Are you embarking on the daunting task of crafting a marketing plan presentation? You’ve found the right guide. Navigating the process with an effective marketing plan template and compelling marketing plan examples will be much easier. This guide distills the knowledge I gained as a former VP of Marketing at J&J, complemented by valuable marketing experience from my tenure at Coke and General Mills. As someone who’s climbed the corporate ladder and has both created and critiqued numerous marketing strategies, I understand what captures management’s attention and gets approved.
Unlock the secrets of an impactful Marketing Plan from an ex-VP of Marketing at Johnson & Johnson.
Crafting a marketing plan is akin to conducting an orchestra: each element must be strategically placed and timed for maximum effect. By employing a marketing plan format that’s been refined through experience, you’ll discover the best ways to allocate resources, ensuring that every move you make propels your business objectives forward.
I’m here to guide you through the essential steps of constructing your plan. From establishing a solid foundation to adding those critical final touches that capture a VP’s attention, I will equip you with engaging slide examples and actionable insights. This guidance will empower you to craft a marketing plan that not only aligns with stakeholder expectations but also inspires your teams to take effective action.
Are you ready to elevate your marketing plan from a mere document to a dynamic strategy that catalyzes success? Let’s embark on this transformative journey together, and watch as your vision is brought to life.
To illustrate, click on our Marketing Plan Process. Importantly, you download or share.
Building the Marketing Plan Presentation
Understanding the importance of a marketing plan checklist
Firstly, it’s crucial to recognize that a well-structured marketing plan is essential for success, whether you are a seasoned marketer or just embarking on your journey. Essentially, the marketing plan acts as a roadmap, guiding your marketing efforts and ensuring that every action you take aligns with your business goals.
Furthermore, a marketing plan checklist serves as a handy tool that keeps you organized, focused, and accountable.
Starting with the basics, a marketing plan checklist
Initially, it includes the vision, purpose, values, and goals. Notably, the situation analysis enables you to identify potential gaps and opportunities, ensuring that you don’t miss out on any crucial aspects in your marketing journey.
Subsequently, you can use the analytics to formulate the key issues and strategize answers to those questions. From there, let the execution plans for communications, sales and retail, product innovation, and customer experience follow.
Moreover, it should include a sales forecast and marketing budget. Depending on the company, you can also include a profit statement.
Emphasizing collaboration and communication
Having a checklist aids in fostering collaboration and communication within your team. It provides a clear framework for everyone involved, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same objectives.
To illustrate, click on our Marketing Plan Checklist.
As we refine our marketing plan, establishing a foundation with clear definitions is paramount. These principles will be the bedrock that informs every facet of our strategic approach.
Our Strategic Pillars
Starting with our Vision, we set the long-term aspirations for our brand. Our Purpose articulates the ‘why’ behind our existence, connecting deeply with both our employees and consumers.
Next, we outline our Values, the essential beliefs that guide our operations and decisions. Our Goals then operationalize these ideals into concrete, measurable targets, allowing us to monitor our journey and make necessary adjustments.
Setting the Stage for Strategic Execution
As we delve deeper, we will explore the vital elements of a comprehensive Situation Analysis, gaining clarity on where we currently stand. We will confront the Key Issues obstructing our path and chart out the Strategies to overcome them. Finally, we will articulate the specific Tactics that will activate our plan, ensuring cohesion and effectiveness in our efforts.
Understanding and applying these foundational ideas positions us to craft a marketing plan that is not only clearly articulated but also primed for execution, aligning seamlessly with our broader business ambitions. Now, let’s examine each element in detail to forge a marketing plan that is both resilient and dynamic.
Below you will find the definitions for each Marketing Plan component. I recommend you bring this list to every meeting and refer back to it whenever questions arise.
To illustrate, click on our Marketing Plan definitions above.
Mapping out your Marketing Plan: Starting with a brand vision
Building a comprehensive Marketing Plan presentation with a visionary foundation
Every effective marketing plan begins with a clear vision. This is the linchpin of your marketing template, the guiding star for all your strategies and actions. Establishing a well-defined Brand Vision is critical, projecting a compelling future for your brand and serving as a reference point for the next decade.
To illustrate, click on our Brand Vision examples, which is part of our Marketing Plan process.
