A marketing plan is essential when you are launching a new business or product, as it helps you outline your overall marketing goals. This plan guides your marketing activities, which can include building brand awareness, establishing your competitive advantage, growing your customer base, and attracting new leads.
Marketing plans can be complex documents because they provide a lot of detail about your overall marketing goals and supporting activities. That’s why it’s important to also write an executive summary for your marketing plan.
As the name suggests, an executive summary provides a brief overview of your marketing plan. On one or two pages, it describes the key results of your marketing research and provides an overview of your brand objectives, marketing goals, and related activities. Its purpose is to outline the most important information for your short-term and long-term marketing plans.
An executive summary is usually one or two pages that provide an overview of the marketing plan.
The importance of the executive summary in a marketing plan
A marketing plan has several benefits:
It helps you understand the needs of your target audience.
It enables you to market your products to meet your customers’ specific needs.
It determines what content you should produce to support your marketing efforts.
It describes your competitive advantage and unique selling points.
The marketing plan is your guide to marketing your business effectively. The executive summary highlights the most important goals, actions, and research results of your marketing plan. It is designed to grab readers’ attention and ensure they quickly understand where your business is going and how it plans to get there.
The executive summary should cover the main parts of your marketing plan, as well as information about your company and brand, your products or services, the market, and your overall direction. While the marketing plan is typically written in sections separated by subheadings, the executive summary is usually written as a series of paragraphs. with each paragraph focusing on one section of the marketing plan.
In addition to your company’s name, location, and contact information, include the following information in your executive summary:
Your executive summary should begin with an introduction that briefly explains what the reader can expect. It provides valuable context and will make the subsequent points easier to understand. Briefly explain the project, the purpose of your marketing plan and the key benefits to potential customers. Keep the introduction simple, short and direct.
This plan is presented for XYZ Company, which sells widgets for the IT industry. We’ve created a new widget for the healthcare industry, and our marketing plan will show that we have a unique opportunity to expand into a new market.
Briefly describe your business, including its history, structure, customer base and sales figures. List the main people involved with the business, including their positions and responsibilities, their respective skills and experience, and their responsibilities with respect to achieving your marketing goals. Include relevant external service providers (e.g., accountants, marketing experts and suppliers).
XYZ Company has been around since 2010 and is based in Anaheim, California. We sell widgets for the IT industry, which are designed to increase energy efficiency and reduce operating costs.
Describe the marketplace and industry sectors in which you sell your products and services, and the main trends that affect them. List the factors that influence the market, the innovations that are taking place and the main drivers or players involved.
There are several large companies and a few smaller specialty companies that sell similar widgets to the IT industry. Innovations in this market can cause disruptions but only when they provide significant benefits in cost savings or efficiencies.
Describe your products or services, and explain their key features and benefits. Outline your products’ or services’ unique selling propositions to show how they differ from or are better than competitors’ offerings.
We’ve created a new widget for the healthcare industry, which is outside our current market. This new product provides healthcare companies with greater efficiencies and cost savings not currently offered by existing products. There are similar products designed for other industries, but there are currently no widgets designed specifically for the healthcare industry.
Describe the key aspects of your target audience, as well as how you identify those customers. Briefly explain where you find your target customers and how you will reach them. Outline your promotional strategy, including its main objectives and related timelines. Describe your key marketing priorities and how they relate to specific business activities (e.g., entering a new market, creating new products). Explain what methods you will use to distribute your products or services.
Our target market is large healthcare companies, including hospitals, clinics and manufacturers of healthcare devices. We plan to do a marketing campaign through direct sales and social media marketing.
Clearly define key financial information related to short-term and long-term marketing activities. Provide line-by-line budget details for individual activities and related metrics to determine their success.
Our marketing budget for the year is $100,000, which will be spread over the following marketing activities.
Briefly describe the project’s goals and the strategies that will be involved in achieving those goals. Conclude with a couple of sentences that will encourage the reader to review your marketing plan.
We’ve developed a marketing plan that will help us to quickly reach key stakeholders in the healthcare industry and become the main provider of widgets to this market. We will use our experience in selling to the IT industry to showcase the benefits of our widget.
