How to create a one-page marketing plan

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.

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.

 Here’s what that might look like for our tactic of rewriting 80 low-performing blog posts:

This might seem like a small and insignificant change, but it means that we can review our progress every quarter to keep things on track.  

 For example, if we find that only 10 posts have been rewritten after the first quarter, then we might need to intervene and optimize workflows to ensure we meet our objectives by the end of the year.

 Planning tactics on a quarterly basis also help you to allocate resources more efficiently.

 Final thoughts

 Given that most marketing plans run dozens or even hundreds of pages, our one-page plan is admittedly very oversimplified. But that’s the point. 

 It helps you get the basics down on paper as fast as possible without having to contend with endless marketing jargon and acronyms.