How to create a winning marketing plan (with examples)
Summary
A marketing plan helps leaders clearly visualize marketing strategies across channels, so they can ensure every campaign drives pipeline and revenue. In this article you’ll learn eight steps to create a winning marketing plan that brings business-critical goals to life, with examples from word-class teams.
To be successful as a marketer, you have to deliver the pipeline and the revenue.”
Marketing is a key revenue driver for every business, with three in four CMOs using revenue growth to measure success. It strengthens your bottom line by building brand awareness, bringing in new customers, and ensuring your existing buyers stick around. But while marketing is critical, it’s also complex—involving strategies across different channels like email, social media, ads, web content, and more. Leaders need a way to visualize and organize all this work, so they can ensure every strategy drives pipeline and revenue.
In other words—they need a well-crafted marketing plan.
Level up your marketing plan to drive revenue in 2024
Learn how to create the right marketing plan to hit your revenue targets in 2024. Hear best practices from marketing experts, including how to confidently set and hit business goals, socialize marketing plans, and move faster with clearer resourcing.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a detailed roadmap that outlines the different strategies your team will use to achieve organizational objectives. Rather than focusing solely on the end goal, a marketing plan maps every step you need to reach your destination—whether that’s driving pipeline for sales, nurturing your existing customer base, or something in-between.
As a marketing leader, you know there’s never a shortage of great campaign and project ideas. A marketing plan gives you a framework to effectively prioritize work that aligns to overarching business goals—and then get that work done. Some elements of a comprehensive marketing plans include:
A clear mission statement
Analysis of your target market and demographics
Defined marketing objectives
A strong value proposition
Breakdown of marketing channels
Detailed marketing budget
Specific marketing tactics with a set timeframe
These elements work together to help your team nail the right marketing mix and connect with your target audience while hitting your goals.
What is the purpose of a marketing plan?
The purpose of a marketing plan is to grow your company’s consumer base and strengthen your brand, while aligning with your organization’s mission and vision. When creating a marketing plan, it should include a competitive analysis of the industry, outline actionable insights for gaining a competitive edge, and map out each step of your strategy to show how your campaigns align with overarching business goals.
How to create a marketing plan
Developing a marketing plan can feel like a daunting task—especially when you're juggling competing priorities, tight budgets, and unclear objectives. The good news? When you understand how to write a marketing plan, you’ll have a clear framework to navigate these challenges and bring focus to your marketing efforts. Our seven-step guide is designed to help you do exactly that.
Step 1. Define your plan
The first step in learning how to create a marketing plan is to define each specific component of your plan. This ensures stakeholders are aligned on goals, deliverables, resources, and more. Ironing out these details early on ensures your plan supports the right business objectives, and that you have sufficient resources and time to get the job done.
Get started by asking yourself the following questions:
What resources do I need?
What is the vision?
What is the value?
What is the goal?
Who is my audience?
What are my channels?
What is the timeline?
For example, imagine you’re creating an annual marketing plan to improve customer adoption and retention in the next fiscal year. Here’s how you could go through the questions above to ensure you’re ready to move forward with your plan:
Resources needed: Support from the content, web, and email teams to create targeted customer content. Dedicated time from one full-time team member in each group, $100K in additional budget, and one new hire.
Vision: Create a positive experience for existing customers, address new customer needs, and encourage upgrades. Deliver how-to guides, feature updates, pricing info, and troubleshooting content.
Value: Retain and grow the customer base to maintain revenue growth. SBI reports that 60% of net new revenue comes from existing customers.
Goals: Decrease customer churn from 30% to 10%. Increase upgrades from 20% to 30% in the next fiscal year.
Audience: All existing customers.
Marketing channels: Primary: Email. Supporting: Website, blog, YouTube, and social media.
Timeline: The first half of the next fiscal year.
Pro tip
One of the most important things to do as you create your marketing strategy is to identify your target audience. As with all marketing, you need to know who you’re marketing to. If you’re having a hard time determining who exactly your target audience is, try the bullseye targeting framework. The bullseye makes it easy for you to determine who your target audience is by industry, geography, company size, psychographics, demographics, and more.
Step 2. Identify key metrics for success
Now it’s time to define what key marketing metrics you’ll use to measure success. Your key metrics will help you measure and track the performance of your marketing activities. They’ll also help you understand how your efforts tie back to larger business goals.
Once you establish key metrics, use a goal-setting framework—like key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs) or SMART goals—to fully flush out your marketing objectives. This ensures your targets are as specific as possible, with no ambiguity about what should be accomplished by when.
Example: If you’re writing a marketing plan to increase email subscriptions and you follow the SMART goal framework (ensuring your objective is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) your goal might look like this: Increase email marketing subscription rate from 10% to 20% in H1.
Step 3. Research your competition
Researching your competition is a key part of developing a marketing plan. A solid competitive analysis helps you see how others market themselves, revealing ways to stand out and gain market share.
As you work through your marketing plan steps, don’t just copy what others are doing. If a competitor has already executed your idea, use it as a chance to innovate and find new ways to differentiate your brand.
Pro tip
To stay ahead of market trends, conduct a SWOT analysis for your marketing plan. A SWOT analysis helps you improve your plan by identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Example: If your competitor launches a social media campaign identical to what you had planned, go back to the drawing board and see how you can build off their campaign. Ask yourself: How can we differentiate our campaign while still getting our message across? What are the weaknesses of their campaign that we can capitalize on? What angles did they not approach?
