How to put together your marketing plan in 5 easy steps

If you’ve got to the point where you’re ready to put together your first marketing plan - firstly, congratulations on making it this far. Secondly, you’re about to enter what I like to call the fun zone of marketing.

It’s at this point that you’ll see all of your hard work in building your strategy pillars come to life. You’ll know who you’re marketing to and with what message. You’ll know the tone of voice that you’ll master across all of your channels. You will also know where your customer gets their information from and where they like to ‘hang out’ online.

You’ll now have your strategy document pulled together in one place, with a clear idea of what your plan needs to be to generate awareness and convert your audience into leads.

1. Using an anchor event to start with your marketing plan

Now, I’m aware that marketing plans come in all shapes and sizes, but what I like to do is keep it as simple as possible and plan out a top level plan for the year in Sheets (or Excel), marked with anchor events and key themes. After the plan is complete, I will then split out each quarter into a detailed project plan.

But what do you mean by anchor events I hear you ask? Well, that’s your one big activity per quarter that your primary marketing objectives point towards, both in the lead up to it and also afterwards.

Your anchor event could be a conference, an expo, a webinar, a podcast launch or even a massive PR push, depending on what you’ve researched will be the best place to meet your customer at.

For example, I’ve recently been working with an AI cybersecurity vendor and their anchor event will always be an expo as it’s the only way to get face time with their ideal customer profile or ICP. So, therefore (depending on when the expo is) we’ll have one a quarter, which we know will drive the majority of leads for that timeframe, but in the run up we’ll send email and LinkedIn campaigns to book meetings. We’ll also be posting across the social channels where we’ll be and what we’ll be discussing.

Therefore, say your expo (or anchor event) is in March, you’ll need to plan your social campaigns to ramp at the beginning of February and meeting invite emails from mid-Feb. Then afterwards you’ll need to set up your email nurture campaigns and produce your content from the anchor event to share across social channels. That means that January will be your planning month for the first quarter, then by April you'll be following up on Q1 activity and planning Q2, and so on.

2. Use your ICP pain points as monthly themes across the year

Your anchor events will be the primary goal driving focus for the quarter but not all of your marketing needs to be centred around this. Plan in monthly themes which play into the customer pain points that you’re trying to solve to help guide on further social activity and content creation for within the month. This will also help serve as a guide for website updates and PR activity too.

By working key themes into your plan you'll not be saying exactly the same message over and over but answering key questions and solving core issues that your ICP has. So when they eventually come into market, you've already done some of the key decision making for them.

As a real-world example here, I've been working with a cybersecurity consultancy to flesh our their content marketing plan. We've split up monthly themes into a blog a week, a quarterly longer form guide, and will then split those into brand-led and founder-led social posts.

3. Channel selection when building a marketing plan

So now you have your anchor events and themes in place, the next stage is selecting your channels and getting it all organised on paper.

You should have already identified the channels that you’ll be using in your plan. These will largely be driven by where your customer lives but also by resource and budget. It’s also very likely that you’ll have identified one paid channel only. And that is also completely normal, especially if you're only testing budget decisions at this stage.

It's also important to note here that your core acquisition channels should make sense for the customer research that you've conducted. It's easy to be swayed by a lot of 'noise' doing the rounds on socials saying that certain channels are dead and that you should go all in on another but this is nonsense. Always take that advice with a pinch of salt and start planning what makes sense for you.

The channels I will usually select for a first marketing plan will be different across different clients, but using cybersecurity or AI as an example:

Acquisition:

Expo

Email

Social media (brand and thought leadership)

Paid social

Brand:

Website

PR

Sales enablement

As a small selection to start you can experiment to see what messaging and approaches work and then start applying them to larger audiences without getting overwhelmed. Some of the common mistakes I see are founders and new marketers wanting to try absolutely everything before they’ve figured out what actually works, meaning that their time is diluted and so are the results. The main culprit here will always be that PPC has been focused on too much and budgets have been burned through.

After the first couple of quarters, you’ll have an idea of what’s working, how to optimise it and keep the channel running properly. Here, you’ll probably be able to add in one more that you can bet on knowing your audience.

In terms of layout for your document - put all your channels down the side and the dates across the top. This makes it far easier to follow and build out a project plan from.

4. Don’t forget about content when building your marketing plan

Content is the cornerstone of any marketing plan today, so ensure that you’re also building out a plan of blog content, informational content, website updates, social media posts and a library of thought leadership posts for your CEO. It’s smart to be as visible as possible but also as helpful as possible. Your content has to serve a purpose and it has to be simple to share through your channels that you have selected.

Make sure that your content fits well into your key themes and also touches on your anchor events - a blog write up from an event with insight is still great content.

Ensure that you have enough coverage of content for 12 months but not so much that you don’t have the resource to do it. If you can get freelance resource to write your content, ensure that timelines and tone of voice documents are agreed and shared. If no one internally at your company is a good enough copywriter, outsource it to someone who is.

5. How to structure your marketing plan

You can structure your plan in any way that you want but I like to put it together in Sheets with the channels down the side and the months and key themes going across the top. I will then fill out the top level activity for that month in the corresponding row/column cell.

Once complete it will give you an overview of all of your activity for the year, which will give you the blueprint for your project plans that will go into the finer details of all of your activity for the quarter.

I help SaaS businesses build their marketing functions in a quick, no nonsense approach. If you need help building your marketing plan, get in contact