Examples of Marketing Plans anchored by vision
In analyzing various marketing plan examples, we notice a trend: the most impactful ones are those grounded in a visionary Brand Vision. This includes:
- A time frame spanning 5 to 10 years, painting a vivid and aspirational picture of your brand’s potential.
- A descriptive and motivational narrative that not only defines what your brand aspires to achieve but also why it matters.
- An emotional appeal that connects deeply with your team and audience, injecting life and energy into the marketing plan.
Integrating Brand Vision into Your Marketing Plan Presentation
When you present your marketing strategy, initiating with your Brand Vision makes a powerful opening. This foundational element should headline your marketing plan presentation, setting the stage for all the strategies and tactics that will unfold.
Engaging the Team with a Vision-Centric Marketing Template
Your marketing template isn’t just a document—it’s a strategic tool that captures your Brand Vision and operationalizes it into your marketing plan. Here, your visionary goals become tangible strategies and actions.
Visualizing the Future of Your Brand: A Hands-On Exercise
Now, let’s put our Brand Vision into practice. The accompanying exercise in the photo prompts you to visualize and articulate your brand’s future. By answering questions such as “What is our ultimate purpose?” and “What makes us unique?”, you’ll craft a Brand Vision that not only informs your marketing plan but also aligns with your overarching business strategy.
This is a foundational step towards creating marketing plan examples that others will follow and is key to a presentation that will resonate with stakeholders and guide your team to success. Remember, the Brand Vision sets the stage for a marketing plan that’s not just a collection of tactics but a coherent narrative that drives your brand toward its ambitious future.
To illustrate, click on our Brand Vision exercise, which is part of our Marketing Plan template.
Goals
Setting the goals in your Marketing Plan
Setting clear and measurable goals is crucial for your plan’s success. It demonstrates to your boss that you will measure what you do. Here are the four primary ways to set goals for your marketing plan.
1. Market Impact and Performance Results
Emphasize your marketing strategy’s market impact (penetration, frequency, share) and performance results (sales, profit).
2. Tactical Execution Measures
Assess the effectiveness of specific marketing tactics, including advertising results, innovation freshness index, and in-store performance indicators.
3. Major Milestones
Establish goals for significant project completion dates or key market share, sales, or profit performance levels. These milestones track your brand’s progress and maintain focus.
4. Brand Reputation Goals
Set objectives related to your brand’s reputation, such as net promoter score, online review scores, consumer perception, and reputation among influencers or social media followers.
Writing Brand Strategy
Start with a Business Review
Successful brand leaders make data-driven decisions by thoroughly analyzing marketing analytics. Importantly, you should conduct a deep-dive business review at least once a year to assess your brand’s performance. Examine five key areas: the marketplace, consumers, channels, competitors, and the brand. To read more about the deep-dive business review: Business Review.
Deep-dive Business Review Process
Click on the deep-dive business review process to zoom in for a detailed view.
To illustrate, click on our Marketing Analytics process.
Identifying Key Issues
As I created the Strategic ThinkBox, I made it so that each of the four questions uses a forced choice to make decisions, where you must focus on only one possible answer for each question.
- What is the core strength that will help your brand win?
- How tightly connected is your consumer to your brand?
- What is your current competitive position?
- What is the current business situation your brand faces?
To read more, click on our strategic thinking post.
To illustrate, click on our Key Issues process.
Our Marketing Training helps your marketers write smarter plans
When your marketers try to do too many things in their brand plan, none have enough resources to make an impact.
Our Marketing Training teaches how the best marketers use planning skills to write a strategic plan that defines how to invest their limited resources to build capabilities that drive growth. They establish a vision, purpose, values, and goals that define a better future. And they find key issues of what’s in the way with detailed strategies and execution plans to guide everyone who works on the team.
The brand plan skills we build through our marketing training.
- First, your marketers will translate smart, strategic thinking into key issues and strategic statements that form the foundation of the brand plan.
- Next, they will make decisions on all elements of a smart brand plan, including the vision, purpose, values, goals, issues, strategies, and tactics.
- Importantly, your marketers will learn how to be stronger in writing and presenting the brand plan to senior management and across the organization.
- Finally, they will develop smart execution plans—communication, sales/retail, and innovation—that deliver against the brand strategies.
It's time to elevate your marketing team's performance with our Beloved Brands Marketing Training program.
