Marketing Plan Template

A marketing plan is an essential tool in successfully maintaining and growing your business. A marketing plan charts out where you plan to take your business over the coming year and provides goals and objectives for a business to aim for. Having a marketing plan unites a company behind its objectives and is a source of structure for a business.

All marketing plans are different as they depend entirely on the specifics of each business and market. However, there are components of a marketing plan template that should be included in all marketing plans in some fashion. If you are creating a marketing plan for the first time, it’s important that you gather all of the information you have on your business and your market to be used to fill in the marketing plan template.

This information should include all financial data on your business, a listing of all of the products and services your business provides, a listing of all of your competitors and any financial data you have on them, all data regarding the market you operate in and all information about the organizational structure of your business. Using a marketing plan template gives you the opportunity to localize all of this information into one document that can be referred to companywide.

There are six main sections of a marketing plan template for all sized businesses. The first is a section on the current market situation. This section will position your company in the larger market as well as describe the market itself in detail. This section should answer the following questions. What do you sell? Who do you sell it to? How well do you sell it? The next section of the marketing plan template outlines the threats and opportunities facing your business in the coming year.

The next section of the marketing plan template should address marketing goals and objectives. They should be both broadly and narrowly defined, but they must be quantifiable. The fourth section of the marketing plan template should outline your budget and itemize each activity planned. The fifth section should discuss how you would track the progress of the marketing plan throughout the year. Finally, the last section should be a summary of the marketing plan in a one page write up that can be easily referred to.