Creating a Complete Marketing Plan: 23 Steps for Any Business

Welcome to the ultimate step-by-step guide to creating a marketing plan for your business.

In these 23 actionable steps, you’ll get detailed instructions, practical tips, and a full roadmap template to develop a comprehensive and effective strategy as easily as possible.

While this framework can be used for almost any real business, it's important to note that nothing is a one-size-fits-all solution if you want to do things perfectly.

Our guide considers various business types, including physical, digital, and services, but flexibility is key. Feel free to adapt the steps, add your twists, or change things up to achieve the best results for your specific situation.

Part 1 - Introduce Your Company/Brand

Here, you’ll provide a quick overview of what your company is about and how it plans to grow through marketing activities.

Step 1. Define the problem your product solves in a couple of sentences: “X happens, and that’s why Z (your product) is needed and important”.

Step 2. Describe your company in two or three sentences:

• when it launched
• who the founders are
• where it’s located
• what the mission is (mention briefly if you've already achieved something in this mission)

Step 3. In a few brief paragraphs, highlight what's special about your products or their strengths (price, quality, manufacturing process, ingredients/materials, ethical policies, etc.). Mention a couple of direct and indirect competitors, but don't do any comparisons yet.

Step 4. Describe in a few sentences what you plan to do such as launching, expanding, or diversifying your business.

Part 2 - Create a Market Overview

Doing a full market analysis might be challenging during the data research stage, especially if you don’t have some ready-to-use statistical sources. But wrapping the data into a couple of pages for your marketing plan is pretty simple.

Here is what you’ll need to do.

Step 5. Specify in a couple of paragraphs why you consider your niche scalable. This can just be a simple blog-like explanation, for example: A, B, and C are transforming, and D is emerging, which creates situation X.

Step 6. Explain in one or two paragraphs who takes part in your market. The point is to show that X (e.g., suppliers), Y (e.g., distributors), Z (e.g., retailers), etc., together build a strong market chain and infrastructure in which your company will be present.

Step 7. Write a few paragraphs highlighting the numbers from your market research, showing its growth in the past and present periods. If your product is innovative but still part of a particular market, prove there's a trend and it's growing.

Step 8. Create a subsection, for example, “Competitors,” and share details on how some of the biggest players (direct competitors or companies building a trend) perform in the market in a few paragraphs. Briefly give your thoughts on what you think their performance means for the market.

Step 8.1 (optional). If there's a specific standout niche within the market that your company will represent, create a subsection with a relevant title and provide a market overview for that niche as well, following steps 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Part 3 - Explain Your Product

After taking a closer look at the market and competitors, it's time to focus on your products and their characteristics.

Step 9. In a few short paragraphs, explain what your company does and specify what makes your products special.

Step 10. Make a bullet list naming the products that will play an important role in your marketing plan.

Step 10.1 (optional). If your business is already running and has multiple products, build your portfolio in a GE-McKinsey Matrix to show which products have the highest, medium, and lowest priority based on investments and other growth efforts.

Part 4 - Values, Vision, and Mission (Optional)

If your marketing plan includes activities that reflect the company's position on socially significant matters like ecology, safety, and equality – such as switching to 100% sustainable packaging or introducing community support programs – describe in a few paragraphs why you do what you do. Divide the explanation into two or three key values with subtitles “Commitment to Sustainability”, “Transparency in All We Do”, “Preserving Cultural Heritage,” and so on.

Finish this section with a couple of sentences highlighting a mission you want to accomplish as a business (based on your company’s values).

Part 5 - Define Segmentation and Positioning

Now that you have specified all the necessary details about the market and the products your company is going to present, it’s time to identify the third participant in the process – your customers. Here, you’ll also explain how you want your product to be perceived.

Step 11. In the "Segmentation" section, create separate bullet lists for the "Demographics" and "Customer Behavior" subsections.

The default parameters in the “Demographics” section usually include:

• Location (and other geographic criteria, if relevant to the nature of the business)
• Age
• Gender
• Family status
• Income
• Education
• Occupation
• Cultural background
• Lifestyle
• Personality

In the “Customer Behavior” subsection, include:

• Customer preferences
• Purchasing behavior
• Brand loyalty
• Buying motivation
• Customer status

Step 11.1 (optional). If there are additional details that may be important but didn’t directly fit into the bullet lists, just mention them in a dedicated paragraph, for example, “Targeting,” “Focus Market,” “Strategic Targeting,” and so on.

Step 12. In the “Positioning” section, dedicate a couple of paragraphs to describe the features and characteristics that make your product special. In contrast to what you did in Step 3, it should focus on how you want customers to perceive your brand.

For example, a startup can be seen as a solution with seamless integration to other big and popular platforms, a fitness center may be perceived as a provider of strong methodology by combining training and nutrition, and a furniture workshop can earn a reputation as a manufacturer using sustainably sourced materials.

Step 12.1 (optional but preferable). Visualize your positioning description with a competitive matrix.

