Marketing plan: Types, examples, and how to write one

Was there ever a time when marketing teams didn’t need to move fast? Of course, we know today that timelines only accelerate, whether aided by AI or in response to your competitive landscape. The tools that marketers have at their disposal can enable amazing personalization for various market segments, but reaching holistic targets across a marketing team still requires careful upfront planning—as well as the ability to make quick shifts based on real-time data once your plan is put into action.

Many marketing leaders are increasingly held to revenue numbers over siloed metrics collected across a proliferation of tools. Individual teams can say: “Here’s what worked well,” but leadership and business owners want to know: “What will move the needle across the entire organization?” Despite the technology available, only 25% of marketing leaders reported having high visibility into return on investment (ROI), which was down 33% from the year prior. This underscores the importance of implementing a unified solution for marketing planning across an organization, which serves as your central source of truth.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan outlines your marketing objectives, target audience, strategies, tactics, and budget within a specific period of time. You can think of it as a map that shows how you'll promote your products or services to customers and achieve defined business goals.

Similar to a modern-day navigation system, marketing plans guide you toward a desired destination, identify the best route to get there based on the best information you have on hand, and track real-time progress along the way. Creating a marketing plan represents a strategy for aligning your team, allocating resources, and measuring success against benchmarks.

Marketing plan vs. business plan

A business plan is a comprehensive document that covers all aspects of a company, from operations to finances, management to marketing, and more. Business plans show how all teams within a company can rally toward a shared longer-term goal. 

Marketing plans are a subset of an overall business plan, focused on how marketing teams will attract and retain customers. These plans are more focused on marketing tactics and campaigns, usually over a limited period of time, and are more operational in nature.

Marketing plan vs. marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy represents the high-level, longer-term approach to bringing products and services to market for your target audiences. A strategy defines your value proposition, target market, and positioning—the competitive advantage to "what” you’re selling and “why” it matters. 

A marketing plan breaks down the tactical execution of your strategy—outlining "when" and "how" you’ll market to prospects. A marketing plan breaks down your strategy into specific campaigns, timelines, and budgets.

Purpose of a marketing plan

Marketing plans serve several important purposes: 

Types of marketing plans

Chances are that your organization will have many types of marketing plans in place, at different levels of granularity. These might include:

What’s included in a marketing plan?

An effective marketing plan typically includes an executive summary, mission statement, market analysis, target audience, competitive analysis, marketing objectives and KPIs, and details around scope, resources, budget, and timelines and milestones.

The depth of each section will vary based on whether you’re a small business or an enterprise, and the complexity of the scope, but these elements form the foundation of effective marketing planning that addresses key business initiatives.

How to write a marketing plan

Marketing plans share some areas of overlap with the research that goes into building a product strategy and roadmap.

1. Conduct market research

Start by gathering data about your industry, market share, market trends, and growth projections. Use both primary research (surveys and interviews about customer needs) and secondary research (industry reports, competitor analysis) to create a comprehensive picture of your market landscape. If you’re attempting market entry with a new product, this will be a more in-depth analysis than introducing a new feature for an existing product. You may also want to perform a SWOT analysis.

2. Define your target audience

Create detailed buyer personas that include demographics, psychographics, pain points, purchase behavior, and preferred communication channels across your customer base. The more specific you can be, the more targeted and effective your marketing efforts will become.

3. Analyze your competition

Identify direct and indirect competitors, analyze their marketing strategies, pricing, messaging, and market positioning. Look for gaps in their approach that represent opportunities for your business to stand out.

AI-powered marketing management software makes this process faster and more reliable. With Airtable’s marketing tools, AI agents can automatically generate a competitive analysis, benchmarking your performance against leading rivals and surfacing real-time insights from the web. This empowers your team to continuously monitor the competitive landscape and quickly act on market shifts or emerging opportunities.

4. Set SMART marketing objectives

Setting clear goals is imperative, and you can do this by using the SMART framework: define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. Instead of "increase brand awareness," aim to "increase brand awareness by 25% among the target audience by the close of Q2."

5. Determine your marketing mix

Plan your approach across the four Ps: Product (features, benefits, positioning), Price (pricing strategy, promotions), Place (distribution channels), and Promotion (advertising, public relations, content marketing, etc.).

6. Choose your channels

Sometimes it’s not possible to be everywhere at once. Select channels based on where your target audience spends time and that align with your budget and capacity. Consider both digital marketing (social media marketing plans, email, search engine optimization or SEO) and traditional methods (print, radio/podcasts, events).

7. Create a content strategy

Plan content for each channel. This includes: what content you'll create, when it’s published or live, and how it supports your objectives. Include blog posts, social media content, videos, whitepapers, and other materials that provide value to your audience.

8. Allocate your budget and resources

Efficiently allocate your marketing resources—both budget and talent—across channels, campaigns, and timelines to maximize impact. Factor in costs for advertising, content creation, tools, and external support such as contractors or freelancers. Make sure to account for both fixed expenses and variable campaign spend.

With AI-powered marketing platforms like Airtable, you can streamline this process—automatically assigning the right people to the right projects and ensuring budgets are optimized for the best results.

9. Create a detailed timeline

Develop a detailed calendar showing when each marketing activity will launch, run, and conclude. Include key milestones, campaign deadlines, and seasonal considerations that affect your industry. In this way, your marketing plan becomes your action plan.

With AI-powered content calendars, you can go a step further, automatically assigning pieces to writers, sending status updates, and keeping your team aligned at every stage.

10. Plan for measurement and optimization

You’ll reference your marketing plan throughout the duration of a campaign or timeframe, but at the planning stages, it needs to already be clear how you’ll measure success. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) for each objective and campaign. Establish regular review periods to assess performance, identify what's working, and make necessary adjustments to improve results.

Sample marketing plan

See how these elements all come to life in this marketing plan template from Airtable. 

The template includes sections for campaign planning, budget tracking, content calendars, and performance metrics—providing a practical framework you can customize for your specific needs.

Marketing plan examples (with templates)

Content marketing plan 

This content marketing pipeline template helps you manage the entire content lifecycle from ideation to publication. Track content ideas, assign responsibilities, manage editorial calendars, and measure content performance all in one place.

Try the template

Event marketing plan

This event marketing template helps you manage everything from initial planning through post-event follow-up. Track vendors, budgets, attendees, promotional activities, and ROI measurement.

Try the template

Social media plan

This social media planning and design template helps you plan content, schedule posts, track engagement, and maintain brand consistency across channels. Post consistently across engagement platforms while keeping aligned to broader marketing campaigns.

Try the template

How Airtable makes marketing planning easy

Airtable offers many marketing solutions and templates to take some of the work out of marketing planning. With pre-built templates for everything from content calendars to campaign management, you can start with proven frameworks rather than building from scratch.

Airtable’s collaborative features allow your marketing team to work together in real-time, track progress, set goals, update timelines, and share feedback. Custom views let different team members see the information most relevant to their role—for example, marketers can focus on campaign details while executives get high-level dashboards. Even better, Airtable integrates with many of the marketing tools your team already uses, from social media schedulers to email marketing platforms, but keeps all marketing plan details in one place.