What is a Marketing Plan, and Why is it Important?

It details things like promotional strategies, content marketing approaches, and how you will measure and track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Essentially, it’s a roadmap for achieving marketing goals like increasing sales or brand awareness. As such, it should reflect alignment with these broader business objectives.

We just referred to marketing goals and business objectives within the same paragraph, so does that mean a marketing plan is the same as a business plan?

No, they serve as different functions. Let’s explain.

A business plan is a broader blueprint for starting or buying a venture. It covers everything from financial plans to your overarching business strategy: how you plan to make money, what you plan to produce, analysis of the market and the competition, etc.

A marketing plan is narrower in scope. It zooms in on how you plan to promote and market your products and services.

So, in a business plan, you’d expect to see goals for revenue, staffing, and commercial real estate expansions. In a marketing plan, these would be irrelevant and confusing since the focus would be on marketing concepts, such as brand positioning, market research, and promotional strategies that support your business goals.

Think of the marketing plan as an action plan dedicated to growth marketing and brand awareness. It outlines your company’s:

• Marketing channels
• Target customers
• Marketing mix
• Content strategies

Within each of these sections, you’ll provide clear steps for achieving a competitive advantage. It’s always helpful to remember that other brands compete for your target audience’s attention. Marketing plans are about how you plan to win that attention.

Together, both documents guide your business essentials: the marketing plan ensures you’re reaching the right audience effectively, while the business plan ensures the organisation’s direction, resources, and infrastructure align with long-term success.

Now, just when you’re getting the hang of things, let’s throw another couple of terms at you: marketing strategy and marketing campaign. These often get confused with the marketing plan itself, so let’s explore how these terms differ and relate to each other.

A marketing strategy outlines the overall approach and high-level vision for achieving marketing goals. The marketing plan details the specific tactics and actions you’ll use to execute the strategy.

Understanding these three elements helps you and your team know exactly which document or discussion you’re referencing in meetings.

You can then set proper expectations and reporting methods to demonstrate the success of your overall marketing initiatives.

Modern marketers can get mixed up with their own jargon. With clarity comes cohesion. If you are clear on everybody’s roles and the timelines as they relate to each component — strategy, plan, and campaign — things tend to go a lot smoother towards better business outcomes.

A well-developed marketing plan serves as a fantastic reference point for everybody on the marketing team and beyond. It helps you stay organised and on track with specific objectives.

It clarifies your business goals and breaks them into smaller, more manageable marketing activities. By aligning tactics, budgets, and timelines, you can prioritise initiatives that yield the highest return.

When the whole team has visibility and is aware of your comprehensive marketing plan, this leads to better collaboration.

Each team member sees where their work fits into a bigger picture. Not only that, you'll find it easier to track outcomes and measure success against the defined metrics set out in your plan.

Ultimately, a marketing plan is an essential tool that provides the foundation for growth and sustainability for the business. Without it, you risk an aimless marketing department. There might be a marketing strategy, but there’s no plan of action to put it into place.

The term ‘marketing plan’ is a bit old-school these days since most businesses will now specialise in specific types of marketing plans. Depending on your objectives, you can select from a variety of plan frameworks:

The aspect of a marketing plan that focuses on online channels, such as social media marketing, SEO marketing, email campaigns, and paid ads. Obviously, twenty years ago, this would be down the list of priorities.

Now, a digital marketing plan is essential thanks to the fact we all live so much of our lives on the internet. This plan sets out how you will drive website traffic and how you’ll manage online brand positioning.

A content marketing plan outlines how you plan to educate and inform your audience about your brand and its products/services. It is centred on creating blog posts, videos, e-books, or podcasts to engage audiences.

You’ll include a content calendar, editorial guidelines, and metrics like time on page or download rates. A key part of content marketing is SEO marketing, where you aim to create content to boost visibility in search engines.

This is specifically geared toward introducing a new product or service. Product marketers use it to outline promotional strategies (like email teasers, event marketing, or influencer partnerships) and set a timeline for demand generation.

