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Mar 03, 2025

How to Create a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business

How to Create a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business
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Eli Smith
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Got a great product idea? Running a small business or going solo as an entrepreneur? You probably have a vision of where you want to take it. But let’s be real — having a destination in mind doesn’t mean you have the map to get there.

So, how do you make it happen? It all starts with a solid marketing strategy plan.

Sure, a business plan is important, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. To truly build something successful, you need more than just a plan — you need a strategy that works.

You need a strategic marketing plan to get your product or business objective in front of people.

In this article, you’ll learn more about what you need to know to build a strategic marketing plan. You’ll also find some resources you can use to create a marketing plan template, including a free marketing plan template to help structure your marketing strategy effectively.

What Is a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A strategic marketing plan is a high-level look at your advertising approach. Ultimately, the goal of this plan is to bring you closer to your target audience.

A good marketing plan connects the economics of growing your business and the psychology of what draws people into your business. It plays a crucial role in enhancing a company’s marketing strategy by incorporating specific tools and solutions.

You might have a technically superior product or idea, but people rarely buy it without feeling inspired to do so.

Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become. It involves creating honest stories—stories that resonate and spread.

– Seth Godin, This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to

But before you get started with your marketing strategy plan, it’s essential to understand the basics.

Definition of a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a comprehensive document that outlines a company’s marketing strategy, goals, and tactics for achieving success in the market. It serves as a roadmap for the company’s marketing efforts, providing direction and guidance for the marketing team.

A well-crafted marketing plan typically includes an analysis of the target market, a detailed description of the company’s products or services, a discussion of the marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion), and a plan for measuring and evaluating the success of the marketing efforts.

By clearly defining the marketing strategy, a marketing plan helps ensure that all marketing activities are aligned with the company’s overall business objectives. It also provides a framework for making informed decisions about where to allocate resources, which marketing channels to use, and how to engage with the target market effectively.

The Importance of a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is essential for any business that wants to succeed in today’s competitive market. It helps companies to clarify their marketing objectives, identify their target audience, and develop effective marketing strategies and tactics. With a well-defined marketing plan, companies can allocate their marketing resources more effectively, ensuring that their marketing efforts are focused on the most promising opportunities.

Moreover, a marketing plan provides a basis for measuring the success of marketing efforts. By setting clear marketing objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs), companies can track their progress and make data-driven decisions. This allows for timely adjustments to marketing strategies, ensuring that the company remains on track to achieve its marketing goals.

Without a marketing plan, companies may struggle to achieve their marketing objectives and may waste valuable resources on ineffective marketing efforts. A marketing plan provides the structure and direction needed to navigate the complexities of the market and achieve sustained success.

marketing people at work

Benefits of a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan offers numerous benefits to companies, including:

  • Clarifies marketing objectives and goals: A marketing plan helps to define clear and achievable marketing objectives, ensuring that all marketing efforts are aligned with the company’s overall business goals.
  • Identifies target audience and market trends: By analyzing the target market, a marketing plan helps to identify the needs and preferences of the target audience, as well as emerging market trends.
  • Develops effective marketing strategies and tactics: A marketing plan outlines the strategies and tactics needed to reach the target audience and achieve marketing objectives.
  • Allocates marketing resources effectively: With a marketing plan, companies can allocate their marketing budget and resources to the most effective marketing channels and activities.
  • Measures the success of marketing efforts: A marketing plan includes key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions.
  • Makes adjustments as needed: By regularly reviewing and analyzing marketing performance, companies can make timely adjustments to their marketing strategies and tactics.
  • Enhances brand reputation and awareness: A well-executed marketing plan helps to build and maintain a strong brand reputation and increase brand awareness.
  • Increases sales and revenue: By effectively reaching and engaging the target audience, a marketing plan can drive sales and revenue growth.
  • Improves customer engagement and loyalty: A marketing plan helps to create meaningful connections with customers, fostering engagement and loyalty.

Before You Start: Understanding the Four PS of Marketing

The four Ps of marketing include product, price, place, and promotion. They were made famous by Neil Borden, an advertising professor from Harvard University.

Market research is crucial in understanding the market and shaping your marketing strategy. It guides decisions around target markets, advertising channels, and overall marketing goals by providing insights into customer needs, market trends, and competitive positioning.

Borden’s approach to identifying these four might seem overly simple. However, if you want to sell a product, it helps to make simple connections. These connections help employees, collaborators, and customers see your value with minimal effort.

