Marketing can get messy. It’s hard to estimate budget for projects, hiring, and outsourcing over the course of a year — especially if you don’t have a solid marketing plan in place.
This has led to the top three cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure – waging pricing wars to lure startups onto their platforms in the current downturn.
“In this article, we’re going to discuss:”
- what should a marketing plan include?
- Marketing Plan Timeline
- How to create a Marketing Plan
- Hubspot’s Free Marketing Plan Template
- One-Page Marketing Plan Template
- Strategy-specific Marketing Plan Templates
What should a marketing plan include?
A marketing plan is a roadmap that businesses like yours use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period.
The marketing plan outline we discuss will help you create an effective plan that easily generates buy-in from stakeholders.
“Even if we do not talk about 5G (specifically), the security talent in general in the country is very sparse at the moment. We need to get more (security) professionals in the system”
Marketing plans can get quite granular depending on your industry and how big your digital presence is. This is true whether you’re selling to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B).
Despite these nuances, here are the essentials I’ve found should be present in every marketing plan or marketing planner template:
Business Summary
In a marketing plan, a business summary is exactly what it sounds like — a summary of the organization.
It gives all stakeholders a refresher on your company before delving into the more strategic components of your plan. It also gives them something easily accessible to refer to if they have questions during their review.
At a minimum, most business summaries include:
- Company name
- Location
- Mission statement
SWOT Analysis
Your marketing plan’s business summary should also include a SWOT analysis. This summarizes your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).
Creating a SWOT analysis is an important strategic exercise (and call me a marketing nerd, but I find it fun). It gives everyone involved a clear picture of the environment your business is working in and how it is doing within it.
It’s like a quick therapy or wellness check-up for business. You see where you’re at and perhaps even get to vent a bit before taking steps to improve things.
Including a SWOT in your marketing plan reminds readers of what circumstances are being considered in your strategy.
Pro Tip: In my experience, it’s good to have stakeholders from every section of the business contribute to creating your SWOT analysis so that nothing is overlooked.
To become truly accurate, it requires thorough market research, data analysis, and competitive analysis.
Revisit your SWOT every time you work on your marketing plan, as your audience and competition will inevitably evolve.