Developing a Brand Strategy Using the A + B + C + D Model
We have created an easy system for writing the brand strategy statements to use in your marketing plan. You need a strategy statement to cover the remaining four other strategic elements: A) program investment, B) focused accelerator, C) market impact, and D) performance result.
A: Build capabilities to deliver the vision:
- The investment in capabilities to deliver the strategy, whether you are building the brand promise, brand story, purchase moment, product innovation, and consumer experience. These crystal-clear marching orders to the team leave no room for doubt, confusion, or hesitation. In this example, the strategic capability is to “Communicate Gray’s new “sports transform lives” positioning.”
B: Focused Accelerator:
- The breakthrough point where the brand will exert pressure to create a market impact. In this example, the focused accelerator “involves our strong base of brand fans.”
C: Market impact:
- Achieves a specific desired market impact with a stakeholder you will attempt to move, whether it is consumers, sales channels, competitors, or influencers. In this example, the desired market impact is to “tighten their bond with Gray’s”
Performance result:
- Drive a specific performance result linked to the market impact, making the brand more powerful or profitable. In this example, the result is to “drive traffic into stores.”
Turn your thinking into brand strategy statements
Our unique strategic model will force you to pick answers to build a strategy statement with marching orders for those who follow your plan. As you build your marketing plan, I recommend you use these four elements of smart strategy statements to ensure you structure and demonstrate your great thinking.
Writing your brand strategy statements
Using the cheat sheet below for brand strategy statements, start by investing in capabilities, choose the target and focused accelerator. For the market impact, will you attract, inform, close, service or delight consumers. What do you want them to do? For performance result, choose one of four ways to get more powerful or wealthier, by pushing penetration, frequency, pricing or enter new markets.
To illustrate, click on our Brand Strategy Cheatsheet. Importantly, you can zoom in, download it, or share it.
ABCs of the brand strategy statement
Build a new product pipeline (A) that meets the changing flavor needs of our loyal consumers (B) to delight and tighten their bond with Gray’s (C) to drive usage frequency and higher share (D).
Summarizing each Brand Strategy for presentation to Management
Once you have crafted your marketing strategies, create a slide for each strategy in your presentation:
- First, include the strategic objective statement.
- Then, list the goals to measure the desired result of this strategy.
- Next, outline three tactical programs where resources will be invested.
- Finally, insert a “watch out statement” to address potential issues that could derail the strategy.
By following these guidelines, you can effectively develop and present a comprehensive brand strategy that drives your marketing plan and sets your brand on a path to success.
To illustrate, click on our Brand Strategy page. Importantly, you can zoom in, download it, or share it.
Marketing Execution Plans
For each significant investment, create a separate execution plan to ensure everyone has specific instructions for their function, eliminating any room for misinterpretation. Each strategic investment should have an execution plan, with most plans covering:
- Brand Communication
- Innovation
- Sales
Your execution plans should combine strategic thinking and brand positioning:
- First, start each execution plan with your marketing strategy statement from one of your strategies.
- Then, in the next four sections, refer to your brand positioning work to lay out the target, brand idea, main benefit, and support points.
- Finally, tailor the final two sections to the type of execution.
Brand Communication Plan
Essentially, the brand communications plan should answer seven questions that guide and inspire the creation of the brand story, establishing your brand positioning and motivating consumers. Our marketing plan template includes a Brand Communications Plan
Using the marketing plan template, answer the following questions:
- First, what do we need our advertising to do? (Marketing strategy statement)
- Next, who is our desired consumer target? (Most motivated people to buy what we do)
- Third, what are we selling? (Our main consumer benefit we stand behind)
- Fourth, why should they believe us? (Support points to back up the main benefit)
- Then ask, what is our organizing brand idea? (Brand soul, essence, or DNA for the brand)
- What do we want people to see, think, feel, do, or influence? (Desired consumer response)
- Finally, where will our consumer be most receptive to see and act upon our message? (Media plan)
Lastly, consider this marketing plan example of an Brand Communications Plan for Gray’s Cookies:
To illustrate, click on our marketing plan example of a Brand Communications Plan.
Innovation Plan
Firstly, your brand idea should direct the product development team in managing innovation ideas at various stages:
- Exploratory stage (beyond five years),
- Pipeline ideas (two to five years), and
- Go-to-market launch plans (within the next two years).
