Business marketing plan guide

Discover 7 key steps to creating an effective marketing plan for your business

How will this Business marketing plan guide help me and my business?

A marketing plan is a bit like a job description for your company... Everyone should have one, but they’re often not fit-for-purpose, out-of-date and reviewed infrequently. Research has shown that companies with a plan succeed more than those without a plan.

Without a marketing plan, you won't have the essential foundations to exploit digital marketing.

As this guide shows, a marketing plan provides focus, defines the approaches to grow your market share, expand products or move into new markets and ensures you are on track. We recommend frameworks and examples to review your strategic capabilities and options to create a well-considered plan.

What does the Business marketing plan guide cover?

We believe it's essential that detailed digital marketing plans are integrated and aligned with your overall business and marketing plan. Yet our research shows that many businesses don't plan and don't have a plan for marketing as a whole or digital channels.

To help our members plan more effectively we created this guide and the accompanying examples to help members create or review a top-level marketing plan for their business.

In this guide, Annmarie Hanlon, an experienced Chartered Marketer and an Associate Profession in Digital and AI Marketing at UCL with over 25 years experience across many business sectors, and Amelia Cooper, Head of Content at Smart Insights with over 10 years of digital marketing experience, give you clear steps and recommendations to follow to create your own plan using PR Smith's SOSTAC® planning framework.

How is the guide structured?

The guide is structured around these 7 Steps:

Step 1. Situation Analysis – Understanding your customers. Showing you why customers’ insights are essential and how to capture these yourself or via a third party.
Step 2. Situation Analysis – Marketing audit: where are we now? Demonstrating how to define your market, calculate the market value and build your Value Proposition.
Step 3. Objectives – Create sustainable objectives: Where do we want to go? It’s easy to create general goals, it’s harder to develop SMART objectives. This step takes you through the process of crafting objectives that focus on more than numbers.
Step 4. Strategy: Segmenting your customer base. If you already have objectives and if you’re ready to segment your business, start the guide
here. This step looks at the key strategic initiatives your business can take and how to form customer segments.
Step 5. Strategy: Targeting new customers and positioning your business
Growing a business involves finding new customers, this may be different segments or markets. This step shows you how to explore new markets and create marketplace strategies.
Step 6. Tactics and Action – Create your marketing action plan
The key to making it happen is to create a detailed marketing action plan. This step shows different models of marketing management, how to create an action plan and brief an agency.
Step 7. Control – Monitor, manage and improve. The final step is about managing the process, monitoring action and measuring results. This chapter shares more tips and checklists for you to apply directly to your business.

Resource Details

Authors: Dr Annmarie Hanlon and Amelia Cooper
Format: Downloadable PDF document

About the authors

Dr Annmarie Hanlon

Dr Annmarie Hanlon is a Chartered Marketer and an Associate Professor in Digital and AI Marketing at UCL within the Global Business School for Health. Previously she was the Course Director of MSc Marketing and Leadership at Cranfield University. She is an experienced academic with a strong teaching portfolio in digital marketing.

Before joining academia, she worked in consultancy for 25 years. As an early adopter of technology and ‘online marketing’ she has led digital strategy and planning projects across Europe, in sectors including healthcare and IT, legal and financial, software and manufacturing.

Annmarie has written several SAGE textbooks including Digital Marketing, Digital Business and The Digital Marketing Planner. She is co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Digital Marketing, and The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Marketing. Her textbooks are adopted in nearly 30 countries by over 100 universities and are the leading textbooks in SAGE’s digital topic collections.

Amelia Cooper

Amelia Cooper is Head of Content at Smart Insights. She is responsible for managing the paid member content library and e-learning resources, as well as strategic planning to ensure customers get the most from their memberships. She is a University of Southampton and the Chartered Institute of Marketing graduate with over 10 years’ experience in digital marketing, specializing in content marketing.