Marketing plan template: 6 downloads you can try for free

An effective marketing plan keeps your team focused on vital marketing objectives. For example, it can:

• Outline strategies for reaching your target audience
• Define how you’ll allocate resources
• Establish metrics so you can track progress

Since writing a marketing plan from scratch is time-consuming, it’s faster to start from a marketing plan template. In this post, I’ve created a marketing plan template that you can download and use for free. 

I’ve also included five other templates that you can try with a free two-week trial of Wrike. These are much more powerful, helping you to plan individual parts of your marketing, such as your competitor analysis. But before I get to that, let me clarify what you should include in your marketing plan.

What should a marketing plan contain?

Entire books have been written to answer the question of what a marketing plan should contain. The most famous one is Allan Dib’s The 1-Page Marketing Plan, which I can fully recommend if you want to get into the weeds of marketing plans. 

But to summarize some of the key points, marketing plans should typically include: 

• An overview of your business
• A description of your target market and ideal customer
• Competitor research
• Which channels you’ll use to reach customers
• Which technology you’ll leverage
• A summary of how much you’ll invest and your expected return

We’ll go over all of that here. And as a bonus, since AI continues to revolutionize the world we live in, we’ll also include some ways that you can build artificial intelligence into your marketing plan. 

Business overview

Begin your marketing plan by summarizing:

1. What your business does
2. Who it serves
3. What makes your offer unique

One mistake I often see companies making is creating a value proposition that’s too broad. Trying to appeal to everyone normally means you end up appealing to nobody. For example, a marketing agency offering every online and offline marketing service under the sun is likely to be outcompeted by niche agencies that specialize in one particular aspect of marketing. 

So, don’t be afraid to spell out what makes you different! Your messaging could turn some people off, but that’s not a problem if the right customers are drawn to you. 

Here are some examples of unique selling propositions:

• You deliver results faster
• You fix a problem more slowly, but the fix is a permanent one
• Your pricing strategy is different from the rest of the market
• You offer a broader range of products than your competitors
• Your product is substantially easier to use 

Target market

Next, it’s time to go into more detail about who you’re serving. Write down:

• How big is your target market?
• Where are your target customers based?
• Are you marketing to businesses (B2B), consumers (B2C), or both?

Businesses commonly reflect on their customers’ demographics at this stage of the process. For example:

• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Marital status
• Income level

What I see less often is businesses reflecting on psychographic criteria. And yet, your customers’ opinions, priorities, personalities, and lifestyles have a huge effect on their purchasing behavior.

That’s why it’s a good idea to create buyer personas that summarize:

• Pain points
• Goals
• Challenges
• Objections
• Purchase triggers

But don’t overwhelm yourself by creating more personas than you have the resources to serve. This is especially true for startups and small businesses, who are usually better off serving only one persona, or set of overlapping personas. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from thinking about who is their ideal customer, and mapping out that person’s customer journey in as much detail as possible. 

Competitors

Unless you’re creating a product that’s completely new, it’s likely that you’ll have direct competition from other businesses. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually a good thing, because it indicates there’s a market for what you’re offering.

In your competitive analysis, outline:

• What your competitors are offering
• What parts of your solution they lack
• What parts of their solution you lack

In fast-moving industries like tech, this type of information can quickly get out of date. So, it’s important to update your market research on a regular basis. I suggest:

• Visiting your competitors’ websites every six months to see which offers they have and how they’re positioning them
• During sales calls, ask leads which other solutions they’re considering
• After a customer chooses you (or a competitor!), ask what made them choose one solution over the other

Channels

Write down a one-page overview of your strategy for each of the marketing channels you’ll be using to reach your customers. For social media, reflect on:

• Which sites are you going to be on? 
• How often are you going to post? 
• Who’s going to post? 
• What’s the voice of your brand? 
• How are you going to ensure engagement?

For content marketing, consider:

• How much content are you going to produce? 
• Who’s going to create it? 
• Where is it going to be published? 
• How are you going to decide what to produce? 
• What content formats will you use? 
• What style guide will your content follow?

For paid marketing, think about:

• Which PPC channels are you going to use?
• What types of ads will you run? 
• What’s your budget for each one? 
• How are you going to differentiate your ads to make them stand out? 

If you’re just getting started, it’s smart to choose one channel to focus on and ignore the others, just because you have limited resources. The fastest way to reach customers as an early-stage business is often through partnerships. This is because it’s more efficient to leverage an existing audience than it is to build a new one from scratch.

So, ask yourself:

• Which influencers, channels, and/or podcasts do your customers already follow? 
• How can you build relationships with those partners? 
• What incentives will you offer the partners? 
• What joint ventures will you create?