Secondly, utilize the marketing plan template to influence, manage, and direct your product development team, ensuring a focus on brand strategy.
Lastly, consider this marketing plan example of an Innovation Plan for Gray’s Cookies:
To illustrate, click on our marketing plan example of an Innovation Plan.
Marketing Plan examples
Examples of Marketing Plan slides we use in our template
Importantly, we provide marketing plan examples of execution slides you can use in your marketing plan. For instance, you will find PowerPoint slides you can use for advertising, social media, and search, event sampling. You can also find slides for new product launches, new product pipelines, competitive defence plans, merchandising and in-store sampling, customer marketing, and promotions. To view, click on any of the marketing plan example slides below.
Consumer Healthcare
Consumer Healthcare marketing plan example.
Quit Smoking
Pharma marketing plan example.
B2B Stage Lighting
Our B2B brand marketing plan example.
B2B Industrial tools
B2B industrial marketing plan example.
Are you not seeing high quality plans from your team?
Should you find yourself leading a marketing team and struggling to see high-quality plans, our marketing training is here to assist. Often, marketers attempt to juggle too many elements in their plan, resulting in none of their ideas receiving sufficient resources to make a significant impact.
Moreover, marketing plans that don’t make firm decisions distribute their limited resources across numerous tactics, leading to none of the ideas generating substantial results. Consequently, a lack of vision causes the plan to become aimless, creating confusion among those responsible for executing the brand’s strategies.
Fortunately, at Beloved Brands, we guide you in constructing your plan with elements such as brand vision, purpose, values, key issues, strategies, and execution plans.
Additionally, for those seeking further detailed guidance, I encourage you to explore my Beloved Brands book on the subject.
Therefore, if your objective is to receive better plans from your team, our Marketing Training will help.
With a wealth of experience working on prominent global brands, I was responsible for developing a marketing plan each year. Starting my journey as an assistant brand manager, I eventually worked my way up to the marketing director position. As a VP of Marketing, I meticulously reviewed 15 plans annually before their presentation to the President.
Subsequently, this inspired me to create a new marketing plan template, which I have continuously refined over time. Hence, if you believe your team could profit from improved planning capabilities, I urge you to visit the following link for more information: Beloved Brands Marketing Training.
Frequently Asked Questions about the Marketing Plan.
What is needed in a marketing plan?
First, every plan must have a vision that acts as the guiding line to chase. I like to have a main sales goal tied to that vision. Second, conduct a business review to focus on what’s driving growth and holding the brand back.
Third, use our Strategic ThinkBox to come up with key issue questions that are facing the brand. Then, dig in and build out the strategies that answer the issues.
Next, brainstorm tactics with your team. And build tactics, including brand communication, innovation, and sales or retail.
Last but not least, create goals and measure performance. A main sales goal can be tied to the vision and can drive parts of the plan, but they can also be used at the end to ensure you measure the strategies and tactics.
Why is a marketing plan important?
The main role of a plan is to gain the approval of your senior management team. Importantly, explain how you will use your resources to drive the growth of your brand. And the plan becomes the roadmap that everyone on your team will follow and help achieve your brand goals. An effective marketing plan will create the brand vision, purpose, key issues, strategies, and tactics.
What are common marketing plan mistakes?
First, the most common mistake I see in plans is when they present a messy story. That’s the reason you should have a good marketing plan template. It won’t go well if you are standing at the front of the room and the boss is confused.
Second, the other common mistake I see in marketing plans is trying to do too many things. Importantly, when you spread the limited resources across too many ideas, none of them will have enough resources to make a difference. You will always be disappointed in the results.
Third, another mistake I see is when parts of the team do not agree with. The brand leader must work to involve the other teams to ensure the team is aligned. Ensure you involve sales, operations, R&D, and your ad agency. And include all those who deliver on behalf of the brand.
Fourth, I have seen plan presentations get out of control. One year, a small brand had 127 slides. Crazy. You should have no more than 20 slides.
What is in a marketing plan?
If you are looking for an ideal outline for a marketing plan template, include a vision, purpose, goals, SWOT analysis, key issues, strategy statements, marketing communications plan, sales plan, new products plan, forecast, and financials. Marketing Plan template.
