How to Create a Marketing Plan: 7 Steps and a One-Page Template

A marketing strategy says where the company wants to win. A marketing plan says what the team will do this year to get there: one document that sets out what marketing will achieve, for which customers, through which channels, with how much money, and how everyone will know whether it is working.

For a CMO or marketing leader, that document matters most when budgets are tight. It is what you defend in the budget meeting, what the team checks its priorities against, and what you change when the results come in.

This guide explains what a marketing plan is and how it differs from a strategy, then walks through seven steps to write one, from the situation analysis to the budget and the measures. It ends with a one-page template you can copy, a worked example, a checklist for turning the plan into campaigns, and answers to the questions people most often ask.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan is a partner in Fieldtrip, a group of marketing agencies, which is mentioned in this article.

What a marketing plan is, and what it is not

A marketing plan sets out the specific actions marketing will take over a period, usually a year or a quarter, to reach defined business goals. It names the target customers, the message, the channels, the budget, the owners, the timeline and the measures.

It is often confused with the documents above and below it:

If the strategy is unclear, the plan will not fix it. A plan written without one usually becomes a list of activities, and a list of activities is hard to defend when the budget is questioned.

Types of marketing plan

The structure in this guide works for most of them. What changes is the scope:

• Annual or quarterly marketing plan: the whole marketing program for the period, tied to the company's revenue goals.
• Product launch plan: the work to introduce a new product or enter a new market, usually split into pre-launch, launch and post-launch phases.
• Channel plans: a plan for one channel, such as paid media, content, search or social, that sits under the main plan and follows its goals.
• Campaign plans: one campaign at a time, covered in the section on turning the plan into campaigns.

Seven steps to write the plan

The steps run in order, but expect to loop back. The budget step often sends you back to the channels, and the audience work can change the goals.

1. 1

   Start from where the business stands

   Begin with an honest audit. Which channels and campaigns bring in customers today, and which only produce activity? What did last year's plan promise, and what happened? Then look outward: how the market is changing, what competitors offer and charge, and what customers say when they choose you or someone else.

   Standard frameworks help organize this. A SWOT analysis lists strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The 5 C's (company, customers, competitors, collaborators and context, sometimes called climate) cover the same ground from another angle. PESTLE and Porter's Five Forces are useful when regulation or the industry's structure is changing. Pick one. What you need from it is a short list of facts the rest of the plan can rely on.

2. 2

   Set goals that tie to the business

   Each marketing goal should connect to a company goal, usually revenue, pipeline, retention or entry into a market, and carry a number and a date. The SMART test (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) is a quick check. Keep the list short enough that the team can remember it.

   Choose the measure that fits the period. In January 2019 I published a 90-day launch plan for the first version of Content Allies, a virtual-assistant service for content creators. It set the target in collected revenue rather than monthly recurring revenue, because I expected short-term promotions and pre-selling future months to be a big part of hitting it. I shut that version down a few weeks later, and the name went to my podcast agency, but the choice of measure is the part worth keeping: the right measure is the one that shows whether this plan worked, even if the business normally reports on another.

3. 3

   Define who you are trying to reach

   Name the segments the plan serves and what each needs to hear. In B2B, that usually means the companies you want (industry, size, situation) and the people inside them who buy, approve and use what you sell. Build personas from real data, such as CRM records, sales conversations, customer interviews and win/loss reviews.

   Also decide how much of the plan is for buyers who are ready now. LinkedIn's B2B Institute, drawing on research with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, says that 95% of potential B2B buyers (opens in a new tab) are not ready to buy today. It advises investing in lead generation for the 5% in the market, and investing "far more heavily" in reaching the whole category with brand advertising so the company is remembered when the others start buying. LinkedIn sells advertising, so weigh the advice accordingly, but the split it describes is a real choice every B2B plan makes, whether or not it is written down.

4. 4

   Decide the positioning and the offer

   State in one or two sentences why the target customer should choose you over the alternatives, including doing nothing. Then check the four Ps against it: the product, the price, where it is sold (place) and how it is promoted. A premium position with discount-led promotion, or an enterprise message sent through channels enterprise buyers do not use, is a contradiction the plan should catch. For more on this step, see the guide to brand positioning.

5. 5

   Choose the channels: scale what works, test a few more

   The easy mistake here is to spread the budget across every channel the team has heard of, pushing each one once and then leaving it.

   I did exactly that for a long time. I would start a cold email campaign, then a podcast, then SEO, then webinars, and let each one fade. On my podcast in 2021 I called it "naive early stage entrepreneur ADD marketing", and passed on a lesson I credited to Russ Perry and to Alex McClafferty, a business adviser I had worked with: most successful companies "have one or two marketing channels that work really, really well for them."

   The rule that follows is simple. Keep funding the channels that already bring in customers, and build a system around them so someone other than you can run them. Test two, possibly three, new channels at a time, and review the early results after about three months. For long buying cycles and brand work, agree what early evidence justifies continuing and when you will judge the final outcome. When a channel produces results, systematize it and scale it while watching for diminishing returns, and keep testing the next one without neglecting the first. At Content Allies, the podcast agency, as I described in that 2021 episode, a second channel worked so well that we started neglecting the first, which still returned more than we put in, so we hired someone to run it.