Marketing technology

Next, consider the tools you want to use in your marketing stack. For example, you might have:

• A work management platform (like Wrike) where your team can collaborate around marketing tasks and streamline their creative and strategic workflows
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software to help you keep track of your interactions with customers
• A content management system (CMS) to help you create, publish, and manage your content
• Email marketing software for cold outreach or sending newsletters
• A social media management tool that can help you schedule social media posts in advance
• Search engine optimization (SEO) software to help you select keywords and track how well you rank for them
• Analytics tools to measure how many visitors come to your website or use certain product features
• Tools to make surveys, share them with users, and analyze the results
• Graphic design software to help you develop custom images, logos, and infographics

For each tool, write down:

• How many seats (or users) you need
• How much it costs 
• Whether you want to pay monthly, yearly, or for a lifetime subscription
• Who on your team is primarily responsible for using it

Artificial intelligence (AI)

While considering your tech stack, make sure you also brainstorm how you can use AI to enhance your marketing initiatives. Here are some creative ideas I’ve seen companies use recently:

• Chatbots that welcome users to your website and answer simple questions
• Automatic A/B testing of email subject lines to maximize open rates
• Automatic segmentation of customers when they sign up for your product
• Sentiment analysis on social media
• Automatically give each new lead a quality score to help salespeople focus on the best leads
• Generative AI that can make custom illustrations from a text prompt
• An automatically generated avatar that gives a video presentation on your company’s behalf

Also read: AI project management tools for productivity and insights

Return on investment (ROI)

Finally, write down what you want to achieve financially from your marketing activities:

• How many new customers do you want to attract?
• How much revenue do you plan to generate?
• What timeframe will you be working with?

Once you’ve set marketing goals, consider how you’ll measure the impact of your efforts, and what tools you’ll use to do that. To maximize your chances of success, reflect on how you’ll allocate your marketing budget toward:

• Employees
• Contractors
• Channels
• Your tech stack — especially AI

Free marketing plan template

As you can see, writing a marketing plan from scratch is time-consuming. To help you, I’ve created the following template that includes all the elements I listed above.

You can download it for free, in whatever format that makes the most sense for you.

• • Microsoft Word
  • PDF

This is a master template that you can use to summarize your entire marketing strategy. 

Not every section will be appropriate for your business. Feel free to customize the template to your needs, and delete the bits that don’t apply to you.

Bonus: Five more marketing templates

The template I shared in the previous section is great for giving you an overview of your entire marketing strategy in one place. But what if you want to plan one individual part of your marketing in more detail?

In this section, I’ll share five more customizable templates that allow you to do exactly that. 

All these templates can be downloaded directly from Wrike.

Competitor analysis template

This is a handy template for collecting information about competitors and recording it in one central location.

• Group competitors by type (primary/ secondary, direct/indirect)
• List product features for each competitor and then use the Table view to compare features visually
• Assign each competitor to a team member and hold them accountable for updating their part of the table regularly
• Create custom request forms that make it easy to add new competitors

Click here to get this template. 

Campaign management template

Once you’ve set up individual marketing campaigns, you can use this template to manage them.

• Speed up your proofing process by commenting directly on assets and tagging colleagues with an @mention
• Add custom fields to tasks to ensure marketers and designers have all the info they need to excel
• Generate reports on KPIs like ad spend, conversion rate, and site visitors, and send those reports to management
• Use Wrike’s dynamic dashboards to track campaign performance in real time

Click here to get this template. 

Marketing calendar template

This marketing calendar template can handle simple weekly campaigns, complex annual campaigns, and everything in between!

• Use Gantt charts to help team members see when tasks are due and avoid missed deadlines
• View multiple marketing channels in one calendar
• Monitor how well the campaign is performing in a dedicated lead dashboard for you (or your agency’s clients)
• Assign each campaign its own folder and project structure

Click here to get this template.

Go-to-market template

If you’re launching a new product, this go-to-market template can help you keep track of all the moving parts. 

• Get a bird’s-eye view of your launch timeline 
• Visualize deadlines, spot scheduling conflicts, and adjust due dates as needed
• Organize your launch by phases to ensure everything is ready when it needs to be and ROI is tracked accurately 
• Deal with launch stress by identifying team members who have reached capacity and reassigning tasks where necessary

Click here to get this template. 

Social media management template

Use this social media management template to manage your social media campaigns or those of your clients.

• Pull data from all your social channels into one management platform
• Visualize campaign information by platform to see what’s working and what isn’t
• See metrics like cost-per-click at a glance
• Give tasks custom statuses like “Strategy,” “Copy,” or “Design” to show the marketing team where each task is in the process

Click here to get this template. 

How Wrike can help you make the most of your marketing plan

Have your marketing roadmap ready to go? Here are some ways Wrike can help you bring it to life.

• Use Wrike’s approval workflows to ensure any content that’s published is reviewed and edited sufficiently 
• Turn your marketing strategy into an action plan consisting of individual projects, tasks, and deadlines
• Visualize your plan using whatever view you want: Gantt, Kanban, calendar, table, and more!
• Build custom dashboards that monitor key performance indicators like leads, traffic, or conversion rate, and generate reports that show progress to executives
• Allocate budget and other resources to different parts of your marketing plan

Save time when you create your marketing plan

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when you create your marketing plan. Start from one of our templates, and you’ll save hours of headaches. 

When you’re ready to implement your plan, Wrike can help you:

• Break complex, long-term goals into individual tasks and deadlines
• Visualize your whole plan and share that vision with teammates
• Track your metrics and report progress to management
• Manage each element of your marketing plan as a project with its own calendar

Sign up for a free trial to get started today!