From small businesses to big companies, they all need proper guidelines to reach out to their customers and improve their sales. With a marketing plan, you can set the baseline and conditions to make your brand more recognizable to the public and your target audience.

Writing a one-page marketing plan will be more concise and perfect for your business if you need to introduce your plan to any key stakeholder, as it is shorter and reaches the key points. That's why we'll take a look at how you can write your own one-page marketing plan.

But before getting there, we need to set up what is a marketing plan, the main idea behind all of this. Overall, a one-page marketing plan is a summarized version of the original marketing plan.

An effective marketing plan not only serves as a roadmap for your business but can heighten the success of your marketing efforts helping you in accomplish many other things:

• Focusing on high-priority initiatives
• Getting rid of any project that doesn't move you toward your objectives
• Identifying the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics to track progress
• Aligning everyone in your team in the same direction
• Setting realistic and measurable goals
• Identifying your target market and target audience so you can define how to reach them
• Developing a structured approach to creating services and products that satisfy the customers' needs
• Retaining your customers
• And, lastly, saving time and money

Overall, the marketing plan is a reference document that will hold you accountable, and it will help you execute your marketing strategies.

Now, let's take a look at how to create a solid marketing plan. The very first step of all is to outline the plan itself.

It will grant you the structure in a way that makes sense for your company with the product or service that you're delivering. It also serves as a table of contents for your completed plan. The details of your marketing plan will vary based on your business and your relative marketing position, whether you are a B2C (business-to-consumer), B2B company (business-to-business), a large corporation, or a small business.

An example of a marketing plan outline may have the following content (which you can modify to fit your needs):

• The Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Executive Summary
• Vision and Mission Statement
• Situation Analysis
• Business Capabilities
• Main Objectives
• Target Market
• Marketing Strategy
• Standards of Performance and Measurement Methods
• Financial Projections and Financial Summary
• Appendix, with Research Results and Product Specifications

It is a commonly used tool to analyze the internal weaknesses and strengths of a business, together with any external opportunities and threats. 

When you detail them, keep in mind that within the strengths and weaknesses, there are factors that your business has control and notion over, while in opportunities and threats, we are dealing with things that may impact our company from the outside.

To summarize the idea, you should include the following in each segment:

• Strength: What your business is good at, what’s working, and what the customers enjoy and like about your product or service. 
• Weaknesses: What we should fix and strengthen, and what we should become more efficient at.
• Opportunities: What the industry might soon want, what we'll be good at, and what will be our differentiator.
• Threats: What we think could hinder our growth, and what or who we think can take our possible customers.

With a SWOT analysis, you can identify weaknesses that can be turned into strengths and leverage those strong points in order to mitigate threats in the market and take advantage of opportunities.

It is used to evaluate the competitive landscape and to pinpoint the factors in your industry that can reinforce or weaken the position of your business.

These five forces include the next components:

• Industry Rivalry: This remarks the industry competitors (industry concentration and growth), the quality differences, barriers to exit, and the switching costs.
• The threat of New Entrants: It checks the barriers to entry (production and labor costs, specialized skill requirements), government regulation, and switching costs.
• Bargaining Power of Buyers: These are the size of each customer order, price sensitivity, buyer’s ability to find alternatives, and switching costs.
• Bargaining Power of Suppliers: The quantity and size of suppliers and differentiation of products between suppliers.
• The threat of Substitute Products: The number of alternatives available, buyer willingness to substitute, and perceived level of product differentiation.

When you finish assessing each of the five forces and rating them from low to high, you'll be better equipped to identify and enhance your company's competitive position within the industry.

This framework is used to evaluate the five key components of marketing decisions for a business. The five Cs of the marketing program are the following: 