Step 4. Integrate your marketing efforts
Now comes the exciting part of building a marketing plan—combining all your marketing activities into a cohesive strategy. A successful plan leverages a well-rounded marketing mix, including efforts like:
Lead generation
Ads
Email
Content
Social media
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Video
Public relations
To nail this step, you need a clear understanding of your target audience and where they spend their time. For example, if your audience includes marketing managers who are active on LinkedIn, focus your social media strategy on creating branded content for that platform.
Step 5. Differentiate with creative content
A strong creative strategy is key when learning how to build a marketing plan. Visual content plays a huge role—49% of marketers say visual images are essential to their content strategy. As you refine your marketing plan format, keep these tips in mind:
Speak to your audience: Create content that resonates by making it relevant and inspiring your audience to feel, think, and act.
Think outside the box: Use creative formats like video or interactive graphics, and ensure visuals display perfectly across all devices.
Tie everything to CTAs: Make Calls to Action (CTAs) a clear focus, always driving your audience toward your goals.
Streamline production: Optimize workflows with tools, request forms, and streamlined feedback to avoid bottlenecks.
Example: If your brand is fun and approachable, let that personality shine in your designs and CTAs. Create content that sparks joy, entertains, and makes choosing your business an easy decision.
By following these steps, you’ll better understand how to develop a marketing plan that stands out with compelling, memorable creative content.
Step 6. Operationalize your marketing plan
Building an effective marketing plan is just the start—operationalizing it ensures campaigns run smoothly and deliver results. Turn your strategy into action by ensuring goals, deliverables, and timelines are clear to every stakeholder. Centralizing your marketing plan on one platform helps team members stay aligned and accountable, connecting campaign work back to company objectives.
Use a work management tool that simplifies making a marketing plan actionable and efficient. Here’s how:
Set goals tied to marketing and business objectives to focus on revenue-driving work.
Centralize deliverables in one place for easy access and organization.
Visualize your plan as a timeline, Gantt chart, calendar, or Kanban board to track progress.
Streamline workflows with automations for tasks like content creation and approvals.
Track progress with dashboards and updates to keep stakeholders informed.
Example: To double page views through organic blog traffic, connect campaign work to a clear OKR and make the goal visible to all stakeholders to keep priorities aligned.
See marketing planning in action
With Asana, marketing teams can connect work, standardize processes, and automate workflows—all in one place.
Step 7. Measure performance
With nearly three in four CMOs using revenue growth to measure success, tracking performance is a must. You set your metrics in step two—now it’s time to see how your efforts are paying off.
Read: 27 business success metrics you should be trackingCheck in on your marketing efforts regularly to spot trends, make adjustments, and fix what’s not working. These insights don’t just help you now—they’ll also help you create a marketing plan that’s even more effective.
Example: If you find that content with infographics drives more clicks and shares than plain text, it’s a clear signal to prioritize infographics in your next campaigns.
Marketing plan examples from world-class teams
Looking for inspiration? The best brands bring their marketing plans to life every day. Below are marketing plan examples from top-performing teams that showcase creative strategies and impactful execution.
Autodesk
Challenge: Autodesk needed to transform Redshift, its small business blog, into a premier owned-media platform.
Redshift’s mission was to share in-depth thought leadership in architecture, engineering, and manufacturing while driving traffic and authority back to Autodesk’s core brand. Scaling this initiative required globalizing content production and streamlining workflows to meet growing demands.
Key marketing strategies:
Scaled content production to support seven additional languages and global audiences.
Standardized workflows to streamline content creation and approvals.
Centralized all content conversations in one tool to improve collaboration across marketing teams.
Results:
Published 2X more content monthly.
Increased site traffic by 30% year-over-year for three consecutive years.
Takeaway: This example marketing plan shows how strategic content scaling and streamlined workflows can transform a niche blog into a global thought leadership platform. Read the case study to learn how Autodesk runs a well-oiled content machine.
Trinny London
Challenge: Trinny London, a fast-growing beauty brand, faced the challenge of efficiently acquiring new customers through social media while maintaining a strong sense of community.
With the competitive landscape of consumer brands, it was critical to ensure their ad spend was laser-focused on reaching the right audience segments. This is one of the most compelling examples of marketing plans for social media success.
Key marketing strategies:
Used a work management tool to centralize the creation, testing, and execution of ads.
Targeted ad spend to hone in on the most relevant audience segments.
Leveraged multiple social channels to grow brand affinity and audience engagement.
Results:
Improved ad efficiency and drove better performance across campaigns.
Increased likes and subscriptions on YouTube.
Takeaway: This marketing plan example demonstrates how centralized ad management and refined audience targeting can drive results in competitive consumer markets.
Read the case study to see how Trinny London capitalized on paid advertising and social media.
Turn your marketing plan into marketing success
Creating a marketing plan promotes clarity and accountability across teams—so every stakeholder knows what they’re responsible for, by when. Reading this article is the first step to achieving better team alignment, so you can ensure every marketing campaign contributes to your company’s bottom line.
Level up your marketing plan to drive revenue in 2024
Learn how to create the right marketing plan to hit your revenue targets in 2024. Hear best practices from marketing experts, including how to confidently set and hit business goals, socialize marketing plans, and move faster with clearer resourcing.
Use a free marketing plan template to get started
Once you’ve nailed down your strategy and understand how to make a marketing plan, our marketing templates can help you put it into action.
Our templates help you manage every detail, from creative requests to approval workflows. Centralize your entire plan in one place, customize the roadmap, assign tasks, and build timelines or calendars to stay organized.
When you use a template to create a marketing plan, it’s easy to share with stakeholders, keep everyone aligned, and show how their work contributes to project goals. With everything in one tool, your team will stay connected, focused, and ready to execute.
Choose the best marketing template for your team:
