Practicing marketing without a solid strategy is like boating without a paddle. You’re executing stuff (and it’s tempting to feel productive), but you have no idea what direction you’re going and whether or not you’re achieving success.
A marketing plan is a roadmap document that visualizes your strategy across channels and gets buy-in from stakeholders. It forces you to prioritize ruthlessly and reflect on what methods will work best for your business.
And with AI in the picture, creating a marketing plan is a much smoother process. AI can eliminate the grunt work and help you get your strategy up and ready in a lot less time. In this article, I’ll share exactly how you can create a marketing plan using AI tools.
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Why your marketing plan can’t be a cookie-cutter template
Your marketing plan can’t be the same as any other company on Earth. The steps in this article can serve as a useful guideline, but ultimately, you have to fit them into your context.
For example:
- Your company might need the marketing plan to be a formal 20-slide presentation that includes extensive competitor analysis and a point-by-point account of resource allocation.
- Or perhaps your stakeholders need the marketing plan to be a sticky, accessible, shareable one-pager that shows the work you will do and how it’ll help the business.
Marketing plans also can’t be a one-size-fits-all because every marketer is at a different stage in their business. You might already have a marketing plan and need help refining it. Or you’re launching soon and are here to understand how you can spread the word. Those two situations will require different marketing plans.
Even an AI tool that shares data analysis on your customers and industry trends, for instance, doesn’t have the experience and context you do. Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand your company goals. It doesn’t know the competition inside out like you do. It’s not speaking to your customers to understand their challenges.
Adjust the steps depending on your situation and requirements. There are 1,000 ways to cook an egg, but the core philosophy remains the same: You have to create a marketing plan that helps you prioritize your marketing efforts and get buy-in from stakeholders.
What to include: 8 essential parts of a marketing plan
Despite the differentiators, every excellent marketing plan has a few common elements:
1. A sticky one sentence summary at the top: If you speak corporate, I’m speaking of the beloved Executive Summary. It’s the one-liner summary of your marketing plan and how you will execute it.
2. Your ideal customer profile (ICP): Who is your target buyer? What do they need from you? Where do they spend their time online? Go beyond the demographics and buyer personas here and hone in on useful stuff: Your ideal customer’s pain points and how you can help resolve them.
3. Market research: Your marketing efforts can’t be in an echo chamber. Your team and stakeholders need to know industry trends, what your competitors are doing, and a SWOT analysis of your current state. This data will help you pinpoint areas where you can stand out and how you can stay relevant for the long-term.
4. How marketing is helping achieve business goals: Marketing doesn’t live in a silo. Your efforts ultimately need to contribute to the overall goals of the company. For example, if the core focus for one quarter is customer acquisition, you need a plan for marketing to contribute to that goal.
5. Measurable KPIs: All of the above factors combined will help you put a spotlight on your goals. Convert them into measurable KPIs. For example, if you’ve decided that marketing’s core aim is to get more signups for the free version of your tool, your KPI would be “get 10,000 sign-ups to the free plan through [chosen marketing channels] in AMJ.” It’s a rough illustration, but you get the idea. Transform that vague goal to a structured one using numbers and a timeframe.
6. Execution plan: How will you implement your marketing plan? What resources would you need? Which marketing channels would you use? Write down your implementation roadmap to a T. Even if you don’t present this to stakeholders, it’ll help you not miss a beat while asking for the budget, hiring more people, etc. This plan doesn’t have to be set in stone though, so don’t spend too much time fussing over choices.
7. Projected results and how you’ll measure ROI: Give a rough estimation of what you’ll achieve at the end of this marketing plan. Hopefully all goes right, but leave some room for error and unexpected obstacles. Also, include how you plan to measure your investment return in this section. What metric or formula defines success? How often will you monitor it? Using which tools?
8. Budget and resources breakdown: Based on the above, decide the budget and resources you’ll need to implement your marketing plan. It might involve doing some upfront work. For example, if you plan to hire independent contractors for content creation, you need a rough range of how much they’ll cost.
All these factors are interrelated. For example, your competitive analysis will influence realistic KPIs and customer research. There’s no one right “order” to this list, either (again, because they’re all interconnected to give you the whole picture).
And as I mentioned before, your company’s culture might need more or fewer elements when you present this data to stakeholders. I’ve seen some companies also lay down individual channel marketing strategies in the marketing plan, while others don’t need to explain the execution process or budget allocation in depth. Flow with your stakeholders’ needs.
Either way, I recommend having these eight elements present internally within your marketing team. Together, they will provide crystal-clear guidance on how you’re going to implement your marketing strategy.
The shortcut: How to create a marketing plan quickly using Plus
Creating a marketing plan using the above elements is a lot of work. After doing all the heavy-lifting of collecting data, narrowing down goals, and conducting research, the last thing you want to do is arrange it properly on Google Slides. It’s busy work. But it’s also essential.
The solution? Plus AI. It’s an add-on for Google Slides, so it integrates easily with your existing presentations and workflows. All you have to do is:
1. Upload your marketing plan document or paste it using text (using any language!)
2. And voila — Plus AI will create the slide for you
It’s really that simple.
Plus already has excellent professional layouts, but you can also customize it with your branding if you need to.
The best part? If you’re stuck on how to write something, Plus AI will co-write with you. Ask it to suggest edits to your slides, create an outline, and build a first draft. If you’re embedding a marketing dashboard, you can even use Plus AI’s Snapshot technology to grab a screenshot by any app or tool, embed it into your slides, and refresh the data with the click of a button.
Try Plus at no cost for a week and see the magic yourself.
How to create a marketing plan for a small business in 4 steps (using AI tools)
Before we begin, it’s worth remembering the three core goals of a marketing plan:
1. Finding your target audience and what troubles them
2. Creating content they need and find useful
3. Ensuring you’re able to reach them with your content
Any step you take — creating a KPI, building team OKRs, measuring ROI — should be in service of the above three core goals.
Step 1: Audit your current marketing efforts
If you’ve already dipped your toe in marketing your business a little bit, it’s a good idea to examine where you’re succeeding and where you’re falling short. Knowing this can help you determine the next steps.
For example, let’s say you see many website visitors coming from LinkedIn, but most bounce quickly. This audit tells you two important things:
- LinkedIn might be a good source of brand awareness if the website visitors match your ICP
- There’s something off about your website — unclear or inconsistent copy, poor design, too long site load time, etc.
What if you’re starting your marketing from scratch? Find areas where your marketing efforts can help immediately. For example, story-driven case studies are a good starting point for B2B companies. It’s effective quickly and can also help sales. B2C companies might see better results by creating social content. It depends on your industry, bandwidth, resources, and business needs.
Why focus on providing near-instant value? To prove the ROI of marketing to stakeholders, motivate your team, and make it smoother to get buy-in in the future.
How AI can help you audit your current marketing efforts
There are a plethora of AI tools to help you do a marketing audit. Choose a specialized tool that helps you analyze your desired metrics.
- SEO tools like Ahrefs and MarketMuse can help uncover your site’s SEO issues. Ahrefs also has a handy free website checker that’s very beginner-friendly for finding ssues with your website (like broken links) and areas of improvement (like keywords where you can rank).
- Google Analytics and Search Console can also help you identify webpages with low click through rates, bounce rates, and dwell times.
- WebFX can help you calculate the readability of your webpage.
- I also love Screaming Frog to do a content audit. It can connect to Google Analytics, Search Console, and Ahrefs to give you all the metrics in one place. It’s also free for 500 URLs, although the learning curve can be a bit steep.
- If you want to collate all your audit insights into a Google Sheet, here's a useful content audit template from Tracey Wallace that you can copy, customize, and use.
How does AI come in if you’re starting marketing efforts from scratch?
- You can conduct a team meeting with all stakeholders — like product, sales, customer success, HR, etc. — about their goals for the quarter. Determine where you can help. This will need you to spot patterns & commonalities in requirements, note general timelines, and determine an angle. Create content packages that can meet goals from multiple departments.
- An AI tool like tl;dv can be immensely helpful here. It’ll take all the meeting notes for you, organize them, and make them shareable. Long meetings become easily referenceable, too.
