For a while now, you’ve been spearheading your organization’s content marketing efforts, and your team’s performance has convinced management to adopt the content marketing strategies you’ve suggested.

Now, your boss wants you to write and present a content marketing plan, but you’ve never done something like that before. You don’t even know where to start.

Fortunately, we’ve curated the best content marketing plans to help you write a concrete plan that’s rooted in data and produces results. But first, we’ll discuss what a marketing plan is and how some of the best marketing plans include strategies that serve their respective businesses.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period. Marketing plans can include different marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the company, all working toward the same business goals.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.
Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign‘s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You’ll also discover what works and what doesn’t. Thus, measuring the success of your strategy.
Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

Looking to develop a marketing plan for your business? Click here to download HubSpot’s free Marketing Plan Template to get started.
To learn more about how to create your marketing plan, keep reading or jump to the section you’re looking for:

If you’re pressed for time or resources, you might not be thinking about a marketing plan. However, a marketing plan is an important part of your business plan.
Marketing Plan vs. Business Plan
A marketing plan is a strategic document that outlines marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics.
A business plan is also a strategic document. But this plan covers all aspects of a company’s operations, including finance, operations, and more. It can also help your business decide how to distribute resources and make decisions as your business grows.
I like to think of a marketing plan as a subset of a business plan; it shows how marketing strategies and objectives can support overall business goals.
Keep in mind that there’s a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software they’ll use to execute that mission and track its success.
For example, while a greater plan or department might handle social media marketing, you might consider your work on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy.
A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It’s the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.
For example, suppose your company is launching a new software product, and it wants customers to sign up. The marketing department needs to develop a marketing plan that’ll help introduce this product to the industry and drive the desired signups.
The department decides to launch a blog dedicated to this industry, a new YouTube video series to establish expertise, and an account on Twitter to join the conversation around this subject. All this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into software users.
To summarize, the business’s marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software product to the marketplace and driving signups for that product. The business will execute that plan with three marketing strategies: a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and a Twitter account.

Of course, the business might consider these three things as one giant marketing strategy, each with its specific content strategies. How granular you want your marketing plan to get is up to you. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a particular set of steps in its creation.

How to Write a Marketing Plan

State your business’s mission.
Determine the KPIs for this mission.
Identify your buyer personas.
Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
Clearly define your plan’s omissions.
Define your marketing budget.
Identify your competition.
Outline your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.

1. State your business’s mission.
Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business‘s main mission statement.
From my experience, you want to be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you’ll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.
For example, if your business’s mission is “to make booking travel a delightful experience,” your marketing mission might be “to attract an audience of travelers, educate them on the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform.”
Need help building your mission statement? Download this guide for examples and templates and write the ideal mission statement.
2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.
Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission‘s progress. To do so, you need to decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.
Let’s take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travelers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.
These KPIs will come into the conversation again in step 4.
3. Identify your buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, and job title. Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business’s current and potential customers. So, all business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.

Create your buyer personas with this free guide and set of buyer persona templates.
4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
Here’s where you’ll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy. Because there’s a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, you must choose wisely and explain how you’ll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.
When I write this section, I like to stipulate:

Which types of content I’ll create. These might include blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
How much of it I’ll create. I typically describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on my workflow and the short-term goals for my content.
The goals (and KPIs) I’ll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
The channels on which I’ll distribute my content. Popular channels include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.
5. Clearly define your plan’s omissions.
A marketing plan explains the marketing team’s focus. It also explains what the marketing team will not focus on.
If there are other aspects of your business that you aren’t serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn’t on the hook for something, you need to make it known.
In my experience, this section is particularly important for stakeholders to help them understand why certain decisions were made.
6. Define your marketing budget.
Whether it’s freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.

You can establish your marketing budget with this kit of 8 free marketing budget templates.
7. Identify your competition.
Part of marketing is knowing whom you’re marketing against. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one.
Keep in mind not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business. For example, while one competitor might be ranking highly on search engines for keywords you want your website to rank for, another competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an account.

