Creating a marketing plan can feel like a bear of a task. Where do you start? What should you include? Who should review it? What does a great one even look like?
Like all great marketing, creating the best plans comes down to understanding your audience. In most cases, marketing effects A LOT of people…
Senior leaders care about the expense and revenue
Marketing cares about campaign success and supporting sales
Sales cares about how much work they need to put in and expected number of leads/opportunities/new business
Operations cares about what they will need to fulfill
The best marketing campaign plans take all of these unique perspectives into consideration and address them in a simple way.
That's what our marketing plan example is built to do. It's a tool for marketers to “sell” their plan to all key internal stakeholders and get buy-in. And getting buy-in is SOOOOOO important.
Why is buy-in so important?
Because success for one group is not always success for another. Classic examples of this include the sales team being unable to close the leads that were generated by the marketing team or the operations team being unable to profitably fulfill the needs of the leads that were closed by the sales team.
Nothing is more frustrating than running a “successful” campaign that leads to frustration and negative gains all because of poor communication.
Our marketing plan example ensures you get all the information you need in a simple to understand document so you can get buy-in from all the key people in your organization.
Click here to get instant access to the document and watch the video below to get my step by step instructions on how to fill it out. It will be 20 minutes (or 16 minutes on 1.25x playback speed) you will be happy you spent :)
COMING SOON!
Completed marketing plan examples for:
Trade Show Attendance
Google & Bing Search Ads Campaign
More upon request!
Just submit a contact form and let us know if you want examples for any other kind of marketing plan. We are happy to help create one for you!
Here is a breakdown of the sections I cover in the video:
Executive Summary
This is a quick overview (meant for a high level executive) that would briefly describe the entire campaign.
Must include if this is an INBOUND, OUTBOUND or HYBRID campaign. That fact will change the execution and measurement of the campaign significantly.
Objective/Goal
Often this is some kind of new client acquisition.
Audience
Companies/Accounts
Industry(s)
Size (Employee count, Revenue, etc.)
HQ Geography
Additional Relevant Qualitative Information (technology used, part of a certain association)
Contacts - Option #1 - Break down by objective data
Titles
Responsibilities
Seniority
Geography
Years of Experience
Contacts - Option #2 - Break down by persona
Groups they are in
Associations they subscribe to
Books they read
Influencers they like
etc.
Campaign Math
Revenue Metrics:
New client worth (preferably using LTV that relates to GP)
Expected number of new customers campaign should generate
Expected win rate
Target Accounts needed
Total Accounts in campaign
Expenditure Metrics:
Max Target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Total allowable spend
Campaign actual budget
What We Expect to Learn
Here we want to talk about things we are testing. This is one of the most important things to do in any campaign because not repeating mistakes is CRUCIAL to your overall marketing success.
Required Team Members (with Roles & Responsibilities)
Here you want to list all the people that will be involved in the campaign and what their responsibilities will be.
Here is an example:
VP of Sales & Marketing - Carol Danvers - Owns budget and copy approval
Marketing Manager - Bruce Banner - Owns hubspot and all reporting
Account Executive - Natasha Romanov - Owns assigning new opportunities generated from the campaign
Tracking and Communication Plan
What will we track to make sure the campaign is moving in the right direction or not?
How often will we review it?
How will we review it (dashboard, report, presentation, etc.)?
Technology:
Examples:
CRM
Marketing Automation tool
Google Adwords
Facebook Ads
Campaign "Touch Points"
Examples:
Email
LinkedIn messaging
Phone calls
Webinars
Retargeting ads
PPC Ads
Social
Etc.
Timeline
Examples:
Customer Journey (Visual)
Must include the process for handing off to sales and where the responsibilities move from marketing to Sales. Also helpful if it covers what Sales needs to convert the opportunity to a sale (Sales Enablement)