A traditional marketing plan refers to how you plan to use offline channels like print ads, broadcasts, or direct mail campaigns — particularly during the early stages of account-based marketing outreach. These older-school channels can still be effective, especially for localised campaigns or for audiences who are less active online.

This kind of plan dives deep into platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok, defining posting schedules, audience targeting, and paid advertising strategies.

Think of this sequence as you set about creating a marketing plan:

1. Research
2. Set clear objectives
3. Outline how you’ll reach the objectives

Here’s a step-by-step guide that walks you through creating a marketing plan. Note that we won’t go into the specialist plans like social media or content marketing. Instead, we’ll keep things general.

Begin by understanding your target customer segments and current market trends. Perform a competitive analysis so you understand what other brands in your space are doing. Get to grips with the pain points of your audience and how your product or service can address them. You’ll build buyer personas here; in-depth profiles of your typical customers.

This is a vital piece of messaging that will form the heart of your marketing: how does your offering solve a problem for the audience? And don’t just assume an intuitive answer. This requires research. Social listening tools and Google Analytics can help you gather insights and define your competitive advantage.

It’s vital to consider how you’ll translate your broader business development goals into marketing objectives. This is a critical element of your marketing plan.

For example, if you need to increase market share as part of your business goals, set metrics like “boost website traffic by 30% this quarter” or “gain 1,000 new email subscribers by year’s end.”

You’ll notice these objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound). Ensuring your objectives are SMART ensures you eliminate vagueness or unrealistic elements as you define your marketing goals, instead setting yourself up for success.

Decide which marketing channels align best with your audience and objectives. Remember, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that works best across all business types. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, targeting Gen Z or boomers or any other differential, your optimal channels are going to look different.

This could include digital marketing tactics (social media ads, SEO and keyword research, content marketing) or more traditional forms (radio, direct mail, local events). Even within these categories, there is scope for hugely different approaches.

For example, within social media, LinkedIn and TikTok offer two very different prospects in terms of lead generation and the types of content that work well on each platform.

Once you’ve landed on the ideal channels for your business context, plan your content strategies, promotional calendars, and marketing materials accordingly.

Allocate resources based on priorities. Again, there is no blanket advice that works here. Your decisions will depend on your circumstances and what you aim to achieve.

For example, if driving growth through social media ads is essential, factor in ad spend, design costs, and staff hours.

Create a timetable for your various campaigns (be realistic, taking into account team size and bandwidth), ensuring each major initiative has defined start and end dates.

This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s one that many busy marketing teams don’t spend enough time clarifying. It’s essential that everyone is on the same page when it comes to who does what within your marketing plan. Identify who will execute different tasks and make this as specific as possible.

Perhaps the marketing manager coordinates the campaign plan while a separate marketing team member handles content creation. Another team member might be assigned to edit content as part of their allocated responsibilities.

Marketing team members often have broad skill sets and can pitch in with various tasks. While this is a nice-to-have in terms of available talent, it means you do need to be precise about each individual’s duties so there is no stepping on toes or tasks missed.

Clarifying roles prevents confusion and ensures accountability — after all, you all need to be working efficiently together toward the broader marketing objectives.

Launch your marketing initiatives knowing this is only the start of ongoing work. You’ll need to keep an eye on key performance indicators (KPIs), as laid out in your marketing plan. Track KPIs related to:

• Lead generation/customer acquisition
• Conversion rates
• Brand engagement levels

Monitoring your work doesn’t have to be difficult; check to see what is working and tweak accordingly over time. The marketing plan provides the framework for this, establishing which benchmarks you should be aiming for to determine ‘success’.

For example, if something isn’t performing (like a low click-through rate on certain channels), revisit your strategy and pivot. Conducting milestone reviews — monthly or quarterly — can help you respond to changing market trends. This flexibility to change things up will help you optimise results.

These guiding steps will help you create a comprehensive marketing plan. It should achieve the following:

• Provide a sense of clear direction
• Help keep your team coordinated
• Help you measure what’s working in your campaigns
• Empower you to iterate for better outcomes as needed

It’s often the case that a company’s actual marketing plan is kept behind closed doors. We don’t get to see the inner workings of a marketing department.

