Marketing Plan Template

Overview

Using a well-defined marketing plan enables companies to scale their marketing tactics, goals and strategies, which in turn drives steady growth in the long run.

As one of the main pillars for most businesses, marketing is also one of their biggest sources of expense. This is why spending a certain budget as productively as possible becomes a key concern for business owners and marketers. However, trying out different marketing initiatives without a clear plan leads to little or inconsistent success.

To learn how to create a successful marketing plan that will help you grow your business strategically, here you’ll find a series of related resources, including a professionally-designed marketing timeline template that you can use for free.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that guides companies in organizing, executing and tracking their marketing strategy over a given period of time.

Documenting the marketing tactics of a business in an organized way, a marketing plan is an effective tool to keep things on track and measure the success of any planned or ongoing campaigns.

What does a marketing plan include?

A marketing plan outlines a company’s marketing strategy for the coming year, quarter or month. No matter the span of its projections, a marketing plan typically includes:

• An overview of the company’s marketing and advertising goals.
• A description of the company’s current marketing position.
• A timeline that illustrates when all the tasks subserving a company’s strategy are to be completed.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be tracked to assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.
• A description of the company’s target audience and customer needs.

How do you create a marketing plan?

Although the scope of a marketing plan depends on its purpose or the type of organization it is intended for, here are the main steps you need to take in order to create a good marketing plan:

1. Outline a simple executive summary – it introduces the audience to your company goals, marketing achievements and important milestones, future plans and overall brand identity.
2. Set metric-driven marketing goals – identify clear key performance indicators (e.g. website traffic, conversion rate, customer retention) that you want to impact and define the percentage by which you want to increase them.
3. Define your user personas – by answering to the questions “Who are my ideal customers?”/”What are their goals and biggest problems?”/”How does my business help them?”
4. Research your competitors and identify how they are conducting their marketing initiatives.
5. Establish accurate baselines so you can track your progress and figure out what worked and what didn’t.
6. Create an actionable list of marketing initiatives that you will undertake over a specified period of time. This will make up the timeline of your marketing plan.
7. Make your marketing plan look professional and clear by using a template.

Using and updating the Marketing Plan Timeline Template

At the foundation of any good business initiative is a solid marketing plan. However, marketing plans can often be heavy documents that go unread. Using the PowerPoint marketing timeline template to illustrate your plan can help. Creating a timeline visual to accompany your marketing plan makes sense particularly when communicating with clients, management and other high-level audiences that need to be briefed. A good visual will also become a reference point for delivering your marketing plan and a measuring stick to assess progress.

Use this free marketing timeline template to present important marketing strategies in a clear, easy-to-understand way. It was designed for business professionals who need to outline plans and communicate them visually. The marketing plan template is a native timeline slide which means it can be shared, edited and updated by anyone who has PowerPoint. You can download and manually change any milestone or phase on the template, or you can use the free timeline creator from Office Timeline to automatically update the template’s placeholders with your own marketing plan.

Office Timeline is a PowerPoint timeline maker that will automate the layout of your marketing timeline. It enables you to show the progress of your marketing strategy throughout its life cycle and also lets you instantly update the plan when things change. This means you can keep your audiences in the know of the latest marketing plan updates, as fast as they need them.

Office Timeline Pro+ Edition enables marketers to automatically import larger plans from tools like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project and other project management or planning tools. It has advanced project planning features such as showing the progress of tasks with a percent complete feature or a Today’s Date indicator. Marketers can use it to provide status reports - which can easily be updated each week - to teams, partners, customers, and clients. These visuals will illustrate progress on critical marketing objectives to your important audiences.