A marketing plan template, and how to actually use it

Before you start: three things to have to hand

You will write a better plan in half the time if you gather these first:

• Last twelve months of enquiries, and where they genuinely came from
• Revenue by customer type or service, so you know what is actually paying
• Whatever you know about your three closest competitors and what they say about themselves

If you cannot say where your enquiries come from, note that as a gap and carry on. Fixing measurement will end up as one of your actions.

Section 1: Where you are now, the audit

This is the section people rush, and it is the one that decides whether the rest of the plan is any good. Give it two or three pages. Everything that follows, the objectives, the targeting and the activity, should be traceable back to something you found here.

Work through it in three layers: the outside world, the market immediately around you, and your own business.

The macro picture, using PESTEL as the prompt:

• Political: procurement rules, trade arrangements, grants or public spending that affects your customers
• Economic: interest rates, input costs, customer confidence and how long budgets are taking to sign off
• Social: shifts in how your buyers research, who now sits in the buying decision, changing expectations of suppliers
• Technological: AI in search and in your customers' workflows, platform changes, tooling that changes what a small team can produce
• Environmental: sustainability requirements landing in tenders and supply chains
• Legal: data protection, advertising rules, sector regulation and anything your claims have to stand up against

Two or three lines per heading is enough. The point is not to write an essay about the economy, it is to note the handful of forces that genuinely change what your customers do this year, and to say what each one means for you.

Then the micro picture, which is the market you actually compete in: your customers and how they buy, your three closest competitors and what they claim, your intermediaries or partners, and anyone new arriving in the market. Say plainly where you win, where you lose, and why.

Finally the internal view: what is working, what is not, what changed in the last year, your resources and skills, your website and enquiry data, and how customers currently find you. Include the uncomfortable bits. A plan built on a flattering summary solves the wrong problems.

Close the section with a short SWOT that pulls all three layers together, no more than four bullets per box. Every strength, weakness, opportunity and threat in it should already have appeared above. If something new turns up in the SWOT, it means the audit was not finished.

Section 2: What you are trying to achieve, your SMART objectives

Two or three SMART objectives, expressed commercially. Not marketing objectives such as growing followers, but business objectives such as a revenue figure, a number of new customers in a particular sector, or a shift in the mix of work.

SMART means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. It sounds like a workshop exercise, but it is doing real work here: a vague objective cannot be argued with, cannot be reported on, and cannot tell you what activity to run.

So a usable SMART objective states:

• Specific: what exactly changes, and in which part of the business
• Measurable: the number, and where that number will be read from
• Achievable: realistic given your budget, people and the audit you just wrote
• Relevant: tied to the commercial priority, not to a channel
• Time bound: the deadline, usually twelve months broken into quarters

For example: increase enquiries from manufacturing businesses in the East of England from eight to twenty per quarter by the end of Q4, measured in the CRM. That is something you can plan against and report on.

Three objectives is plenty. Six means you have not decided anything.

Section 3: Who you are targeting

Describe the customers you actually want, not a demographic profile. For most SMEs this is a short description of the type of business or person, the situation that makes them start looking, and what they are worried about when they choose.

Two or three of these is usually right. If you list six, the plan will fragment and the budget will spread until nothing works.

Section 4: What you want them to believe

Your positioning and the messages that carry it. One paragraph on what you want a prospective customer to believe about you, and the proof that makes it credible: results, case studies, credentials, guarantees.

Then two or three supporting messages you will repeat consistently everywhere. Repetition is not boring, it is how positioning gets built. You will tire of your message roughly two years before your market notices it.

Section 5: What you are going to do, and which objective it serves

Activity exists to deliver the objectives in section two. Nothing goes in this section on its own merits. Organise it objective by objective rather than channel by channel, so the line of sight is impossible to lose: this objective, therefore this activity, therefore this measure.

Written that way, the awkward questions answer themselves. If a channel cannot be attached to an objective, it comes out. If an objective has no activity underneath it, it is a hope rather than a plan.

Under each objective, one line per piece of activity covering:

• Which objective it serves, and how it moves that number
• What it is for: awareness, enquiries, credibility or retention
• Roughly how much activity: frequency rather than a full content calendar
• Who is responsible, by name
• What it costs, including time

Three or four channels per objective is a plan. Nine is a wish list. If you are unsure which to drop, drop the one that cannot explain which objective it feeds, or the one nobody has claimed ownership of.

Section 6: What you are deliberately not doing

The most useful section in the document, and the one almost every template leaves out.

Write down the things you have decided against for now, and why. When someone asks in June why you are not on a new platform, the answer is already written and the conversation takes two minutes instead of a fortnight.

Section 7: Budget

One table. Spend by channel, by quarter, with a line for time as well as money if internal people are doing the work.

Leave ten to fifteen per cent unallocated. Something will come up that is genuinely worth doing, and a plan with no slack either gets broken or blocks a good opportunity.

Section 8: How you will measure it

Pick a small number of measures tied to the objectives in section two, and say who reports them and when.

For most SMEs the honest set is:

• Enquiries, and how many were genuinely viable
• Where those enquiries came from
• Conversion rate from enquiry to customer
• Cost per enquiry by channel, including time
• Revenue attributed to marketing, however roughly

If you cannot currently measure these, the first action in your plan is fixing tracking. Everything else is guesswork until then.

Section 9: The next ninety days

The final section, and the one that turns a document into work. A short list of specific actions for the next quarter, each with an owner and a date.

Twelve-month plans fail at the point of starting. A ninety-day list with names against it does not.

How long it should be, and how often to revisit it

Six to eight pages for most SMEs, with the audit taking two or three of them and everything after it kept tight. If it runs past twelve, something in it is decoration.

Review it quarterly against the measures, and rewrite it annually. A quarterly review takes an hour and mostly consists of deciding what to stop. That hour is where the value of the whole document is realised.

Five reasons marketing plans get ignored

In roughly the order I see them:

• Too long, so nobody reads it after the day it was written
• No owners, so every action belongs to everyone and therefore no one
• No measurement, so nobody can tell whether it worked
• Too many channels, so none of them get enough attention to produce anything
• Written for a resource level the business does not have

That last one is the most common of all. A plan that assumes a marketing team you do not employ is not a plan, it is a wish.

Writing it with SLD Marketing

Plenty of businesses write a good plan from a structure like this one. Where I usually get called in is when the audit needs an outside eye, when the objectives keep coming out vague, or when the activity has grown into a list nobody can tie back to a commercial goal.

Working together on a marketing plan typically covers:

• The audit: PESTEL, competitor and customer view, and an honest read of your own data
• Two or three SMART objectives agreed with you, in commercial terms
• Targeting and positioning, written so your team can use the words
• Activity mapped objective by objective, with owners, budget and measures
• A ninety-day action list, and a quarterly review to keep it honest

Marketing plans start from £1,250. If you would rather see where the gaps are first, the free marketing health check takes about five minutes and gives you a score with the priorities behind it.