Download these 10 Free Marketing Plan Templates in MS Excel Format to help you prepare your Marketing Plan easily.
Being a marketing manager or creator of marketing plans, you are familiar with your bosses and clients always asking for something unique and creative. This is one of the most common things happening in the life of a marketing person. When it comes to putting creativity in the marketing plan, there is a limit. If you add too much creativity, the client will not be able to wrap his head around the idea and the plan will be rejected immediately. Then there is the situation where you go with a boring and traditional approach which is successful but old and the client again doesn’t like it because everyone seems to be copying it. The bottom line is that a marketing plan should have just the right amount of creativity.
Free Marketing Plan Templates
Here are 10 Free Marketing Plan Templates prepared using MS Excel to help you prepare your Marketing Plan quickly.
Guidelines to create a Creative Marketing Plan:
Define your Marketing Goal:
Before creating a marketing plan, the first thing that you need to define and understand is what you want to achieve by implementing the marketing strategy. At this stage, it’s not important to think about how you will achieve your goals but here you just need to understand what your goals are. For instance, you want to increase your sales or create better brand recognition in the market. The steps that come later mainly depend on these goals and objectives. Your marketing goals should be SMART; specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-framed.
Select Key Performance Indicators:
When it comes to creating a marketing plan, some features are more important to you than others. These are known as the key performance indicators. If you can’t decide which KPIs are in your marketing plan, maybe you should create a different plan because all of the features can’t be KPIs. A creative marketing plan should have a limited number of KPIs.
Understand the Audience:
Most marketing strategies don’t work because they are not created with the target audience in mind. Being a smart marketer, you should be able to put yourself in the shoes of the target buyer of your product or service and then create the strategy according to what he wants to hear or see in a product. Hitting this particular group of people who should be taking an interest in your product is the key to having a successful marketing plan.
Understand the benefits of your Product:
While you are creating a marketing plan for your product or service, you should be able to understand your product first. There are some basic questions that you need to answer including; what advantages your product has, what problem it solves, and how it’s better than the product from your competitor. Once you get to know these specific features of your product, you can portray its image to your target audience in a better way.
Prepare a Specific Budget:
You can never estimate how many marketing plans are shut down or closed just because the client doesn’t want to go over budget and even if the marketing plan is working fine, he pulls the plug instead of going over budget. This is something that a creative marketing plan shouldn’t have. When you create the marketing plan, you should be able to estimate how much budget it will require, where the money will come from, the type of internal and external resources required for the execution, and how you are going to keep an eye on the expenditures so you never exceed your budget limits.