How to Write a Marketing Plan in Business Plan

When Google Glass came out in 2013, it felt like the future of technology—smart glasses you could wear and instantly access information. But for all the excitement, it bombed.

From where I sit, the problem wasn’t the technology. It was the lack of a clear marketing plan. Google never nailed down its target market or addressed public concerns about privacy and usability. People didn’t know if they were buying a gadget, a fashion statement, or just an expensive toy for the tech elite.

I’ve seen similar mistakes in smaller businesses: Great products that never find their footing because there’s no real plan for how to position, sell, or communicate their value.

That’s why a strong marketing plan isn’t optional. It defines your objectives, your audience, and your messaging so you’re not leaving success to chance.

In this article, I’ll break down exactly what goes into a marketing plan.

An effective marketing plan solidifies a business plan. One drives customer acquisition, while the other maps out the company’s future. To build a solid foundation, you need both.

Let’s see how they compare.

Business plan vs. marketing plan

From working with founders, I’ve noticed that many treat business plans and marketing plans as separate, unrelated documents. That’s a mistake.

A business plan is a strategic blueprint that outlines how a company runs, including the company’s operations, finances, and long-term planning process. It’s the big picture.

While a marketing plan is also a strategic plan, it’s all about marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics, essentially, how you get people to care about your business.

Since a marketing plan wunder orks the umbrella of the overall business plan, the two complement each other towards success.

What should you include in your marketing plan?

If you want your marketing to actually get results, you need a clear, simple plan. It should help you make smart decisions based on your goals, budget, and what you can track.

• Target audience: Defines who your ideal customers are, where they hang out, what gets their attention, and what would compel them to use your product over someone else's.
• Customer segments: Breaks your target audience into 2–3 personas with different motivations or pain points so you can send the right message to the right people.

• Pain points and solutions: Lists your target audience’s major pain points and explain how your offerings can fix each of those pain points.

• Competitive analysis: Identifies your closest competitors and how you’re different in terms of price, features, and service.

• Marketing and business goals: Sets specific, measurable goals like boosting sales, gaining more customers, or raising profit margins.

• Positioning & messaging: Sets the tone of your brand and sum up your main message in one sentence.

• Marketing channels: Addresses your channels: social media, SEO, paid ads, email, influencers—based on where your audience spends time.
• Campaign plan: Describes the campaigns you’ll run (e.g., product launch ad, email drip, seasonal promo) and where they’ll go live.
• Customer journey: Maps how people move from seeing your product to buying it, and what you’ll do at each step to help.
• Budget: Breaks down how much you’ll spend on each channel or campaign and justifies the cost.
• Metrics & KPIs: Lists what you’ll track (conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, ROI) and how you’ll monitor it.
• Timeline: Shows when each campaign or activity happens with dates or a simple calendar.
• Team & resources: List who’s handling what—marketing lead, freelancer, agency, or internal team.
• Budget and risk plan: Points out what could go wrong (low ROI, delayed campaign, overspend) and how you’ll adapt if needed.

A marketing plan is a strategic guide that propels business growth, brand recognition, and new customer acquisition. Now, let's take the main components of a marketing plan and convert them into an executable plan.

How to create a marketing plan for a small business?

With the right structure, you can make sense of your marketing strategy’s objectives, budgets, and marketing activities without the stress. Follow the eight-step process to create one.

Step 1: Define your business mission and marketing goals

If a marketing plan template came with a rulebook, the opening page would declare: "Begin with a mission statement that really means something." 

When I’m working with a business, I want that mission to do more than sound nice. It needs to guide every marketing decision we make. A good value proposition ensures all marketing activity serves the objectives of the business, so customers understand why they should care.

Getting clear on your goals early makes it easier to filter out distractions later. Without that clarity, small businesses tend to chase every new trend, and marketing becomes scattered.

Well-defined goals give you a lens for making better decisions and a way to measure whether your efforts are actually building sustainable growth.

Step 2: Set performance metrics and key metrics

You can’t run a strong marketing plan without knowing how you’ll measure success. That’s why I help clients set KPIs right from the start so we’re all clear on what “good” looks like. These could include ad spend efficiency, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, repeat purchase rates, whatever directly reflects your goals.

Tracking isn’t a one-and-done job. I review KPIs with clients regularly, because markets shift, campaigns evolve, and what worked six months ago might not work today. Stale data leads to stale decisions.

Focusing on KPIs, Zarina Bahadur, CEO and Founder of 123BabyBox, shared, “A marketing plan is only as strong as its ability to track progress through KPIs. For example, our marketing team tracks ad spend, conversion rates, and customer retention weekly to ensure we maintain 20% month-over-month growth."

Her method proves that tracking is what keeps marketing from going stale.

For many small businesses, offline metrics are just as revealing. Things like store foot traffic, phone inquiries, event turnout, or even referral rates can be just as valuable as online clicks.

Step 3: Determine your target audience and develop buyer personas

I’m yet to see a marketing plan succeed when the target audience is “everyone.” As ambitious as it sounds, it’s actually a shortcut to wasted time and budget. Most of your audience doesn’t care what you’re selling and that’s fine. You just need to find the people who do.

