One Page Marketing Plan Template
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 |While a comprehensive marketing plan can be a vital component to any business plan, it’s often neglected by small business owners, online business owners and webmasters, and independent or creative professionals, for a few reasons:
- They simply don’t want to put the effort into writing a full marketing plan.
- They’re too short on time to write a comprehensive marketing plan.
- They don’t know how to write a marketing plan, and are flustered by the process.
A one page marketing plan can, in these cases, be a viable alternative to a full marketing plan, while still touching on important marketing strategy areas. This sample includes a variety of marketing areas that should be addressed. Use the following guide to help you fill out your one page marketing plan:
- Target Market - Briefly mention your target market for your company, website, product, etc., including any important demographics.
- Industry Trends - Are there any industry trends that would affect your marketing strategy (such as major growth or decline in your specific industry within certain markets)?
- Goal(s) - What is the goal of your marketing efforts? What do you want to accomplish? Make your goals specific and measureable.
- Strategies - In a general sense, how do you plan to reach your goals? These shouldn’t be specific tactics (like send a weekly newsletter), but should be broad in nature (such as increasing repeat visitor traffic, if your goal were to grow to 100,000 pageviews per day while marketing your website).
- Yearly Marketing Budget - Simply include your predetermined marketing budget, so you know what you have to work with when planning out your marketing tactics.
- Marketing Mix - Here’s where you’ll tackle the 4 Ps of Marketing.
- Product (or service) - Simply mention what your product / service is. What is it that you’re marketing? A tool? A professional service? Information?
- Price - How will the pricing model of your products/services factor into your marketing? Will you sell with a low price on a value principle? A high price to target a luxury market?
- Placement (also referred to as distribution) - Placement means where you will physically or figuratively “place” your products or services, to make them visible to your target market. Will you sell through special in-store displays? What kind of stores? Will you sell through a catalog? Your own website? Online through affiliates? etc.
- Promotion - Give a very general overview of how you intend to promote your products or services. How will you build your brand?
- Top 3 Competitors - Who are the top three competitors that you need to position yourself against? For example, if you’re an online book seller focusing on a niche of selling mysteries, Amazon.com won’t be one of your top three competitors. You’ll need to position yourself against other online booksellers in your specific niche before trying to go after the “big guys”. Keep things as realistic as possible. Who’s competing against you in the most direct sense?
- Your Strengths - What are your particular strengths which might help you position yourself against your competitors?
- Your Weaknesses - What are your weaknesses, or potential barriers to positioning yourself against your competitors? (Everyone has them.) For example, are you new to the industry? Do you have a smaller product line? etc.
- Monthly Tactics - Using the rest of your one page marketing plan as a guide, determine where your chosen marketing tactics should fit into your yearly plan. For example, using the book-selling scenario again, if there were a specific week or month focused nationally or internationally on reading or your specific niche, you might want to focus certain marketing efforts around that time (like a sale, having online chat sessions set up with select authors, etc.).
If you’re ready to kickstart your strategy planning, view and download (a .pdf file) the free one page marketing plan template.
Note: I originally published this article for the Suite101 network.
If you run a website or blog, you’ve probably heard of the typical list of marketing activities… submit your site to directories, submit your articles to article directories, submit your links to Digg, Del.icio.us, and other social media sites, target the right keyword phrases, comment on related sites and blogs, etc. However, there’s a lot more to Web promotion than simply doing what everyone else is doing, especially if you want to set your site apart from the competition.
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