Here’s a definition of these four Ps and how to connect them with value:

  • The product: What you are actually selling. Marketing the product defines how it differs from the market and how it can beat your competitors.
  • The price: What you charge customers. It impacts the perception of your products, such as whether it’s a luxury product (expensive) or a good deal (inexpensive).
  • The place: Where you sell your product. Do you want to start an eCommerce website, use online third-party vendors, or create a brick-and-mortar business?
  • The promotion: How you get your products in front of customers. This might include your choice of online advertising, influencers, or word-of-mouth advertising.

The Four PS of Marketing

Knowing the four Ps will dictate your marketing approach. For example, local advertising might not serve you if selling products on a national level.

You’ll find that the four Ps can impact all aspects of your strategic plan, so consider them as you go through each stage of this strategic marketing process.

Setting Marketing Objectives

Setting marketing objectives is a critical step in developing a marketing plan. Marketing objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). These objectives provide a clear direction for the company’s marketing efforts and ensure that all marketing activities are aligned with the company’s overall business objectives.

For example, a marketing objective might be to increase website traffic by 20% over the next six months. This objective is specific (increase website traffic), measurable (by 20%), achievable (based on current performance), relevant (supports business growth), and time-bound (over the next six months).

By setting SMART marketing objectives, companies can focus their marketing efforts on achieving tangible results and make informed decisions about where to allocate resources.

How to Execute a Strategic Marketing Plan Step-by-Step

1. Conduct a SWOT analysis

The first stage of developing any plan is to understand where you are. A good SWOT analysis gives you a simple and deep understanding of your position.

SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It was formed in the 1960s by Albert Humphrey, a management consultant working for the Stanford Research Institute.

Here is a free template of a table with four quadrants for each category to start your analysis. From there, fill in each quadrant with ideas from the above categories.

swot analysis marketing plan

Here’s an explanation of what each of those table cells should look like:

  • Internal Strengths focus on areas in which your interior business excels. You might have a loyal customer base and an experienced team.
  • Internal Weaknesses stop your business from performing its best work. Your company might have a high turnover rate or high debt.
  • External Opportunities focus on areas where you can potentially get an advantage. You might see a market opportunity in an underserved market. Identifying target markets is crucial to capitalize on these opportunities.
  • External Threats are factors that could hurt your business. You could run into a series of copycat products/ competitors or deal with the rising costs of the materials you use.

Conduct a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis helps your strategic marketing plan stay grounded in reality. Knowing where you are helps you understand where you can go.

Once you complete your list, you’ll want to connect the concepts. Ask yourself how your strengths connect you to the best opportunities. You can also do the opposite, showing how your threats can impact your weaknesses.

You’ll find that this direction helps apply natural focus to your marketing plan outline. For example, if you have an experienced team, that strength can help you take advantage of a market saturated with poor salespeople. From there, you can emphasize your team’s commitment to a detail-oriented process while promoting your product.

But before promoting, you need to understand who you are talking to.

2. Create a Persona of Your Target Audience

A buyer or customer persona is a snapshot of your target audience. Personifying your target audience helps you achieve results or better KPIs.

A persona isn’t just limited to understanding your current customer. It also helps you create an “ideal customer” on whom you want to target most of your marketing effort. Understanding your ideal customer and their preferences is key to developing effective marketing tactics.

A persona is typically made up of three critical areas:

  • Demographics: The typical age, gender, location, education, household income, and employment data.
  • Psychographics: The motivations, interests, opinions, pain points, and lifestyle of your target audience.
  • Behavioral traits: Purchasing intentions and habits, online activity, and brand loyalty.

Demographics are good for getting a general picture of your audience. Knowing factors like age and education helps you add a face to a name. Base this data on the most common members of your customer base.

Psychographics is where you can truly change things.

Your customer will ultimately buy your products based on what drives them. If you can address their pain points and align with their motivations, you will more likely make a sale. It also helps you answer the all-important question in marketing: how can I help you?

Behavioral traits take this a step further by analyzing how customers interact with your business—tracking habits like purchase frequency, brand loyalty, and product usage.

Getting psychographic data is a bit trickier. But you can start by asking your customers about what motivates them to buy a product through surveys.

Below is a free template you can fill out to get started. You might think giving them a name and an image might be a bit silly, but it helps to talk to a person.

