Business marketing plan guide

Create a solid marketing plan to grow a 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 Everyone should have one, but they’re often not fit-for-purpose, out-of-date and reviewed infrequently.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 and to create a well-considered plan.

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 with over 20 years experience across many business sectors, gives you clear steps and recommends to follow to create your own plan using PR Smith’s SOSTAC® planning framework.

Resource Details

About the author

Annmarie Hanlon

Annmarie Hanlon

Annmarie Hanlon is the Smart Insights expert commentator on online and offline marketing strategies for business. Annmarie is the MD of Evonomie and author of Quick Win Marketing, and co-author of Quick Win Digital Marketing. She runs social media workshops in the UK and Ireland and shares marketing tips and news in her blog, B2B Marketing. You can follow Annmarie on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

What does the Business marketing planning guide include?

This resource provides you with:

Seven steps to help create your own plan from understanding what you want to achieve to creating a strategy and implementing your marketing action plan
Clear explanations and examples of the key concepts like segmentation, targeting, growth options and positioning
Simple planning frameworks to help you structure your plan and review your options.
Recommendations and best practice tips to create your plan

Recommended content: Example marketing plan template