   Match the channels to the offer, too. In 2023 I wrote that cold email works well for a new offer the market has not seen, because you are telling people it exists, and badly for a commoditized offer in a mature industry, where it looks like spam.

6. 6

   Set the budget

   Build the budget from the plan: estimate the cost of each channel and program, including people, agencies, tools and production, and fund the proven channels first. Then set aside a defined amount for tests, and write down what result moves a test into the core budget and what result stops it.

   Use benchmarks only as a sense check. The CMO Survey (opens in a new tab), sponsored by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, asked marketing leaders at US for-profit companies in January 2026; 308 responded. Their marketing budgets averaged 9.0% of company revenue and 9.6% of overall company budgets; the share of company budgets was the lowest since 2021. The averages varied by sector: 7.0% of revenue for B2B product companies, 10.1% for B2B services, 12.0% for B2C product companies and 7.2% for B2C services.

   Two other findings from the same report are worth planning around. When profits fall short and companies focus on cutting expenses, the report found, marketing expenses are cut 45.4% of the time, more often than other expense categories. And acquisition budgets were 26.0% larger than retention budgets on average, even though retention was outperforming acquisition in the survey's performance data. A plan that shows what each line of spend returns, and that budgets for keeping customers as well as winning them, is easier to defend in that conversation.

7. 7

   Agree the measures and how often you will review them

   Give every goal one main measure and a few supporting ones, and say where each number comes from: the CRM, the analytics platform, the finance system. For tests, agree the early signals that justify continuing, since revenue may take longer than a quarter to show.

   Set the timeframe honestly. LinkedIn's B2B Institute reports that 96% of B2B marketers in one of its studies expected to see the main effect of their ad campaigns within two weeks; its own research argues that advertising works mainly by reaching buyers before they enter the market, so much of the effect shows up later. Brand work and lead generation need different measures and different patience.

   Then fix the rhythm: spend and channel results monthly, the plan itself each quarter, and the strategy once a year or when the market changes.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

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Marketing spend as a share of revenue varies by sector. The CMO Survey’s 2026 overall mean was 9.0%; these reported averages are context for planning, not recommended targets.

A one-page marketing plan template

The template below summarizes the plan's main decisions on one page. Keeping it that short makes the trade-offs visible and gives leadership something it can read in a few minutes.

If you would rather start from a formatted file, these pages offer marketing plan templates:

• Smartsheet (opens in a new tab) publishes free templates, including a one-page version in Excel, Word, PDF and Google Docs formats.
• Visme (opens in a new tab) offers designed templates to edit in its online tool.
• SCORE, the small-business mentoring organization, has a free marketing plan template (opens in a new tab) in Word format, posted in 2021 and written for small businesses.

A worked example (hypothetical)

To show how the pieces connect, here is a hypothetical mid-market software company planning its year. The company, its choices and its figures are invented for illustration; they are not benchmarks.

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The article’s hypothetical allocation: $150,000 to the core partner program, $50,000 to retention, and $40,000 to channel tests. It illustrates priorities rather than prescribing a budget split.

The partnerships lead owns the partner program, customer marketing owns onboarding and renewal, and demand generation owns the two tests. The figures matter less than the connections: each goal has a number and a date, each line of the budget serves a goal, and each test has a date and a result that decides it.

Turn the plan into campaigns

The plan sets direction for the year. Campaigns are where it is carried out, week by week. Each campaign should trace back to a goal in the plan, with its own brief and owner.

A large launch usually breaks into phases: building awareness before the launch, the launch itself, and engagement afterward. Each phase needs the people who make it work. Product supplies accurate details, sales prepares to follow up, customer service knows what customers will ask, and the web or IT team makes sure the pages and tracking work.

Before a large commitment, run a smaller pilot. Test the message or the channel with a part of the audience, compare the result against a control where you can, and scale what works. The same discipline that applies to channels applies to campaigns.

Questions people ask about marketing plans

How long should a marketing plan be?

Long enough to record the decisions, and no longer. A one-page summary that leadership reads, with supporting detail for the team that runs each channel, works better than a long document nobody opens after the budget meeting.

How often should a marketing plan be updated?

Review results monthly and the plan quarterly, and rewrite it once a year. Update it straight away when something material changes, such as a new product, a lost channel, a budget cut or a competitor's move.

What are the 5 C's of a marketing plan?

Company, customers, competitors, collaborators and context (sometimes called climate). They are a checklist for the situation analysis: your own strengths and limits, what customers need, what competitors offer, which partners you depend on, and the economic, regulatory and technical conditions around you.

What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy?

The strategy decides who you serve and how you will win; the plan sets out what you will do this year to carry it out, with the budget, owners, dates and measures. The table at the top of this guide compares them.

Write the plan you will actually run

A marketing plan earns its place when the team uses it to decide what to stop, what to fund and what to test. Keep it short, tie every line to a goal, and decide in advance what result will change your mind.

Which channel in your current plan would you keep if you could fund only one, and what would you test next to it?