Buyer Persona template for marketing plan

Knowing this information will help you during the promotional process of content marketing. When creating content or advertising (step four), knowing who you are talking to can help you speak directly to them.

After all, you aren’t selling to a “target audience”. You are selling to people. Give those people your best by understanding where they come from.

3. Create Marketing Objectives

Knowing where you are can help you in stage three: Goal development. Good goals need to be realistic, direct, and measurable.

An excellent framework to follow when developing goals is to make them SMART goals. These goals are broken down into five areas:

  • Specific goals directly mention what you need to accomplish and the actions you will take.
  • Measurable goals are driven by data and specific numbers.
  • Achievable goals are doable based on your current standing (the SWOT analysis helps with this).
  • Relevant goals align with your business’s broader goals and show why the results are important.
  • Time-bound goals set a specific period for which to achieve those goals.

Setting SMART goals is crucial for a successful marketing strategy as it ensures that your objectives are clear, attainable, and aligned with your overall business goals.

When creating any marketing strategy plan, ask yourself where you want to be by the end of this. If your marketing strategy doesn’t meet these goals, you won’t know when to move on to the next initiative. This can make you feel stuck.

For example, a good marketing goal might be this: I want to sell my product through my e-commerce website to 300 people using email marketing by the end of this month. It fits all the criteria, aligning with the need to grow your business. A SMART, good goal should fit in one sentence.

Pay special attention to the “relevancy” section of your goal. It’s easy to stretch this out of proportion. For example, you might want to grow website traffic by 10%, but how does this align with your business strategy? Ask yourself questions like this when setting goals or key performance indicators.

4. Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that are used to measure the success of a company’s marketing efforts. KPIs should be specific, measurable, and relevant to the company’s marketing objectives. By tracking KPIs, companies can gain insights into the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions to optimize their marketing efforts.

Examples of KPIs include:

Website traffic: The number of visitors to the company’s website.

Social media engagement: The level of interaction with the company’s social media content, such as likes, shares, and comments.

  • Lead generation: The number of new leads generated through marketing activities.
  • Conversion rates: The percentage of leads that convert into customers.
  • Customer acquisition costs: The cost of acquiring a new customer.
  • Return on investment (ROI): The financial return generated from marketing activities relative to the cost.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

By setting clear marketing objectives and KPIs, companies can ensure that their marketing efforts are focused, effective, and aligned with their overall business goals. Regularly monitoring and analyzing KPIs allows companies to make timely adjustments to their marketing strategies, ensuring continuous improvement and success.

5. Decide on the Media You Want to Target

Your target media, also known as the marketing mix, dictates where your marketing strategy plan will focus. Like your goals, you’ll want to keep it simple and specific.

Choosing the right media channels is a crucial part of marketing tactics, as it ensures that your message reaches the intended audience effectively. You can work on increasing traffic to your website, work with influencers in your field, focus on your social media outlets, or opt for paid ads.

There are many types of media you can target. When selecting them, it’s important to understand their advantages and disadvantages. Here’s a breakdown of the types of media:

  • Owned media is the content you create on your website. Examples include on-site landing pages and blog content. This marketing channel is completely under your control but requires people to visit your website.
  • Earned media is the content you get from people talking about your product. Examples include memes about your product or social media posts. It’s hard to control exactly what other people say about you.
  • Paid media is another marketing channel, which is any media you pay for to get exposure. Examples include social media and search engine advertisements. These can connect you with a new audience but cost a lot of money.

Marketing channel for your strategy

There are also different types of media within the three marketing mix categories. For example, choosing paid media could include social media and search advertising.

When choosing the best media for your needs, ask yourself the following question: What type of media does my target market consume? This goes back to the last question about creating a buyer’s persona (see above).

Here are some other questions to help you with your marketing mix:

  • What are my competitors doing?
  • How important is it to reach my audience fast?
  • Is this a long-term or short-term goal?
  • How does my target market respond to this medium?

Choosing your message and define how you want to send that message is important. What message should you send? This is where your value proposition comes into play.

6. Create a Value Proposition

The value proposition is a short statement or overview expressing the benefits your product or company gives. It is a promise to consumers of what you intend to uphold.

The value proposition has two goals:

  • It is a statement that aligns your marketing with your business intent, guiding employees and yourself.
  • It encourages potential customers to buy your product because it is a promise based on consumer needs.