These tips should help you create an effective executive summary of your marketing plan:
The executive summary is a brief overview of your marketing plan. Write the complete marketing plan before providing a summary of that plan. Once you have all of the information for your marketing plan, you can decide what’s important enough to include in the executive summary. Tell your story.
Whoever reads the executive summary should come away with a complete understanding of your marketing goals. Tell your story. Explain what your company does and why you chose to do what you do. Talk about what matters to you, the people who are helping you meet your goals and what you want to achieve with your marketing.
Telling your story will get readers interested in your company and encourage them to read the full marketing plan.
Take notes.
Make note of whatever stands out when you’re creating your marketing plan. This could include interesting statistics, memorable moments, key findings about your competitors, anecdotes from leadership, ideas to support promotion and newsworthy events. Check out what your favorite brands are doing, note anything interesting you’ve read in a blog or article, or recall an interesting tool or technology that you can apply to your business. These ideas can be inspiration for your executive summary.
Your executive summary must contain key data and findings, including an analysis of the market and your competition, and budgetary and financial considerations. Your marketing plan will provide more details, but the executive summary should contain important research data to get your reader interested in your marketing plan.
An executive summary is a professional document, so you should write in a professional manner. However, it should also reflect who you are as a person and as a company.
Your executive summary tells your story. What is your style? What is your audience’s style? The tone of this document should match the tone of your marketing material and your company.
Avoid clichés and hyperbole, as they come off as inauthentic and can rub readers the wrong way. Clichés tend to not match the reality of your situation, as they can overpromise on what you can actually deliver. Is your company the best in its category among all competitors? What determines “best”? Ensure any claims you make are specific and measurable.
The executive summary is a part of your marketing plan, so remember that its purpose is to market your business. Think about how you can position what you’ve written in the marketing plan in a concise way that will compel the reader to continue reading. Include a brief explanation of the most important and interesting information, as well as the key takeaways, that will matter to the reader.
Your marketing plan should change over time, and so should your executive summary. Include any updates to your products, services or technologies, or any significant changes in your market and competition. For example, COVID-19 forced many companies to change their marketing strategies and business practices. Your executive summary should reflect the changes your company has made to its marketing plans to deal with the changes in the market.
These templates will help get you started on drafting your marketing plan’s executive summary:
A marketing plan executive summary gives readers an overview of your company’s market opportunity and how you intend to pursue your target audience, in detail and with financial projections whenever possible. With these tips and templates, you can put together a detailed marketing plan executive summary that articulates the value proposition of your business and a clear plan to turn leads and prospects into customers.
At the opening of the report, remind the reader that you will give more detailed recommendations later, but don't give too much away or risk losing their attention. Make them want more. Build a profile of your target customer. Write a short character study based on key demographics and market research. This can be bullet points of what age he is, education, average household income, spending habits, and where and how they are most likely to purchase products like yours. This data will help you determine the dollar value of acquiring each customer. Put this character study in the middle of the strategy document, after you have identified and introduced your marketing channel.
Research your competitors. Identify what other successful companies are already doing in the space and how successful they are. Identify areas of opportunity and weaknesses within their specific vertical. Identify what tactics a competitor is using to gain a competitive advantage. Assess their distribution channels, and compare and contrast their prices with yours. Use comparison tools and resources such as SpyFu, Alexa, Compete, and Google Trends to track important keywords used by your competition and monitor their traffic. Ask your existing customers what they like or don't like about your competitor. Write these analyses and findings into block summaries, inserting them after the target customer study.
Determine your brand strategy and choose which channels, indirect and direct, to focus on. Different distribution channels affect the perception of your brand. For example, selling food products in an organic, specialty food market creates a brand identity different from selling them in a chain supermarket. Or direct marketing though coupon mailers might be more impactful and cost-effective than buying a late-night infomercial slot. Write down the pros and cons of both direct and indirect channels. Rank them from top to bottom in importance to your brand, crossing out the factors that are non-essential. Once you have weighed all factors and narrowed the list down as far as it can go, you have found your marketing channel. Place brand strategy after your competitor research.