Easily track and analyze your competitors with this collection of ten free competitive analysis templates.
8. Outline your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.
With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it’s time to explain who’s doing what. I don’t like to delve too deeply into my employees’ day-to-day projects, but I know which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.
Now that you know why you need to build an effective marketing plan, it’s time to get to work. Starting a plan from scratch can be overwhelming if you haven’t done it before. That’s why there are many helpful resources that can support your first steps. We’ll share some of the best guides and templates that can help you build effective results-driven plans for your marketing strategies.
Ready to make your own marketing plan? Get started using this free template.

Types of Marketing Plans
Depending on the company you work for, you might want to create various marketing plans. We compiled different samples to suit your needs:
1. Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans
These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you’ll take on in a certain period.

Forbes published a marketing plan template that has amassed almost 4 million views. To help you sculpt a marketing roadmap with true vision, their template will teach you how to fill out the 15 key sections of a marketing plan, which are:

  • Executive Summary
  • Target Customers
  • Unique Selling Proposition
  • Pricing & Positioning Strategy
  • Distribution Plan
  • Your Offers
  • Marketing Materials
  • Promotions Strategy
  • Online Marketing Strategy
  • Conversion Strategy
  • Joint Ventures & Partnerships
  • Referral Strategy
  • Strategy for Increasing Transaction Prices
  • Retention Strategy
  • Financial Projections

Best For
If you’re truly lost on where to start with a marketing plan, I highly recommend using this guide to help you define your target audience, figure out how to reach them, and ensure that audience becomes loyal customers.

2. Social Media Marketing Plan
This type of plan highlights the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media. A specific subtype is a paid marketing plan, which highlights paid strategies, such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media promotions.
Shane Snow’s Marketing Plan for His Book Dream Team is a great example of a social media marketing plan:

 
When Shane Snow started promoting his new book, “Dream Team,” he knew he had to leverage a data-driven content strategy framework. So, he chose his favorite one: the content strategy waterfall. The content strategy waterfall is defined by Economic Times as a model used to create a system with a linear and sequential approach.
Snow wrote a blog post about how the waterfall‘s content strategy helped him launch his new book successfully. After reading it, you can use his tactics to inform your own marketing plan. More specifically, you’ll learn how he:

Applied his business objectives to decide which marketing metrics to track.
Used his ultimate business goal of earning $200,000 in sales or 10,000 purchases to estimate the conversion rate of each stage of his funnel.
Created buyer personas to figure out which channels his audience would prefer to consume his content.
Used his average post view on each of his marketing channels to estimate how much content he had to create and how often he had to post on social media.
Calculated how much earned and paid media could cut down the amount of content he had to create and post.
Designed his process and workflow, built his team, and assigned members to tasks.
Analyzed content performance metrics to refine his overall content strategy.

Best For
I use Snow’s marketing plan to think more creatively about my content promotion and distribution plan. I like that it’s linear and builds on the step before it, creating an air-tight strategy that doesn’t leave any details out.

3. Content Marketing Plan
This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you’ll use content to promote your business or product.
HubSpot’s Comprehensive Guide for Content Marketing Strategy is a strong example of a content marketing plan:

At HubSpot, we‘ve built our marketing team from two business school graduates working from a coffee table to a powerhouse of hundreds of employees. Along the way, we’ve learned countless lessons that shaped our current content marketing strategy. So, we decided to illustrate our insights in a blog post to teach marketers how to develop a successful content marketing strategy, regardless of their team’s size.

In this comprehensive guide for modern marketers, you’ll learn:

What exactly content marketing is.
Why your business needs a content marketing strategy.
Who should lead your content marketing efforts?
How to structure your content marketing team based on your company’s size.
How to hire the right people for each role on your team.
What marketing tools and technology you’ll need to succeed.
What type of content your team should create, and which employees should be responsible for creating them.
The importance of distributing your content through search engines, social media, email, and paid ads.
And finally, the recommended metrics each of your teams should measure and report to optimize your content marketing program.

