How Is The Insanely Simple One-Page Marketing Plan Template

Every business needs a marketing plan. It helps guide your marketing efforts and keeps you on track to hit your marketing objectives.

The problem is that creating one can get complicated, really complicated.

It’s not so bad if you’re familiar with marketing jargon and acronyms like SWOT and KPI. But if you’ve never created one before and want to hit the ground running, it can feel like you need an MBA in marketing just to get started.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a roadmap for executing your marketing strategy over a given period of time, usually a year.

How to create a one-page marketing plan

Start by making a copy of the marketing plan template. You’ll see that it revolves around answering four simple questions. Let’s go through how to answer these.

Question 1. Who are you targeting?

If you’re creating a marketing plan, you should already have done your market research and developed your marketing strategy. And that means you should already have a pretty good idea of who you’re targeting. However, it’s helpful to reiterate this in your marketing plan to keep you focused and on track.

For example, if we were putting together a marketing plan for Ahrefs, we might put:

SEO professionals and website owners who want to drive more traffic to their websites.

This is a very simplified version of who we’re targeting, but it’s enough to set us on the right track.

Question 2. What are your objectives?

You’re not creating a marketing plan for the fun of it. You’re creating one to map out how you’ll (hopefully) achieve some marketing objectives. So you need to define what those objectives are.

These can be pretty much anything you like, but they should ideally be SMART.

Unfortunately, this is one piece of marketing jargon we have to tackle, but it’s pretty straightforward and just means that your objectives should be:

Specific. They should clearly state the desired outcome.
Measurable. They should be something you can track the success of.
Achievable. They should be realistic.
Relevant. They should align with your overall business objectives.
Timely. They should have a time frame attached to them.

Question 3. How will you achieve your objectives?

Placing goalposts is easy, but scoring a goal is hard. That’s why you now need to get specific and think about the tactics you’ll use to achieve your marketing objectives and how much they’ll cost.

Remember that your tactics should always align with your marketing strategy and objectives. Don’t just pluck them out of thin air or opt for shiny, new tactics. Consider what tactics align with your marketing strategy and go from there.

Question 4. When will you do everything?

Marketing plans cover a specific period of time, so it might seem like the answer to this question is obvious. If you’re creating a 12-month marketing plan, then the tactics you outlined in the previous step need to be done in that time frame.

Although this is true, simply having a list of things to do over the course of a year isn’t very actionable. It’s better to break things down into manageable chunks so you can track progress throughout the year.

How much you break things down is up to you, but a quarterly plan is a good starting point.