Writing a Marketing Plan

Before you start writing a marketing plan, make sure you have completed the marketing strategy planning exercise that we laid out in this article. This will make sure that your marketing activities are focused on supporting your primary business goals.

If you need a simple definition, then check out our article on what is a marketing plan.

If you’ve not already done so, prioritize your marketing tactics according to how well they support your main marketing strategies. Those on the top of the list are the ones you should focus on in the plan itself. You can also take a look at these top ten tips for writing a marketing plan.

Follow these guidelines for your marketing plan format, and include these main items:

• Market Overview
• Target customer(s) (describe in as much detail as you can)
• Target customer's primary pain point that product/solution addresses,
• Summary and analysis of competition
• Your unique value proposition (customer benefit & competitive differentiation)
• Pricing strategy
• Sales model
• Marketing approach:
  • How do you find/create customers?
  • How do you grow the business?
  • What are distribution/deployment channels?
  • How do you communicate with customers?
• Sales strategy:
• type/size of sales force,
• strategic sales partners,
• sales activities.

To get started, take a look at our plan outline to give you an overview of the parts of the plan and to use as a starting point to put one together for your business.

Finally, pay attention to these top tips for writing a marketing strategy and plan. You should also be aware of the top five marketing mistakes, and how you can avoid them.

It can be productive to use a sample plan that you can then customize for your own business. There are a number of examples available for different types of businesses at Palo Alto Software's business planning website, or search for an online marketing resource specific to your market segment, such as this one for software marketing.

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