When I work with clients, we start by narrowing the focus. Who are the people most likely to buy from you? What do they value? Where do they spend time: Both online and offline?

Industry analysis gives you a bird’s-eye view of trends and gaps in your space, while competitive analysis helps you see where you stand in the marketplace and where there’s room to stand out.

Once we have those insights, we create buyer personas. They’re semi-fictional profiles built on real data, combining lifestyle habits, purchasing behaviors, challenges, and motivations.

For example, if you’re selling eco-friendly cleaning products, one persona might be “Lisa, the urban mom who values sustainability, shops online twice a week, and actively avoids harsh chemicals.”

Every piece of marketing, from social media ads to email subject lines can now be aimed at “Lisa” instead of some vague, general audience. This makes your campaigns sharper, your spend more efficient, and your messaging far more relevant.

Yarden Morgan, Director of Growth at Lusha, puts it perfectly:

“At Lusha, we begin by defining our ideal customer segments before setting measurable KPIs, ensuring our marketing efforts align with business goals. This process helps create a data-driven approach that maximizes engagement and conversions.”

She’s right! Define your audience first, and every other decision in your marketing plan becomes easier.

Step 4: Choose the right marketing channels and distribution strategies

If you’re talking to the wrong crowd, your marketing plan won’t get you far. I’ve worked with businesses that were running great campaigns, just on channels their audience rarely used. The result? Lots of effort, very little return.

When we help choose marketing channels, the starting point is simple: Go where your audience actually is. For some, that’s LinkedIn and trade publications. For others, it’s Instagram, TikTok, or a mix of paid ads and influencer content.

There’s no one‑size‑fits‑all answer. Your channels should match how your customers discover, evaluate, and buy products like yours.

Distribution strategy matters just as much. Apart from attracting attention, you should also make it easy for people to buy. That might mean improving your online checkout, offering click‑and‑collect, or choosing retail partners that your customers already trust.

A good plan connects the dots between where people see you and how they can get what you’re offering without friction.

Step 5: Conduct a competitive analysis

Competitors can be a useful source of insight. Conducting a complete analysis of competitors entails gauging their pricing frameworks, distribution expenditure, and marketplace positioning to tap into strengths and weaknesses.

When I do this work, I’m looking for patterns and gaps. What are they doing consistently well? Where do they seem to struggle? For example, some might have great products but poor customer follow‑up, or strong marketing but confusing pricing.

Here are a few areas worth exploring:

• Pricing: How do they position themselves on price vs. value?
• Marketing presence: Where are they most active, and how are they engaging people?
• Customer experience: What feedback do they get, both positive and negative?
• Market positioning: What story are they telling about themselves?

Sometimes, the best way to learn is to experience it yourself. I’ve signed up for competitor products or services just to see how they treat a new customer. It’s a simple step that often uncovers opportunities to stand out in ways that don’t require a bigger budget, just a different approach.

Step 6: Allocate a marketing budget and resources

I’ve noticed that marketing budgets often get set one of two ways: A fixed percentage of revenue (because “that’s what the industry does”) or a best‑guess figure with no clear link to goals. Neither approach works well on its own.

A stronger method is to start with your objectives and then decide what it will realistically cost to achieve them. That might mean splitting funds between online channels (social ads, search marketing, influencer partnerships) and offline tactics (print, trade shows, radio, local events).

The right mix depends entirely on where your audience is most responsive.

Don’t forget distribution costs. Whether you’re shipping products via e‑commerce, managing retail partnerships, or selling directly, those costs directly affect how much budget is left for actual marketing.

I recommend mapping out the full path from campaign spend to customer purchase so you see where the money goes at each step.

Resources aren’t just financial; they’re also about people. You can have the best budget in the world, but if your team can’t execute effectively across every sales channel, you won’t see the return you’re expecting.

This is why we track KPIs closely. It helps us monitor spend and ensure every dollar and every hour of effort ties back to your core business objectives.

Step 7: Develop a pricing and promotional strategy

Pricing is one of those topics that looks simple on paper but can quietly sink a business if you get it wrong. If it is too expensive, customers leave, and if it is too cheap, profits suffer.

To find the correct mix, perform a comprehensive market analysis based on:

• Price elasticity - how sensitive your customers are to price changes.
• Industry norms - where your price sits compared to competitors.
• Purchase habits - how and when people are willing to buy.

From there, decide if you’re positioning as a premium option, a competitive middle ground, or an entry-level disruptor. The right choice depends on your goals and the story you’re telling.

But pricing doesn’t work in isolation. You also need a promotion strategy that makes the price make sense. That could mean a mix of:

• Digital: targeted ads, content marketing, SEO, influencer partnerships.
• Offline: direct mail, event sponsorship, print campaigns.

In my work, the most effective plans always match the price and the message. If you’re charging a premium, the marketing should make people feel they’re getting something exclusive. If you’re going for volume, promotions should scream accessibility and value.

Step 8: Monitor, optimize, and adjust your marketing plan

A frozen marketing plan is a slow road to falling behind. The market changes, customers change, and if you’re not checking in regularly, you won’t see it coming.

