12 Things Every Marketing Plan Should Include

Do you want in on the secret to successfully hitting your business goals? It’s a marketing plan. The best marketing plans are collaborative efforts, touching on all aspects of your business. At my marketing studio, Tote + Pears, we’ve been creating marketing plans for over a decade, always touching on these 12 key things. 

1. Products and Services

An in-depth understanding of your product or service features, benefits, and unique selling proposition (USP) can take your marketing strategy to a whole new level because it enables you to effortlessly communicate why your offering matters. You can illustrate your offering’s capabilities and benefits in a way that resonates with your target audience and compels them to action.

Consider Apple, whose marketing campaigns carefully highlight its products' USPs, from retina displays to privacy features.

2. Place

Your distribution strategy is a critical aspect of any marketing plan. 

Are your products available in-store, online, through partnerships, or a combination of these options? A robust marketing plan structure includes comprehensive market research that pinpoints where your product or service fits in the market. That is then used to determine the marketing channels and platforms to target, allowing you to connect directly with the right audience. For instance, a hand-crafted gift item might thrive on Etsy, while electronics may find a fitting home on Amazon or Best Buy's online platforms.

3. Promotion

Promotion can be a critical element of what should be included in a marketing plan. It refers to the marketing tactics and strategies used to communicate your offering. It includes advertising, public relations, social media marketing, email marketing, and more. 

Knowing where and when potential customers encounter your brand can help ensure that you’re connecting with your audience at the perfect time and place. A marketing plan example of an effective promotional strategy is Nike's "Just Do It" campaign.

Nike launched their "Just Do It" campaign to inspire and motivate, creating a robust connection with their audience. The campaign, amplified via various channels, urged consumers to share their fitness and sports stories on social media using the hashtag #JustDoIt. This campaign leveraged personalized and relatable experiences to form a powerful bond between the brand and its consumers. 

4. Price

Pricing can directly impact profitability, brand perception, and customer acquisition. 

Planning marketing efforts around strategic pricing strategies can provide a competitive edge, optimizing revenue and shaping consumers’ perceptions of your brand. 

A strategic marketing plan includes pricing strategies that consider competitors and the company budget, are designed to appease the target audience, and ultimately contribute to long-term success.

5. Consumer

When you understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and challenges, you can tailor your marketing strategy directly to them.

At Tote + Pears, we’ve seen this firsthand as we’ve helped our clients learn how their product features and messaging resonate differently with different audiences. For example, a retailer targeting young mothers with a household income of $40,000 or less was deploying messaging designed for high-income women. So, their target customers were overlooking the products. To help, we developed buyer personas to help them understand who their customers are so they can act accordingly. 

Tracking and anticipating trends can help you design your marketing plan so it cam engage customers more effectively, keep you competitive, and drive better results.

Based on data and market research, buyer personas can encapsulate a range of characteristics such as demographics, professional position, motivators to purchase, lifestyle, values, and preferred communication methods. They can pave the way for the product, operations, marketing and sales teams to channel strategies, like customer segmentation, effectively.

6. Cost

Near the top of the list of what marketing plans should include is your marketing budget. Some common areas to consider during your planning include:

• Personnel costs: Salaries, wages, or fees for marketing team employees or agencies/consultants.
• Market research costs: Expenses involved in gathering data about market trends, customer behavior, and competitors’ strategies.
• Content creation and creative costs: This includes creating content and designing websites, blogs, social media posts, and promotional materials as well as development costs.
• Media and advertising costs: These include online paid advertising, traditional marketing, and newer methods like influencer marketing.
• Events costs: All expenses for hosting, attending, or sponsoring trade shows, product launches, and other events.
• Marketing tools costs: Subscription fees for marketing tools, website development and maintenance, CRM, SEO, analytics, email marketing, and social media management tools.

7. Convenience

Incorporating convenience into your strategic marketing plan is a prerequisite for success in today's digital-first consumer environment. Consumers value ease of access and time efficiency and tend to favor brands that prioritize user-friendly, seamless experiences.

Streamlined purchase processes, flexible payment options, efficient customer service, and optimized mobile experiences attract and retain customers and can boost profitability. 

8. Communication

How are your customers going to communicate with you and vice versa? 

Domino’s Pizza is a great example of how brands are being creative with their communication and conversational marketing tactics. In 2016, Domino’s introduced an AI-driven chatbot called "Dom" on Facebook Messenger that's still used today. 

Dom assists users with ordering pizza. Customers can start a conversation with Dom through Facebook Messenger, ask questions about the menu, and place an order directly without leaving the chat interface. 

Domino's enhanced the chatbot further by integrating it with an AI voice recognition system.

Dom is a great example of a brand leveraging technology to communicate with customers.

9. Validity

Knowing how to write a marketing plan is just the beginning. It also should be tested and refined for optimal results. At Tote + Pears, we conduct a small-scale pilot test before launching a full marketing plan. Leveraging our marketing plan outline, we monitor and analyze the results of this mini-campaign.

We look at key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rate, click-through rate, and sales figures and lean on tools such as Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and A/B testing software.

We also use surveys, focus groups, or interviews to gain insights into our marketing messages, visuals, and overall strategy.

10. Value

Capturing value goes beyond the cost – it's a clear reflection of the consumer’s perception of the product or service. By aligning pricing strategies with business goals and marketing objectives, you can tell a bigger story about what you’re offering and why it’s needed.

For example, excellent customer service, innovative product features, or unique brand stories can be used to create an experience your customers are willing to pay more for. 

11. Experiences

A unique customer experience can be key for brand differentiation, helping to attract and retain customers. 

For instance, IKEA sells an experience, not just furniture; their showrooms depict furnished spaces for customers to envision their products in real-life scenarios. Additionally, their stores feature restaurants offering Swedish food and supervised children's play areas, making shopping immersive. 

When you have a thorough understanding of your customer's needs and expectations, you can design marketing tactics that capture their attention. 

12. Market Trends

A market trend analysis is an essential ​​marketing plan component. Marketing trends can shed light on evolving consumer behaviors, new technologies, and shifts in industry norms or market conditions. 

Tracking and anticipating trends can help you design your marketing plan so it can engage customers more effectively, keep you competitive, and drive better results. Ignoring marketing trends, on the other hand, can result in outdated strategies that may fail to resonate with your target audience. 

For instance, the rise of digital streaming and online rentals transformed how consumers accessed movies, prompting Netflix to successfully pivot its business model while brick-and-mortar businesses fell behind. Today, streaming is the dominant method of movie consumption.

The Importance of a Marketing Plan

So, what should a marketing plan look like? A robust marketing plan requires a comprehensive understanding of the offering, target audiences, effective promotional tactics, pricing and cost management, and ongoing validity testing. Marketing plan components should prioritize consumer convenience, keep open lines of communication, demonstrate value, provide exceptional brand experiences, and consistently adapt to market trends.

With a marketing plan that does all of this, marketing success may no longer be a secret. You can be well on your way to achieving your goals.

A version of this article was originally published on August 02, 2011.

Photo: Getty Images