Write down lists with different pricing and cross-reference them until you find the best "sweet spot". Determine if your prices are able to increase or decrease through different distribution channels and still stay profitable. Depending on cost of shipping, retailer discounts and other markups, selling your products via traditional retailers might cause prices to balloon, whereas going through wholesalers could keep shipping costs down while still increasing bulk order volume. Writing these metrics down on paper gives you a visual aid and helps pinpoint the optimal pricing model for your product. Place pricing models at the end of the main body of the strategy document.
Now summarize. Based on the detailed information presented in the report, state your strategy recommendations, in manageable paragraphs with bold headings. These should compress and make linear sense of all the data, clearly and concisely explaining how the channel distribution marketing campaign will be executed based upon target customers, brand strategy, competitors, pricing, etc. (If necessary, include an appendix of links, supplementary charts, graphs and info-graphics culled from the text body to further visually illustrate the document.) The final closing statement is the most important, because it sticks with the reader the most.
A marketing plan identifies your target audience, the most effective channels on which to engage with them, and analytical insights to guide future strategy.
Businesses need a comprehensive marketing plan to coordinate their campaigns and properly measure their impact.
Marketing is a cumulative effort, and a unified plan maximizes the value of every campaign toward a cohesive strategy.
This article is for small business owners looking to build an effective marketing plan that achieves higher engagement and fuels business growth.
Every successful company needs a well-thought-out business plan to outline its course of action. A marketing strategy is one key part of that plan. It spells out critical information, including how a business will distinguish itself from competitors and what the team will aim to achieve.
While marketing plans don’t always produce immediate results, they are still a crucial aspect of a business plan and should be given a considerate amount of attention. A complete and effective marketing strategy can reveal opportunities through new audience segments, changes in pricing strategy, or by differentiating the brand from the competition.
Here’s how to create an effective marketing plan for your business.
How to develop a business marketing plan
A focused marketing plan sets two goals. The first is to maintain engagement and customer loyalty, and the second is to capture market share within a specific audience segment of your target audience.
Your marketing plan outlines the strategies you’ll use to achieve both goals and the specific actions your marketing team will employ, such as the specific outreach campaigns, over which channels they will occur, the required marketing budget, and data-driven projections of their success.
Marketing is a science-driven commitment that typically requires months of data to refine campaigns, and an interconnected marketing plan keeps your business committed to its long-term goals.
All marketing guidelines will circle back to the four P’s: product, price, place, and promotion. The following tips are starting points that will ingrain the habit of continually returning to these four P’s.
Marketing campaigns should not be considered individual functions. Marketing is the story of your brand as told to customers; like any narrative, its tone and characters should remain consistent. An executive summary details your marketing goals for the next year and helps tie each campaign together.
When establishing your marketing goals, they should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound—or SMART. These goals should work together to achieve both internal and external harmony, telling a consistent story that informs customers of your exact message while building on its previous chapters.
For example, you may set a SMART goal to increase your company’s social media traffic by 15% in a 90-day time frame and plan to achieve this by creating four relevant, informative, and high-quality posts per week on each platform, using your company’s brand kit.
Before you write a marketing plan, you need to find and understand your niche. Ask yourself who the specific demographic is that you’re targeting. For example, if your business sells 30-minute meals, then those who work traditional 9-to-5 jobs are likely in your market. Study that group of individuals to understand their struggles and learn how your business can solve the problem.
FYI: Targeting your audience can drastically improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and help you avoid wasting resources on fruitless campaigns.
Inbound marketing utilizes internal tools, such as content marketing, social media activity, and search engine optimization (SEO), to attract a customer’s attention primarily through online communication. Content marketing can include informative blog posts, interviews, podcasts with relevant industry figures, or supplementary guides on how to best use your product. For example, if you sell cooking supplies, consider posting several fun recipes around the holidays that your tools can help prepare.
Each of these strategies empowers the others in a loop to achieve greater customer attention. A strong content offering can improve your search engine ranking, which brings more people to your website and social pages. You can then share those developed content pieces with a wider audience, which will again improve your search engine rankings. All of this can be done without the expense of a famous endorser or commercial advertising campaign.
