good to mention again.
How to make your S.M.A.R.T. goals: Read Here
3. Determine the KPIs for this mission.
Every marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission's progress. To do so, you'll need to determine your key performance indicators, or "KPIs" for short. 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 marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is "to attract an audience who buy daily needs grocery" we might track websites 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.
4. Identify your buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a description of whom you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, job title, and more. Each buyer persona should be a direct reflection of your business's customers and potential customers. Therefore, it's critical that business leaders all agree on what your buyer personas are.
Read more about on the buyers persona from here.
5. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
Here's where you'll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy. Because there are a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, it's critical that you choose wisely and explain how you'll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.
A content strategy should stipulate:
- Which types of content you'll create. For ex- eBooks, Templates, Blog Articles, etc..
- How much of it you'll create. You can describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly intervals.
- The goals (and KPIs) you'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 you'll distribute this content. Some popular channels at your disposal include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
- Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.
6. Define your marketing budget.
Your content strategy might leverage many free channels and platforms, but there are a number of hidden expenses to a marketing team that need to be accounted for.
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.
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 in this section.
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.
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. You don't have to delve too deeply into your employees' day-to-day projects, but it should be known which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.
Ready to make your own marketing plan?