However, we can make educated guesses about their planning by looking at their public-facing activities and how they align with broader objectives.

In other words, we might not see the exact tactics, budgets, and timelines laid out in a private internal marketing document, that said, there are themes we see in their marketing activities that offer clues.

By observing these recurring patterns, we can infer how well they execute on their goals, which in turn demonstrates the value of a well-structured marketing plan.

Let’s check out a few marketing plan examples.

Boost Juice is famous for fresh juices and smoothies, but its success comes from a well-thought-out marketing plan that goes beyond the products themselves.

The company’s marketing focuses heavily on social media competitions. They often invite customers to share fun, healthy-living content for a chance to win rewards.

This is an example of using UGC (user-generated content) to build brand awareness, leveraging the idea that modern customers want to see authentic content from their peers. It builds a genuine community around the products and the brand's health-conscious philosophy without it feeling manufactured.

The company also runs a popular loyalty program through ‘Vibe,’ an easy-to-use, accessible app offering free drinks or upgrades after a certain number of purchases. This emphasis on repeat business alongside the cheeky, energetic branding has helped Boost Juice maintain a strong presence in a competitive drinks market.

Founded in Australia, Canva has quickly become a global sensation in the graphic design space. Its company marketing strategy and plan centres on solving a common pain point: making design accessible to non-designers.

The marketing team wants to present Canva as an accessible tool, something anybody can use to create great-looking flyers, presentations, teaching materials, websites, and more with little design skills.

So, how do they support this?

They regularly create educational blog articles and short social media tutorials that show how anyone — from small business owners to students to teachers — can produce professional-looking visuals with minimal fuss.

By connecting these tutorials to easy-to-use templates, Canva effectively addresses user challenges in real-time. They also engage in influencer partnerships and sponsor creative communities, leveraging word-of-mouth buzz.

Again, many modern brands are looking for ways within marketing plans to build a community around their brand as a way to foster loyalty. This integrated digital marketing approach positions Canva as a one-stop solution for quick, compelling design.

Bunnings is a household name in Australia thanks to a distinctive marketing plan that combines a friendly in-store experience with ongoing community engagement. Much of its marketing focuses on creating the notion of your local neighbourhood DIY store while achieving this on a national level.

One way in which the team achieves this is through their carefully crafted in-store experience. Bunnings offers workshops, demonstrations, and kids’ activities, encouraging hands-on learning. This interactive element helps differentiate them from online-only competitors and encourages return visits.

Weekend “sausage sizzles” at store entrances have become an Aussie tradition, tying the brand to local fundraisers and community events. This fosters goodwill while driving foot traffic.

This friendly, outgoing, community-driven branding is consistent throughout the whole brand experience. Go into any Bunnings across the country, and you’ll see the brand show up in the same way. Familiar staff aprons. The iconic jingle. They reinforce their brand recognition — an intelligent move since the brand is known for its community spirit.

And underpinning the whole notion that they are ‘for’ the customers: a commitment to value. Their tagline, “Lowest prices are just the beginning,” reflects a consistent pricing strategy that builds consumer trust.

Through these combined tactics, Bunnings reveals a marketing plan dedicated to delivering value, nurturing community ties, and standing out as the go-to home improvement store in Australia.

A well-thought-out marketing plan ensures you achieve three core things:

1. You understand your audience
2. You set specific objectives
3. You choose the best strategies for reaching them

Let’s roll out the cliche: failing to plan is planning to fail. Without your marketing plan, you can get lost as you try to build your brand awareness and drive sales, guiding how you allocate budget and resources and stick to timelines.

And, of course, there are tools available to help create marketing plans and monitor them as you go.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers tools to manage campaigns, track performance, and engage customers across every touchpoint — so you can keep refining your marketing plan and grow your business with confidence.

What’s more, you can leverage the latest AI advancements to help optimise every step of your marketing campaigns, letting you benefit from marketing automation tools and even deeper audience insights.