You can create a value proposition by combining information from your buyer’s persona and SWOT analysis.

For example, let’s say you have a technically superior product and an experienced staff behind it. To prove your commitment, you provide a money-back guarantee if the product doesn’t meet their needs. In your value proposition, you emphasize that you are so confident in your product that you suspect customers won’t need this guarantee.

When creating a value proposition, ask yourself the number one reason why customers should pick you over the competition in your positioning. Take this number one reason from your strengths list above and apply it to addressing your customers’ motivations or pain points.

7. Select the Tools You Need

Once you align everything above, you’ll be ready to execute your marketing planning. But before you do that, you’ll need the support to get started.

Because you can’t be expected to develop everything from scratch, it helps to rely on tools to support the plan. Below, you’ll find a list of tools you can use to support your marketing efforts:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools

CRMs, or customer relationship management software, provides support in gathering data from customers. The data from CRMs can be used to create more effective personas. You can also use CRMs to track your clients, their stage in the sales funnel, and their potential value to your business.

HubSpot is one of the most recommended tools because it combines multiple marketing tools under one roof. Here, you can get everything from sales to operational software and marketing support tools.

Hubspot CRM

Example: Hubspot CRM

Project Management Tools

Project management tools help you assign duties and track progress. The tools under project management can also help track customer data, which means you can connect them to your CRM efforts. These tools help you ensure collaborators and employees work on the right tasks and know exactly what to do.

ClickUp is one of the most highly recommended project management software. The platform is incredibly customizable, making it a step above other project managers like Trello and Asana.

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing tools are potent because of their high potential for earnings. After all, it doesn’t cost much of anything to send an email promotion. The tools you can use to build an email marketing campaign also help you make automated response chains.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is one of the most powerful in creating automated response campaigns. The platform is inexpensive, simple, and powerful. So you don’t have to be an email marketing expert to use it.

Brevo email marketing

Example: Brevo email marketing

Content Creation Tools

​To enhance your marketing efforts, integrating content creation tools can significantly boost productivity and creativity. For instance, Canva offers an intuitive platform for designing visuals, enabling teams to craft engaging graphics effortlessly.

Similarly, Jasper utilizes AI to generate high-quality written content, streamlining the copywriting process. Incorporating these tools into your strategy ensures a cohesive and efficient approach to content development, aligning with your overall marketing objectives.

Canva AI image

Example: Canva AI image creator

8. Analyze Your Results and Change Your Course (As Needed)

With the first six steps, you can execute an effective marketing plan. However, things don’t always go as planned, so you must revisit them regularly.

The analysis will help you understand what worked for the marketing plan and what didn’t. Using this knowledge, you can run better marketing pushes in the future.

Before executing your marketing plan, set up a few times to check in while the marketing push is running. Regularly analyzing the metrics will let you know whether the plan is going in the right direction and whether the conversion rate or KPIs are as expected. You can consider tweaking the plan now if your metrics aren’t where they should be.

Try not to fall into the trap of over-analyzing your plan. Often, marketers can jump the gun and make tweaks too early. They do this with a limited scope of data — too early to make any defined decisions.

Give yourself a few weeks (or up to a month) before making decisions based on what you see. If you aren’t confident in your plan and move too early, you might not see the true results of your execution.

Final Thoughts

By following these eight crucial steps, you’ll have everything you need to build a solid marketing plan. It all starts with the basics — getting to know your audience, defining your position, and crafting a strong value proposition. Then, it’s about choosing the right marketing channels to reach your goals.

And here’s the good news: If something doesn’t work, that’s not failure — it’s feedback. Every tweak, adjustment, and lesson learned gets you closer to what works best.

That’s why the final step — analyzing your results — is the real game-changer. It’s how you refine, improve, and keep moving forward.

So go ahead, put your plan into action, and adjust as you go. 

FAQ

Q: What are the key components of a strategic marketing plan?
A: A solid marketing plan includes market research, SWOT analysis, clear goals, a marketing mix (4 Ps), budget allocation, and performance tracking.

Q: How do I identify my target audience?
A: Analyze customer data, create buyer personas, and conduct market research to understand your ideal audience and their needs.

Q: How should I set and measure marketing goals?
A: Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) and track KPIs like website traffic, conversions, and engagement.

Q: How do I choose the right marketing channels?
A: Focus on where your audience is most active, assess past performance, align channels with your goals, and ensure you have the resources to manage them.

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