No matter how good is your product, you should have a well-researched and solid marketing strategy plan to succeed in your business venture. Since developing a marketing strategy for a specific time range can be tricky, people often choose to use marketing plan templates to make the task easier. This article will discuss the definition, importance, and elements of a marketing plan. Also, we will share a list of templates for marketing plans.
What Is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan of strategy is a document that contains the outline of an organization’s marketing or advertising strategy. It demonstrates how PR campaigns will be driven to reach the target customers and generate leads. A clearly defined marketing strategy carries the overall plan for explaining the benefits of your product or service to the audience and beating the competitors. Furthermore, such a plan may contain various marketing terms that need an easy explanation when reaching out to the audience.
Benefits of a Marketing Plan
#1. Identify Target Audience and Competitors
With an adequately researched marketing plan, companies can identify their target customers whose problems they will try to resolve with their products or services. It should also locate the competitors to understand what the others are offering to the same customers and how you can offer better products.
#2. Enable Decision Making
A marketing plan contains the factors that will affect your business and the resources you can use to handle them. With these being listed in the same place, making marketing decisions will be an easy process. Now, you can answer all the marketing questions based on the marketing plan.
#3. Helps With Long-Term Plan & Short-Term Execution
An ideal strategic marketing plan offers a futuristic view of the next 3 to 5 years. Thus, you become prepared to handle any challenges that might occur in the future. You can also visit them from time to time to make any changes if necessary.
#4. Avoid Panic Decisions
The marketing plan can foretell the issues that lie ahead so you can stay prepared for them and develop suitable strategies to handle them. For this reason, you will not end up making panic decisions if anything unfavorable happens. The implementation of the planned framework is enough to tackle those situations.
#5. Develop Customer-Oriented Strategies
With a strategic marketing plan, you can utilize the market research data to develop a way to reach your target audience. The plan will also contain the channels and tools you will use to attract them. It also ensures that you invest in marketing activities that support the pre-defined strategy.
What to Include in a Marketing Plan?
Depending on your product and company needs, you can focus on various aspects of a marketing plan. The followings are some components commonly found in a strategic marketing plan.
Target audience and their demographyMarket researchSWOT analysisCompetitor analysisObjectivesMarket Strategies and channelsTimingBudget
HubSpot
Creating a marketing plan is a breeze if you use the HubSpot template for the marketing strategy plan. The template helps users outline their annual marketing strategy, pinpoint the most crucial initiatives, and track the critical metrics. Simply enter your marketing goals and get a template for your company’s marketing strategy. For example, you have to add your company mission, your team’s focus, initiatives you have on priority, goals you want to achieve with these, and future endeavors. The template includes sections for Summary, Business Initiatives, Market Strategy, Marketing Channels, Marketing Technology, Target Market, and Budget.
monday.com
People searching for customizable templates for their marketing needs can opt for monday.com. Here, you will find several ready-made marketing templates, including one for the marketing strategy. Using this template, you and your team can monitor all marketing strategies and initiatives. Now, it will become possible to plan your business objectives, campaigns, and budgets in a single workspace. This template also supports visualizing the marketing strategy through a comprehensive timeline and chart. Its drag and drop feature lets you easily include necessary columns. The marketing template from monday.com easily integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Facebook Ads, Mailchimp, and HubSpot.
Canva
Canva boasts a wide range of templates, including dedicated ones for the marketing strategy plan. The platform has some outstanding slide presentations you can customize to present the most compelling marketing strategy. Here, you can find an array of professionally designed presentations with different styles and colors for various purposes, ranging from new product pitches to social media strategy updates. You can choose from colorful, simple, minimalist, and quirky templates to match the brand identity. This user-friendly platform also supports collaboration with your teammates and lets you add photos, icons, shapes, and illustrations. After creating the presentation, you can download it as a PDF or PPT. You can also share a viewable link of the presentation with the stakeholders.
Visme
If you find creating a strategic marketing plan hectic, check out the collection of marketing plan templates that Visme offers. Using their templates, anyone can get started with pre-designed layouts and personalize them to create a plan that fits your goals and strategy. Features like placeholder content replacement along with font and color customization make the marketing plan creates a seamless process. You can include your brand assets or any other free photos, icons, and charts in the template as our needs. Additionally, it is feasible to rearrange or remove slides according to your content. When the plan development is complete, you can download the high-resolution marketing plan or share it online using a link.
Plannuh
Plannuh is a cloud-based strategic marketing plan solution where users can develop and manage marketing plans using powerful templates. Using the slide templates, you can build online marketing plans and export or download them as your requirements. The template slides come with definitions and examples of the elements so you can generate better ideas. These are editable and customizable where you can format the text besides adding numbering and bulleting. For example, while generating a plan about the target audience, you can include the definition of your target customers, their demographic, behavior, location, and personas. Some of the Plannuh slides for the marketing strategy plan are Market Research & Analysis, Marketing Goals, Company Goals, Pricing and Packaging, Competitive Analysis, and Sales Channel Strategy.
Xtensio
Xtensio is a collaboration portal where you can find beautiful templates and presentations, including a marketing plan template. It assists you in identifying the core objectives of your company and drawing a clear roadmap for faster business growth. Using this template, organizations can develop a strong marketing plan consisting of the tactical and strategical marketing plans they have for the customers. It is also suitable for creating a visually-engaging strategic roadmap for the marketing team. Users can keep up the consistency across the marketing strategy by utilizing it. This template also helps retain transparency across the company regarding effective resource management and allocation. Its font and color customization features ensure brand consistency.
Slite
Are you looking for marketing plan templates that let you outline your company’s marketing plan along with its specific timeframe? Slite offers you free templates for marketing plans that help you develop a practical and useful marketing plan with ease. You do not have to invest valuable resources and time to create a marketing plan when you have this template handy. These collaborative marketing strategy templates make the entire planning process effortless and succinct while offering you a solid base to start from. Slite offers separate templates for marketing projects, marketing experiments, marketing newsletters, and competitor analysis, so you can easily customize them to add necessary data.
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is highly useful for executives who need to prepare an effective marketing plan presentation for teammates and stakeholders. Using it, users can present a clear view of your marketing plans. This presentation template not only frees you from creating slides from scratch but also offers you the freedom to include creativity in your slides. While this template is ideal for various purposes, people mostly use it for ad campaigns, marketing proposals, and marketing plans. This template from Beautiful.ai contains 10 fully customizable slides with infographics and design features. It has dedicated slides for Campaign Structure, Budget, Growth Chart, Marketing Funnel, Agenda, Goals, and Process Diagram.
Asana
Asana offers a robust marketing strategy template that you can use to strategies your goals and manage key resources. It also lets you centralize all your marketing-related plans on one platform for seamless execution. Whether you want to create a B2B or B2C marketing strategy, it is possible to grow and scale marketing impact with this Asana template. You can use it to create marketing plans for digital marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, and any other market strategy. This template lets you include task progress, priority rank, and approval status of every step of the plan. With these, users can create actionable tasks with owners, update regular status, and keep the plans accessible to team members.
Conclusion
Creating a comprehensive marketing strategy is key to a successful campaign launch and management. With the help of the above-discussed marketing plan templates, you should be able to create a strategy for product marketing in no time. While making plans, you may want to include SMS marketing platforms to reach the end-users directly for product promotion.