• Company: Recognize the Unique Value Proposition (UVP) or the sustainable advantage the company possesses. It can include cost leadership, economies of scale, and differentiation. This component involves evaluating the services, products, culture, and brand perception of the business to define if it's in the best position to satisfy customers.
• Customers: Having an insight into who your clients are and what motivates them to buy is essential before defining how you will meet their needs. Research who is buying products, how the clients interact with your business, customer feedback, and seasonal trends to gain an understanding of the preferences of your customer base.
• Competitors: Learning and understanding how your competitors perform their business will enable you to craft marketing tactics that will beat them at their own game. Learn about their strengths, weaknesses, and market position by researching what makes them stand out, what kind of content they are producing, and how their customers interact with them. 
• Collaborators: One of the key components is leveraging relationships with partners, distributors, and people that support your daily business operations. They can be highly favorable for helping your company to run more efficiently as these collaborators get your products in front of customers. Create a list of all these players your business works with to create strong relations and uncover opportunities.
• Climate: Getting a sense of legal, societal, and industry trends that could affect your business plan will allow you to make more proactive decisions. Keep a watchful eye on where the market is heading in terms of social and economic trends that could impact how buyers purchase products or new technologies that could change how businesses operate.

Performing an analysis utilizing any of these methods will allow you to check the organization and industry landscape, establish your marketing goals and overall business objectives, identify opportunities, and create an actionable marketing plan to take steps toward achieving those marketing objectives. 

Once you are done with the situational analysis, point out the core capabilities of your organization that you can exploit to gain a competitive foothold. 

One way to identify your own competencies is by gathering feedback from your team and related players. Check together what would be your business' strengths, the team's strengths, what differentiates your product and service from your competitors, and what will make us the best in the industry. 

Your main competencies should be a reflection of your vision and mission statement, and these statements should be adjusted as the core competencies change.

When you complete defining your goals, it is time to point out to the audience that your business will direct its marketing efforts and resources to in order to achieve those goals. Since it is very inefficient to target everyone, the idea is to focus on clients that will choose you over the competition and will stay loyal to your brand. 

Look at your existing customers and search for mutual preferences, interests, and pain points among those buyers so you can build a customer profile. You can also collect information from them by doing surveys, research, looking at focus groups, or simply asking for feedback, so you can gain more insight and data about the shared characteristics of your buyers. Then capitalize on that to attract more customers. 

You should check the clients of your competition. Learn who they are targeting and the benefits they provide, and see how each of those benefits solves a specific problem. With this information, you can find niche markets or opportunities that your competitors are missing out on.

Examine your products and services and list out the key benefits they provide and how each will solve a certain problem. You can use this information to quickly recognize which people are most likely to have a problem that those benefits solve.

Lastly, you should create a target persona. Once you pick out the kind of people who will benefit from your product, you need to convert them into actual buyers and attract them to purchase it. Figure out what the demographics of each customer look like, as well as the characteristics of those buyers. Then, identify how the target persona may find your service or product, what will motivate them to purchase it, how it fits into their lifestyle, and how they will use it.

Your marketing plan should include a list of the marketing channels that your organization might use. These are the place where you will publish content that educates the buyers, spread awareness, and generate leads. 

You can use this section to map out which social networks you want to launch a business page on, for what you will use this social media, and how you will measure the business's success on this network. 

One of the purposes of this section is to prove to superiors (from the marketing department and outside) that these channels will serve to grow the organization. And if you have an extensive social media presence, you might consider elaborating on the social strategy in different social media plan templates.

Once you have picked out your target buyer, you need to develop content that will incentivize it through each stage of the customer's journey. Understanding how they make purchase decisions will give you the knowledge to align your content strategy accordingly. 

• Awareness: Where the prospects have a problem, and they're looking for a solution. This is where organizations invest resources in advertising media and any other channels to make potential customers aware of your product.
• Consideration: Where the buyers consider the many solutions available and need convincing to purchase it finally. It is where business spill out in great detail all the benefits the customer will receive when using the product and try to convince them why they are better than the competition.
• Intent: Where the buyers are fully convinced that they have to purchase that product to solve the problem and start to compare the different alternatives. It is time for organizations to reassure their customers that the product or service they offer makes the most sense over the competition from different perspectives (economic, emotional, or lifestyle).
• Purchase: Where the buyers have decided on which alternative they will get and from whom they will purchase it. Keep in mind that if the customer chooses your business, it doesn't end here. The true goal of your organization is to develop a relationship with the buyer to increase their loyalty towards your brand and find upsell opportunities based on purchase history.
• Repurchase: The buyer needs to renew a perishable product or renew your service (like a subscription). You need to foster the relationship by offering some incentives to repurchase and increase brand loyalty. You can do email marketing campaigns as content to retain your customers, letting them know of different offers.

