Marketing Plan Template & Example

June 22, 2014

Marketing is extremely important for your business. For best results, you should get organized in your marketing efforts. One of the best strategies to get organized in your marketing is to create a marketing plan that you will later execute, and to get guidance and support from someone who has an expertise in marketing.

First, let’s examine the sections of a marketing plan.

Objectives

You should set expectations for what you hope to accomplish with your marketing efforts. The objectives should be reasonable and based on savvy strategies, and not just hopes.

Target Market

You must identify your target market very accurately because your marketing efforts will need to reach people who would be potential buyers of your products. If you incorrectly identify your target market, or if you don’t reach your target market with your marketing efforts, it can all go to waste because the people you reach just won’t end up buying your product or service.

Schedule

This is a relatively self-explanatory section. You should set some deadlines for when you should accomplish your objectives. Keep in mind that you should be serious about deadlines and time expectations because if your marketing is not effective, the biggest cost of your marketing efforts is the amount of time it takes before you begin getting clients.

Strategies And Tactics

You should outline the tactics and strategies you will implement as a marketing plan. Each of the tactics and strategies you plan to implement should have these four criteria.

Cost – calculate the total marketing cost of the particular tactic or strategy you are evaluating.
Scale – consider how many people you will be able to reach. Will you reach ten, hundred, or thousands of people?
Targeting – we alluded to choosing the correct target market. You must make sure that many of the people whom you reach are within your target market.
Conversion – ultimately, the people whom you attract with your marketing must convert to customers for your business. You can increase conversion by ensuring that you are reaching your target market at a good enough rate.

You should list a number of strategies and tactics for how you plan to promote your business. Individual tactics and strategies can be Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, YouTube marketing, marketing with flyers, or any other marketing strategy.

Marketing Plan Example

I’ll give an example of how I plan my own marketing strategies. I can give an example of my Twitter marketing. You can check out my multiple Twitter accounts for reference:

@genadinik – my personal Twitter account.
@problemio – the Twitter account for my mobile apps and entrepreneur business.
@sfhiking – the Twitter account for my website comehike.com.
@comehike – a second, smaller Twitter account for my website comehike.com.

If I was to evaluate my Twitter marketing strategy, I would say that the scale for my Twitter marketing is potentially only hundreds or only a few thousand new people. The targeting is mixed because even though I can reach my target market, Twitter is a free for all. So many people you will reach won’t be within your target market. The cost appears to be free. But the to actively grow your Twitter followers and do things to improve your Twitter presence will take quite a bit of time. That means that there is a significant cost for those Twitter marketing efforts. Lastly, the conversion of site visitors to clients for Twitter marketing can be a bit unpredictable.

In my case, because Twitter marketing required quite a bit of time and effort, and since the scale of people I would reach was at most only a few thousand people, I opted not to focus on Twitter marketing too much. Instead, what I do is automated Tweeting with WordPress plugins to tweet my old blog posts, and automatic posts from YouTube when I upload new content.

Further Marketing Help

If you need help with marketing, you’ve come to the right place. I created a number of marketing courses, mobile apps, books, and offer services that can help you promote your business.

Check out my marketing plan book where I explain many strategies for how to promote your business, and how to write a marketing plan. Additionally, you can use my marketing apps to write a marketing plan on the app and download your plan to email, or write the marketing plan collaboratively with business partners, right on the app. Here are my Android business apps, Kindle business apps, and here is more about all my mobile business apps.

Lastly, you are welcome to join my community of entrepreneurs to get help and advice from me and the community of small business owners just like yourself. Here is more on how to get business help with my apps, books and products.