- “But my stakeholders are too busy to hop on a call.” I hear you. Use an AI software like Polly (it integrates with Slack) to conduct polls and surveys. It’ll help you make answering your questions more convenient for everyone — although the data you get might not be equally in-depth.
Step 2: Create your ideal customer profile (ICP)
The second step is understanding your ideal buyer. Buyer personas alone don’t help you do that because they don’t holistically capture customer pain points, where you come in, etc. They can also be limiting and mislead your marketing plan.
The first thing you need to do is segment your customers. Not all buyers are created equal.
- Some might be sales prospects already — on the cusp, ready to buy
- Many are cold customers who don’t even know about you yet
- Another way to segment might be just by different job titles
Identify three to four customer segments you want to serve with your marketing plan and enter them into this customer ranking calculator by consumer psychology expert Katelyn Bourgoin.
First put your energy in customers with the highest score. These are the customers who will benefit the most from your marketing plan. Every segment can have individualized marketing assets, of course, but you need to prioritize.
Next, do a thorough customer research on the buyer segment(s) you’re prioritizing.
- What are their pain points?
- Why would they use your tool to solve their problem?
- What might be their objections against buying from you?
- Which other solutions (competitor or not) might they consider alongside your product?
- What are their consumption habits — which marketing channels do they use, which influencers do they trust, what podcasts do they listen to, etc.?
The results you uncover here will give you insight into the content your ICP actually needs. Let it hold a large chunk in dictating your marketing channels and content topics.
How AI can help you map out your ideal ICP
AI tools can be beneficial in both: a) finding your customer segments and b) doing customer research on those segments.
a) For finding your various customer segments
The most accurate way to segment your customers is to analyze existing customer data.
AI tools like Segment and Tealium can help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers — their demographics, buying journey, inclination to buy, and more.
b) For doing customer research on various customer segments
- The best way to do customer research is through buyer interviews. If you can schedule these — at least a few every quarter — do so! Nothing beats knowing your customers 1:1. You can ask them all the questions directly and get full context. AI tools like Insight7 can help you analyze these customer interviews and even collate the common themes across various interviews.
- But buyer interviews are only scalable if you have a large team with enough bandwidth. In that case, the second alternative is building customer surveys. SurveyMonkey and SurveySparrow have AI capabilities to help you refine your questions and spot trends. You can add these surveys in post purchase notifications, to your email list, or ask customer success folks to send them directly. The job is to filter for commonalities among what your customers say (using AI as much as possible) and identify what your customers need.
- What if you have less than 1,000 customers? It might be challenging to spot patterns or get them to come on interview calls. Use an AI tool like SparkToro to understand your buyer’s consumption habits. It’s excellent because it shares detailed insights into how your customers behave (which website they visit, what videos they watch), their demographics, and characteristics.
Understanding your ICP is arguably the most important part of creating a business plan. Knowing who you’re speaking to, what they like & dislike, who they trust, and what resonates with them enables creating marketing content that sells like hotcakes.
Step 3: Conduct market research
Market research mainly includes:
1. Competitor analysis
2. SWOT analysis
3. Industry trends
Your business doesn’t exist alone. Customers are evaluating competitors against you and wondering which choice is better. To supersede this, you need to know your competition and your strengths & weaknesses.
This step is about answering questions like:
- Who are my primary competitors?
- What do their buyers complain about?
- What do customers love about them?
- Which overlapping market are they serving?
- How is our product a better fit for customers?
- Where is our product lagging compared to our core competitors?
Baton Rouge has a good example of an effective SWOT analysis. They list the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats relative to their competitors. This gives a 360-degree picture of how the market plan was formed.
Analyzing industry trends translates to always having an ear to the ground. It’s also a tactic to stay ahead to the competition. What are your customers looking forward to in your niche? How can you help? What’s a viral topic everyone’s speaking about in your customer segment? Answers to all these questions help you have a pulse on the market and serve your audience even better.
How AI can help you conduct market research
AI tools can pitch in all three areas of market research.
