Michael Epps Utley 
Is your current marketing program unfocused and chaotic? It’s a common issue for many small businesses. Most owners are so busy running their businesses that promotion gets pushed down the priority list.
The best way to get back on track with brand promotion and outreach is to develop a marketing plan. Sure, it takes time to build a plan, but it will pay off many times over in improved marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
This article explains what a marketing plan is and how you can create a basic one to help bring order out of the chaos.
What Is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is a blueprint that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing efforts over a time period, typically a year. Marketing plans tie together all your strategies and tactics to help ensure everything — and everyone — is working together to achieve business goals.
Why You Need a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan makes you document your promotional strategies and tactics in an organized way. This will help you launch campaigns on time and measure your efforts' success.
Your marketing plan will include:
The reason for each campaign
Buyer/audience personas
Budget
Tactics
Deliverables
Timeline
Projected results
With all this information in a single place, it’ll be easier to keep your marketing efforts on track and figure out what’s working and what isn’t so you can optimize your promotional program.
How to Write a Small Business Marketing Plan, Step by Step
Here are all the things you should include in your plan.
1. Mark Your Mission
If you don’t already have one, you should develop your company’s mission statement (if you do, include it here). A strong mission statement guides how you run your organization and how your marketing supports it.
You want your mission statement to be specific but not too specific. It should clearly explain the value your organization delivers to people and how it serves them. Once you know what your mission is, you can determine the purpose of your marketing,
For instance, if your contracting firm’s mission is “to make home improvement a delightful experience,” the purpose of your marketing could be “to attract an audience of home enthusiasts, educate them on the latest home design trends, and inspire them to update their homes.”
2. Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
How will you know your marketing efforts are successful? Your key performance indicators will tell you.
KPIs are metrics that measure the success of different components of your marketing campaigns. They help you establish short-term targets that ladder up to achieving your ultimate bottom-line business goals.
For instance, if your overall goal is to achieve one million dollars in revenue, your KPIs are the results you must earn in each channel (social media click-throughs, email clicks, website visits, etc.) through each campaign and effort monthly to reach your ultimate revenue goal.
If you’re unsure what KPIs to track, take time to learn about the metrics each of your marketing software solutions report. This will help you figure out what to monitor.
3. Develop Buyer Personas
If you haven’t already done so, create buyer personas.
Buyer personas describe who you want to do business with. Information can include age, sex, location, family size, job title, level of education, mindset, media preferences, and pain points your business can resolve. Include whatever you need to know to market to consumers effectively.
4. Document Your Marketing and Content Efforts
This is where you outline the marketing strategies and content development efforts you will need to leverage to achieve your business goals.
Here are some things to consider and include:
Types of content. This could be blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, landing pages, ebooks, and more.
Amount of content. Document content volume in daily, weekly, or monthly intervals. Base it on resource availability and what you need to achieve your goals.
Content distribution channels. Popular ones include Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Select channels the people you’re targeting are active in.
Paid advertising. Outline how much paid advertising you expect to do in each channel every day, week, or month.
KPI alignment. Assign the KPIs you determined earlier to the marketing and content efforts you document in this section.
5. Set Your Marketing Budget
Include everything you will spend money on to promote your business. This can be talent fees, media costs, licensing images, and equipment and software costs. Keeping an eye on these numbers will help you keep priorities straight and allow you to track ROI over time.
6. Identify Your Competitors
Marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You’re competing against other similar businesses in your area.
It’s wise to document your key competitors and come up with a schedule for monitoring their promotional efforts in your marketing plan. It will help you identify things they’re doing that could impact your marketing and overall business results.
8. Assign Responsibilities
Even in the smallest businesses, it’s rare for all marketing tasks to be handled by a single person. You should document roles and responsibilities in your marketing plan and communicate this information to the people doing the work. Common roles include strategizing, writing, distribution, performance monitoring, and quality assurance (to name just a handful). Thoughtful delegation is the key to success in any marketing plan.
9. Share the Plan With Key Stakeholders
Your primary driver in building a marketing plan may be to get organized. This won’t happen if you don’t get buy-in from critical stakeholders who support your promotional efforts. Gather feedback from them and incorporate it into the plan. It will help ensure that they will fully support it and work toward making it a success.
2025 Marketing Plan: The Final Word
If your marketing program is a little chaotic, you could benefit from developing a small business marketing plan. It will help get you and everyone involved in your promotional activities organized and keep you on track to achieving your marketing, sales, and overall business goals.