So I almost always make it a point to build regular check-ins into every marketing plan. That means looking at:

• Performance data: Are campaigns hitting the KPIs we set, or do we need to tweak targeting?
• Message relevance: Does our audience still connect with our positioning, or has it lost its edge?
• Channel performance: Are the platforms we’re using still bringing ROI, or should we reallocate budget?

As Nathan Mathews, CEO of Roofer, learned this firsthand:

“We once offered free consultations at Roofer.com, but they didn’t generate enough leads. After reassessing customer expectations, we realized that homeowners wanted clear pricing, not just advice. Once we introduced a cost estimator and integrated it into our marketing, our lead generation increased by 25%.”

That’s the kind of pivot you want to be ready for—quick, targeted, and grounded in what your customers actually want.

When we do this with clients, we treat the marketing plan like a living document. It’s constantly evolving to reflect the latest data, feedback, and opportunities. That’s how you keep it relevant, competitive, and tied directly to your broader business goals.

There you go, a step-by-step guide to how to develop a marketing plan for your company. However, marketing doesn’t operate in isolation. It must be integrated into the business plan to support broader company goals.

Marketing plan as a section of your business plan

We’ve covered what a marketing plan is, what goes into it, and how to create one. But the approach shifts slightly when your marketing plan isn’t a standalone document; it’s part of your business plan.

When I help founders create a marketing plan for internal use, the goal is usually to narrow focus, give the team a clear direction, and plan how to spend marketing resources wisely.

But when that same section sits inside a business plan, it serves a second purpose; it becomes proof to investors that you understand your market and know how to win in it.

In my experience, this is what they’re really looking for:

• You’ve clearly defined your audience.
• You’ve mapped out realistic acquisition channels.
• You have a way to measure what’s working (and what’s not).
• You can show that marketing will drive real, measurable growth.

So, when you put together your marketing plan into your business plan, make sure you make investors feel confident about your strategies.

A sure-shot way to do this? Follow what’s already working. Here, I’m sharing a sample marketing plan—refer to it, analyze it, and implement what you can.

Sample marketing plan (Subscription-based meal delivery service)

Download this free marketing plan template

Starting a marketing strategy from scratch? Let’s make this easier. Our free marketing plan template helps you outline your goals, budget, and marketing strategies without the headache of figuring it all out alone.

Whether you're launching a new product or just trying to get your marketing efforts in order, this template will help you get everything down in a structured way.

📥 Download the free marketing plan template and start planning smarter

Mistakes to avoid when creating a marketing plan

Avoiding common mistakes in your marketing plan can significantly enhance your business's success. Over the years, I’ve seen the same mistakes creep into marketing plans, sometimes in startups, sometimes in well-established businesses.

But, they’re easy to avoid once you know what to look for. Here are ten pitfalls to steer clear of:

Leaping into tactics without strategy

If your marketing plan is nothing more than a mess of ideas, do not be surprised if the results don't add up. A well-defined strategy ensures that each marketing effort has a reason and helps the business grow.

Undefined target audience

Not everyone is your customer. If you market to everyone, your messaging will be too broad to be useful. A clearly defined target audience guarantees more engagement, more conversions, and wiser ad spending.

Neglecting competitive analysis

Your competitors are learning from you, and so should you. Skipping the analysis means missing out on market opportunities. Understanding what competitors are doing right (or wrong) helps businesses adjust their approach and gain an edge.

Setting unrealistic goals

Aiming high is great, but goals that are impossible to reach will only drain energy. I prefer using the SMART framework so the clients have clear, achievable targets that actually motivate their team.

Overlooking data and analytics

Ignoring important metrics is missing out on valuable learning. Regularly monitor performance data to know what is effective, change strategies, and make decisions based on data that optimize marketing ROI.

Failing to evolve in response to changing markets

Clinging doggedly to a plan without responding to market developments can make plans ineffective. Be flexible and tweak your plan when necessary.

Insufficient budget allocation

Marketing requires financial investment to drive meaningful impact. Businesses that underfund initiatives risk low visibility, weak engagement, and missed revenue opportunities. A realistic budget aligned with business goals ensures ROI-driven marketing efforts.

These mistakes rarely happen in isolation. Usually, one weak area creates a ripple effect. For example, skipping competitor analysis often leads to unrealistic goals, and unclear audience targeting almost always results in wasted budget.

That’s why fixing one issue in isolation isn’t enough. You need to see how all the parts of your plan connect. That’s the discipline a good marketing plan demands, and it’s the mindset we bring when helping clients build theirs.

The bottom line

A marketing strategy is a business strategic road map, but its success is reliant upon constant tracking and modification.

To stay ahead, businesses don’t just create a plan but use a disciplined, fact-based process with regular marketing audits to monitor performance and refine strategies.

Plangrowlab helps you with that.

Their professional team creates detailed marketing plans that combine industry research, competitive analysis, marketing strategy, and performance monitoring.

Whether you’re creating a standard business plan or optimizing a traditional marketing plan, Plangrowlab ensures that your marketing activities are in line with your business goals and adjustable according to shifting market conditions.