Part 6 - Elaborate on the Marketing Mix

This mix is a must-have component in every marketing plan. It’s designed to provide more details on what, where, and how you’re going to sell, and how much it will cost consumers.

Step 13. Divide this part into four sections:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

These are the standard 4Ps to be elaborated in the marketing mix, whether you’re selling tangible or intangible products.

Step 14. In the “Product” section, create bullet lists with the following information:

1. Key features that prove the quality of your product (e.g., 100% non-toxic components, dermatologically tested, etc.). Online businesses can focus on features such as built-in functionality, a large database, fast onboarding, fast delivery, and so on.

2. Design elements that make your product stand out or simply be noticeable.

Concerning the design, you can proceed as follows depending on the nature of your product:

• For physical products, create two bullet lists for “Design” (of the product itself) and “Packaging.”

• For services, create a “Customer Experience” bullet list instead of “Design” and specify features of the customer journey that make it attractive.

• For digital products, the “Design” section should cover UX/UI design. Instead of “Packaging,” add a “Digital Presence & Access” section.

Step 15. Add photos, screenshots, or diagrams of your product to the subsections on design and packaging.

Step 16. In the “Price” section, write one or two paragraphs with details about product pricing and where it stands compared to your competitors.

Step 16.1 (optional). Support your information with a competitive matrix to emphasize the brand’s advantages from a pricing/quality point of view.

Step 17. In the “Place” section (“Distribution” for online businesses), describe in a few paragraphs where your company will sell the product, provide the service, or where customers will be able to access or download your digital solution. Briefly specify why you have chosen those locations or platforms.

Step 18. Divide the “Promotion” section into several subsections for each key-priority promotional channel and describe each one (e.g., events, social media, public transportation campaigns, etc.) in one or two short paragraphs as your vision.

This is where you show that you see the big picture and know what you're doing.

Part 7 - List Marketing Actions

You already created detailed information about marketing activities in Step 6. In this section, you’ll create a straightforward list of core marketing activities and tie them to objectives, tactics, and KPIs.

Step 19. Divide the upcoming marketing efforts into different types of activities and relevant subsections, such as event marketing, content marketing, loyalty programs, outdoor advertising, etc.

In each subsection, include a bullet list of:

• the objectives (e.g., to achieve X, to increase Y by X%, to launch Z)
• the tactics (e.g., discuss a partnership with a city bus company, run a series of workshops with special offers for attendees)
• the KPIs

If you're expanding your business presence, this implies that the core marketing actions will remain similar to the ones you’ve already been using. In this case, it may be reasonable to briefly describe each activity in terms of its importance and provide some positive results it has shown, instead of wrapping the data into bullet points.

As for KPIs, you can also omit them from this part and create a dedicated “KPIs” or “Evaluation” section at the end of your marketing plan, where you provide a list of criteria that will be used to measure the efficiency of your strategies (e.g., increase A by X%, achieve B). These can be both measurable and unmeasurable criteria.

Step 19.1 (optional) Support the activities you describe with visuals, if available.

Part 8 - Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Step 20. Create a standard SWOT diagram specifying your product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The only detail to keep in mind is that it's important to see the big picture in your analysis and not try to overhype your product’s chances in the market. There are always multiple threats and weak spots for any business. That’s why you develop a marketing plan – to challenge those obstacles directly or indirectly.

Part 9 - Conduct a 5C Analysis

This part of your analysis is what helps you reflect on your market and product knowledge one more time. It also exists to provide substantial context to those who review your marketing plan.

Step 21. The 5C analysis may sound like a repeat of everything you have already clarified, but it's an important (though not obligatory) summary of your Company, Customers, Collaborations, Competitors, and Climate.

The “Climate” parameter should be based on a PESTLE analysis, which is used to identify political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors that may positively or negatively impact the product or company. For example, political stability, high inflation, widespread adherence to traditions, etc.

Create a table with five cells for each of the C’s. Make bullet lists inside each cell highlighting the key points relevant to each.

Part 10 - Estimate the Budget and Create a Calendar

Congratulations! You have reached the ultimate stage of creating your marketing plan. It’s time to wrap it up with brief but crucial information about the time and money you’ll need to make things happen.

Step 22. If you already have exact dates in mind, create an execution timeline using a Gantt chart or a simple timeline view to visualize how you will progress with each activity. If you don’t know the exact dates, make a summarized bullet list with the names of all activities and break the list into months, seasons, or other reasonable periods.

Step 23. For the budget, create a simple, easily readable table to specify the total cost and the investments required for each part of your strategy in your marketing plan. Don’t get too elaborate; try to fit everything into no more than 10 rows.

Summary

The better you know something, the harder it is to describe it to others. In reality, a marketing plan is a combination of specific, brief pieces of information that are relatively easy to bring together. We hope this actionable framework helps you overcome this struggle so you can move on to the most important part, which is putting your plan into action.

As a handy guide, use our summary of all the steps we discussed.

Here is a snapshot of what’s inside: