Tips For A Successful Plan With Editable Strategic Plan Template

Without marketing, many companies could fail. However, many small businesses do not take the time to create a good strategic plan template. What often happens is that these companies will try different tailored marketing tactics, obtaining only a minor to moderate success. Or they will be able to achieve a great triumph by chance, but they will not feel able to scale their tactics, objectives and strategies appropriately .



Today there are many tools for online marketing that can give companies an advantage. Learning how to make a marketing plan forces you to think about the important steps to create an effective marketing strategy . A plan will also help you stay focused on your big goals.

Not to mention that if you try to inspire confidence in your investors, CEO, or new team members; A solid strategic plan template will show that your marketing strategies are backed by research .

The objective of a strategic plan template is:

Offer an analysis of the current situation of your business
Present and describe your target audience
Offer a summary of your marketing goals
Show all marketing communication strategies that will be used

Define your marketing budget

The scope of your marketing plan may vary according to the purpose or type of organization to which you belong. For example, you could create a plan that provides a comprehensive view of the marketing strategy of a company, or just focus on a specific channel as SEO , the social media marketing , the marketing of influencer or event marketing .

Your approach may also change if you create a corporate marketing plan and not a marketing plan for a nonprofit organization , or a marketing plan for the public sector. Here is an example of a marketing plan , so you have an idea of ​​the type of content you can include. In any case, your marketing plan has to be well focused and organized. This is how an effective marketing plan design manages to get into the game.

Start using a strategic plan template for marketing plan

Although a marketing plan doesn't have to be necessarily pretty, an amazing design could certainly help if you want your plan to be more convincing. The presentation is especially important if you show your marketing plan to investors, or if you have to convince your boss to approve the budget you have requested.

That is where a template for the marketing plan can help. If you don't have an available designer, or if you even want a framework on which you can base your own design, then a template will offer you a solid base for you to work on.

Start by creating your marketing plan with a template and then customize it so that the design adapts to your information and incorporates your own brand. Here are 7 strategic plan template for the marketing you can start with, and some of the best practices for designing reports that you should follow when creating your plan.

1. Identify, describe and illustrate what your target audience will be

Knowing your target audience is one of the most important steps that every marketing team must cover before they can make any marketing decision. So, when you start writing your marketing plan, you should have identified your target audience. In your marketing plan, you have to include a section to present to your target audience. To help your target audience stay present when planning and executing your marketing strategies, it could help if you visualize the people in your audience. Using imaginary images of your people, icons and illustrations would be a great way to put face to the "names" of your people.

2. Visualize the important process flows and strategy maps

To define new strategies, processes and timelines effectively, it might be very useful to visualize the flows. You can opt for a classic flowchart , or for a creative infographic . Regardless of the type of image you decide to create, the goal is to make the information easy for people to follow.

The first thing is to organize your flow in different steps. You should remember to label each step clearly and use visual cues , such as lines or arrows, that will indicate the direction in which the flow is read.

It could also be very useful to visualize each step using different forms, or by adding an icon in each step.

3. Emphasize statistics, metrics and important numbers in your marketing plan

To make your plan much more convincing and easy to look at, you must establish a hierarchy of information that is in the design of your page. For example, you could use graphs and pictograms to show some important statistics or metrics. Or you could write important numbers using brightly colored fonts, so they can stand out from the rest of the text.

It is a good opportunity to show your creativity in the design of your page.

4. Use your main marketing objective to guide your design

One of the main objectives of your strategic plan template is to identify your most important marketing objectives. The design of your marketing plan should be oriented towards this objective, as well as the page designs and other elements that you are going to use.

You can achieve this by choosing a design theme that reflects your objective and uses it throughout your marketing plan. It may be some particular form or object (for example, you could use plant images in an SEO plan to represent growth) or perhaps a color palette that reflects the mood of your mission.

5. Vary your page designs to create a striking marketing plan

When you put some extra effort into using the images, not only will you make your marketing plan much more eye-catching, but you will also make readers retain the information more easily .

That's why, although you could use the same page layout throughout your plan, it would be nice to vary the layout of your page. When you mix your design you will avoid making your plan so predictable. And you will have a lot of flexibility to visualize the information more creatively .

6. Visualize your main channels using icons, graphics and pictograms

It is very important that your team can understand which channels have the best performance. So you can identify the areas where you want to channel more resources. A very simple but effective way to analyze your channels is to visualize them. You can do it using graphs , infographics and pictograms.

7. Use borders or colored blocks to organize your pages into sections

Generally, it can be very good to stick to one topic per page. This helps keep your strategic plan template more organized and makes it easy for readers to search for information.

That said, you may want to place more than one topic on the same page as if the topics are directly related. In that case, you could organize the page into different sections, using borders or blocks as the background color.