No matter how original your product or service may be, there is always competition for your target customer’s dollar. Small business personnel seldom take the time to study their competitors in depth or pinpoint companies outside their industry that are just as capable of luring customers away. Knowing who your competitors are, their core competitive advantages, and how they might respond to your offerings—like price cuts or increased communication—helps you devise strategies to combat such losses.
By seeking out these competitors, you can develop ways to differentiate your business by providing consumers with the things they may be lacking from your competition. Observe how your competitors operate to find ways in which you can stand out and steer your target audience toward your business.
Did you know? According to SmallBizGenius, 19% of small businesses fail because of their competitors.
Ultimately, your brand – and what it symbolizes for customers – is your strongest advantage. You should be able to write a simple declarative sentence of how you will meet customer needs and beat the competition. The best positioning statements focus on solving a problem for the customer in a way that promotes the best value.
When implementing a strategy, consider the marketing budget you will allot. Marketing requires money for various reasons, including paid promotions, marketing software, events and outsourced costs. Consider your budget when creating the plan so that there is money available to spend on marketing tactics to achieve your goals.
While drafting the plan and evaluating your course of action, note the estimated cost, assets, and time required to achieve the stated goals; this will help when it comes time to set the actual calculated budget. Any goals that you create should be realistically achievable within the budget you have set.
When developing your marketing plan, you should know why a customer would use your product, differentiate your brand from competitors, and audit your product offering and message to ensure consistency.
Channels to include in your marketing plan
Once you know the elements of your plan, the next step is to develop the blueprint of how you will reach your target customers. Aside from traditional print and broadcast media, here are three digital marketing channels that many business owners utilize.
Social media is an essential part of businesses’ marketing plans, because every type of customer is on some type of platform – such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. You may feel overwhelmed at the possibilities, but focus on the sites that can benefit your business the most.
Brett Farmiloe, founder of internet marketing company Markitors, advised companies starting out in social media to get to know their customers and the platforms they use.
“Figure out where your customers are spending their time, and set up shop on those platforms,” he told Business News Daily. “Develop a content strategy that can be executed internally, [and then] execute your strategy by posting branded content on your selected platforms.”
Though email marketing is not as new as social media marketing, it is an effective and popular choice for small business owners. Companies can implement email marketing techniques in many ways, including newsletters, promotional campaigns and transactional emails. For instance, Mailchimp and Constant Contact help companies manage their email drip campaigns.
Farmiloe added to set your email marketing efforts apart from the others by segmenting your markets.
“Not all subscribers want to receive the same blast,” he said. “Smart email marketers take the time to segment subscribers at the outset, and then continue to segment based on subscriber activity. Through segmentation, companies reduce the amount of unsubscribes, increase open rates and, most importantly, increase the amount of actions taken from an email send.”
The popularity of smartphones and tablets has changed how companies target consumers. Since people have these devices with them nearly all the time, companies are looking to implement strategies that reach customers on their gadgets.
“Mobile marketing is interruptive,” Farmiloe said. “It’s because of this power that a marketer has to let the consumer determine how and when to receive marketing material. That’s why almost every app comes with the option to turn notifications on or off. The consumer has to hold the power with mobile marketing.”
Use digital marketing channels – such as social media, email and mobile – to reach customers, but only after researching each channel in depth and developing a strategy to capture consumers’ interest.
Monitoring results
Well-defined budgets, goals and action items – with appropriate personnel assigned to each – can make your marketing plan a reality. Think about how much you’re willing to spend, the outcomes you expect and the necessary tasks to achieve those outcomes.
Analytical tools that track customer behavior and engagement rates can serve as a helpful guide for your marketing strategy. Unlike billboards or commercials, digital channels allow you to assess each step of the customer journey and gain insights on the individual patterns and intent of prospects. Intention can soon develop into prediction, empowering your marketing team to develop campaigns that consistently reach target audiences at the right time.
You can find more tips for measuring your marketing ROI here.
Jordan Beier and Adryan Corcione contributed to the writing and reporting in this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.