- For competitive analysis: Tools like Kompyte and Semrush can give you AI-powered insights into what your competitors are up to. You can analyze their traffic, advertising, social media, and where they’re ranking in organic search. Even ChatGPT can give you some insight into your competitors, but I wouldn’t trust its data 100%. It also won’t share comprehensive reports like dedicated AI tools would.
- For SWOT analysis: AI tools don’t know the internal info on your business like you do. It’s best to create your own SWOT diagram based on competitive analysis, but you can use AI software like SWOT Bot and Creately to get a headstart and visualize your findings.
- For industry trends: AI social listening tools like Sprout Social and Brandwatch help you understand what your ICPs are talking about on social media or searching on Google. You can spot trends and take action early.
AI is incredibly powerful in conducting market research. But it can get even stronger once you supplement it with your own insights into the industry, competitors, and customers.
Step 4: Establish KPIs and an execution roadmap
After you’ve collected all this data, you know what you expect to achieve from your marketing efforts. The next piece of the puzzle is setting measurable KPIs in your marketing plan.
For example, you can have a KPI to increase product signups by 20% in one quarter. To convert your goals to KPIs, use the SMART acronym. Any goal you set should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Adding all these elements will convert a goal into a measurable KPI.
How many goals should you set? It’s best to limit yourself to a maximum of three KPIs per quarter. Any more and your team’s focus can be strapped thin. Have one main KPI and if possible, the other two KPIs will be adjacent to it, too.
I like Safe Haven Family Shelter’s KPIs in its marketing plan. It also includes “action steps” right next to each column.
Once you set your KPIs, you also need to provide a rough roadmap of how you’re planning to achieve these KPIs in your marketing plan. Your execution section should answer:
- What is the timeline for implementing individual blocks in your marketing plan?
- Which marketing channels are you going to use?
- What distribution strategies will you use to ensure the content reaches your audience?
- How many people will you hire?
- What’s the budget you’ll need?
The University of Illinois has a good example of how to present this. They have a section breakdown for each of their marketing channels — why they’ve chosen that channel, tactics for each platform, and success metrics.
How detailed or succinct you choose to go is individual to your company. Do your stakeholders need to see an editorial calendar? Or would a rough timeline and plan suffice? Depending on your needs, add more or less details in the implementation section.
How AI can help you set KPIs and build an execution roadmap
AI tools can assist in this department, but they aren’t as helpful as they were in other steps. ChatGPT will be a hit-and-miss if you ask it to convert a vague goal into a tangible KPI. Similarly, only you know the resources, team size, available resources, and budget constraints of your company.
But AI presentation tools can help you make these presentations easier (and make your Google Slides look good!).
Let’s say you have your execution roadmap listed in text format, but you need to convert it into a presentable, snackable slide. ChatGPT can create the powerpoint presentation in textual form.
Want something even easier? Just upload that document or enter your text into Plus AI and it’ll automatically create your execution plan in presentation form.
And you can customize it with brand colors or edit individual slides if that’s more your jam. You’re saving hours you would’ve spent converting your plan into slides. Plus AI does the job in mere minutes so you can focus on the more important stuff.
Customize your marketing plan according to your needs
Creating a marketing plan isn’t an easy job. And it’s one you can’t replicate: Each company has a different set of requirements on what metrics you need, how deeply you need to explain, and which facets of marketing you need to include.
But every marketing strategy has a few common elements:
- An analysis of how your current marketing efforts are performing
- Your ideal customer profile, their needs, and their preferred marketing channels
- A market research analysis into your competitors and how you fare against them
- Defined KPIs, priorities, and an execution roadmap to achieve the goals you’ve set
This small business marketing strategy example, for instance, has all the above elements and more.
It’s obvious that you need to do a ton of upfront work to present something legible to your team and stakeholders. AI tools can help a lot along the way.
Using Plus, you can generate your marketing plan within Google Slides much faster. The best part? You can customize it however you wish.
- Want to create individual slides? Easy peasy.
- Need marketing strategy templates to get you started? Plenty available.
- Wish an AI could generate all the slides for you and you could just edit with your data and context? That’s possible too.
Try Plus today. Your first seven days are free!