Best For
This is fantastic resource for content teams of any size — whether you’re a team of one or 100. It includes how to hire and structure a content marketing team, what marketing tools you’ll need, what type of content you should create, and even recommends what metrics to track for analyzing campaigns.
4. New Product Launch Marketing Plan
This will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you‘ll implement to promote a new product. And if you’re searching for an example, look no further than Chief Outsiders’ Go-To-Market Plan for a New Product:
After reading this plan, you’ll learn how to:

  • Validate a product
  • Write strategic objectives
  • Identify your market
  • Compile a competitive landscape
  • Create a value proposition for a new product
  • Consider sales and service in your marketing plan

Best For
If you’re looking for a marketing plan for a new product, the Chief Outsiders template is a great place to start. Marketing plans for a new product will be more specific because they target one product versus its entire marketing strategy.

5. Growth Marketing Plan
Growth marketing plans use experimentation and data to drive results, like we see in Venture Harbour’s Growth Marketing Plan Template:

Venture Harbour’s growth marketing plan is a data-driven and experiment-led alternative to the more traditional marketing plan. Their template has five steps intended for refinement with every test-measure-learn cycle. The five steps are:

  • Goal
  • Projection
  • Experiments
  • Roadmap
  • Insights

Best For
I recommend this plan if you want to experiment with different platforms and campaigns. Experimentation always feels risky and unfamiliar, but this plan creates a framework for accountability and strategy.
Marketing Plan Examples

Louisville Tourism
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Visit Oxnard
Safe Haven Family Shelter
Wright County Economic Development
The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County
Cabarrus County Convention and Visitors Bureau
Visit Billings

1. Louisville Tourism
In my opinion, this marketing plan is a masterclass for companies in the tourism industry. It’s a comprehensive game plan that covers key strategies for events, tourism programs, meetings, and conventions.
It also divides its target market into growth and seed categories to allow for more focused strategies. For example, the plan recognizes Millennials in Chicago, Atlanta, and Nashville as the core of it’s growth market, whereas people in Boston, Austin, and New York represent seed markets where potential growth opportunities exist. Then, the plan outlines objectives and tactics for reaching each market.
Why This Marketing Plan Works

The plan starts with a letter from the President & CEO of the company, who sets the stage for the plan by providing a high-level preview of the incoming developments for Louisville’s tourism industry
The focus on Louisville as “Bourbon City” effectively leverages its unique cultural and culinary attributes to present a strong brand
Incorporates a variety of data points from Google Analytics, Arrivalist, and visitor profiles to to define their target audience with a data-informed approach

2. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Colleges have a broad target audience, including prospective students, international students, parents, alumni, faculty, and staff. This marketing plan does an effective job of outlining strategies for each group as they move through different stages in the funnel.
For example, students who become prospects as freshman and sophomore will receive emails that focus on getting the most out of high school and college prep classes. Once these students become juniors and seniors — thus entering the consideration stage — the emails will focus more on the college application process and other exploratory content.
Why This Marketing Plan Works

The plan incorporates competitive analysis, evaluation surveys, and other research to determine the makeup of its target audience
The plan lists each marketing program (e.g., direct mail, social media, email etc.) and supplements it with examples on the next page
Each marketing program has its own objectives, tactics, and KPIs for measuring success

3. Visit Oxnard
This marketing plan by Visit Oxnard, a convention and visitors bureau, is packed with all the information one needs in a marketing plan: target markets, key performance indicators, selling points, personas, marketing tactics by channel, and much more.
It also articulates the organization’s strategic plans for the upcoming fiscal year, especially as it grapples with the aftereffects of the pandemic. Lastly, it has impeccable visual appeal, with color-coded sections and strong branding elements.
Why This Marketing Plan Works

States clear and actionable goals for the coming year
Includes data and other research that shows how their team made their decisions
Outlines how the team will measure the success of their plan

4. Safe Haven Family Shelter

This marketing plan by a nonprofit organization is an excellent example to follow if your plan will be presented to internal stakeholders at all levels of your organization. It includes SMART marketing goals, deadlines, action steps, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages, and metrics.
The plan is detailed, yet scannable. By the end of it, one can walk away with a strong understanding of the organization’s strategic direction for its upcoming