Establish your content goals, strategies, and tactics to meet those objectives and the metrics to measure results before creating content for these buying cycle stages.

In order to guide potential clients through each stage of the buyer's lifecycle, you can use your marketing project management skills to form a proper tactic to get your business's brand in front of them and then encourage them to purchase your products. While developing your marketing strategy, you should refer to the 4Ps of your marketing mix.

The first of them is "Product," referring to the good or service that you are offering as a solution to fit the customer's needs. Differentiating your product in the market and emphasizing the UVP are the first steps in positioning your brand and setting yourself apart from the competition.

Then we have the "Price." It's what the buyer is expected to pay for the service or product. Understanding your product's perceived value in the customer's eyes is critical before you can effectively set a price. You can start by researching your competitors and see how much they set the price for similar products.

Now we head to the "Promotion," where we are referring to the communication aspect of the marketing strategy. This is where you raise awareness about your brand by getting the word out and implementing different methods like videos, advertising, press releases, trade shows, and event marketing.

Last but not least, we have the "Place," and we check where the customers are purchasing our products. Is it going to be online, or will the customers buy our products from a physical location? Keep in mind that the marketing channels that you'll use from producer to customer are part of the distribution strategy.

With a marketing plan timeline, your team will be able to view all projects, events, campaigns, and any other related tasks in one place with their respective deadlines. It will make sure that everyone knows when it's due, what's due, and what will be next in the pipeline. 

Once you are done with the analysis, research, and establishing the goals, it's time to set the deadlines for each assignment. Everything needs to have a deadline, and you should also consider any holiday or event taking place over the year.

Start by estimating how long you think these tasks will take and set the deadline accordingly. Then, you can track the actual time it takes to complete this task in similar types of projects. Once you are done with some of them, you'll have a better idea of how much it will take to finish each task and be more precise about setting deadlines.

Now that you know and understand how to create a proper marketing plan, we can proceed with the making of a 1-page marketing plan. It is a helpful tool that will make you focus your marketing efforts on your organization. 

There are many ways you can approach your plan and not just stick to the pre-launch, launch, and post-launch of the product. It will depend on the scope of your marketing efforts. A one-page marketing plan is a way to capture where you are trying to go with them.

Following the Allan Dib model, you are going to use a "before lead capture, during lead generation, and after the prospect becomes a customer" approach. This one-page marketing plan template is divided into nine different steps that you should follow to reach your goal of securing customers for your organization.

After explaining how to make a solid one-page marketing plan, you may ask, "how do you actually write it down?" Thankfully, the "Allan Dib model" has its own template that you can download from the Successwise website as a PDF document and modify from the browser to introduce your own marketing plan.

This template is a high-level document that guides your marketing initiatives and ensures your goals are aligned with the business objectives. 

It goes to a simplistic design, where you can outline the purpose that your business serves, as well as the target market, strategic goals, and standards of performance, to make sure that you have a thorough and deliberate plan of action. 

You can download it from the Smartsheet website as a Word file.

This marketing plan template serves the same function as the previous one. But, of course, the main difference is the design, as it is more complete and artistic.

You will able to do everything that you have to for a marketing plan and more, with an eye-catching presentation. And you will able to modify it with your own style and images.

You can download it for Word from Hubspot.

This template is different from the Allan Dib model that we introduced earlier as it serves more as a summarized version of a common and extensive marketing plan template. It takes its comprehensiveness and pares it down to only the key elements for better readability. 

It has space for a concise executive summary, target market, marketing strategy, overall objectives, financial requirements, and more sections. The template also has an action plan to detail role assignments, marketing activities, deadlines, and costs.

Download it from Smartsheet.com as an Excel file or a Word document.

It includes sections for online advertising and analytics, SEO strategy and content marketing, social media, and tools for tracking metrics. 

This digital marketing plan template is divided into months to create a proper timeline for your digital marketing plan. You should use it when creating a comprehensive plan of action for online marketing. 

Download Microsoft Excel from Smartsheet.com.

With this template, business owners can fill it with their own information to create a proper marketing plan. It outlines items like executive summary, company overview and mission, marketing team, target market, go-to-market strategy, marketing goals, action plan, tools and resources, and marketing budget and expenses.

You can download it for Word from the Coschedule website.