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Marketing Strategy Template: How to Create a Marketing Plan
Master marketing strategy with our free template.
A marketing strategy template is a pre-designed framework that outlines a business’s approach to promoting its products. It guides marketing campaign planning and resource allocation.
We’ve all been there: grocery shopping without a list. You get distracted by promotions and end up walking out with a jumbo pack of marshmallows you don’t really want and only have about 70% of the ingredients you actually need for dinner. Marketing without a strategy is similar: You waste time and resources and don’t reach your objectives.
A strong marketing strategy plan is essential to acquire, monetize, and retain your customer base. But it’s easy to dive into the details of a plan without stopping to refine the strategic approach behind it.
This post outlines the features of a strong marketing strategy and teaches you how to create one, including guidance on what decisions to make before you start planning. It also discusses resources to help you succeed, such as a marketing strategy template—a framework outlining the approach you’ll take to promote your products.
To dive in right away, get a copy of our free marketing strategy worksheet or read on for more details.
Key Takeaways
– A marketing strategy template is a structured guide to outline a business’s strategic approach to promoting its product.
– A marketing strategy helps businesses to attract and retain customers, avoiding wasting time and marketing budget.
– A strong marketing strategy directs marketing initiatives and resource allocation, ensuring systematic customer engagement, sustainable growth, and competitive differentiation.
– Creating an effective marketing plan involves setting measurable goals, crafting targeted messaging, and choosing the right distribution channels.
Why a Marketing Strategy is Important
A marketing strategy is essential if you want to attract and retain customers in a systematic and predictable way. Without a strategy, you might succeed in growing your customer base, but you’ll struggle to replicate your success reliably and consistently.
Having a strategy ensures consistency in the customer experience and within internal teams. It brings cohesion to marketing efforts and facilitates collaboration between marketing teams and others, such as sales and product.
By aligning all teams, their efforts complement each other, and customers get a seamless experience across all touchpoints. There’s no point in getting new customers to sign up if they are wrong for your product and will churn after a short time.
A plan helps you effectively deploy resources and enables you to be specific and targeted with your time and effort investments.
Features of a Strong Marketing Strategy
A basic marketing plan typically outlines some information about your target audience and the channels you plan to use to reach them. A strong marketing strategy, however, builds on data that informs your expectations for your marketing efforts. It prioritizes three main areas: customer engagement, operational scalability, and market differentiation.
– Customer Engagement: It’s important to define how you engage customers. Consistently supporting customers in reaching their goals helps you build long-term relationships with them, increasing retention rates and creating more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
– Scalability and Sustainability: Considering how you’ll make your marketing sustainable and scalable enables you to grow without compromising the quality of the customer experience.
– Differentiation: Knowing what unique value you offer—why customers should choose you over competitors—means you can communicate that proposition to customers in your marketing, helping you attract and retain customers.
Three Ways to Create Your Marketing Strategy Plan
Before detailing your marketing plan, it’s important to define and refine your strategic approach. This will help you attract, retain, and monetize customers effectively later on.
1. Identify the Promises You Make to Your Target Market
– The key to retaining customers is building long-term relationships with them. To do this, your product must align with your customers’ goals and deliver consistent value. A successful marketing strategy centers around a clear understanding of this value.
– For example, consider Amplitude and its users—marketers, product teams, and data analysts/engineers. The promises might look like this:
– Marketers: Gain easy, actionable insights into customer behavior and campaign performance without needing deep technical expertise.
– Product Teams: Get trusted insights about what drives customer engagement to build better products.
– Data Leaders: Make trusted data accessible to everyone, empowering teams with self-service insights to collaborate and act quickly.
– When you’re clear on the value your product provides to each persona, it’s easier to develop marketing actions to communicate that value.
2. Plan for Sustainability at Scale
– Effective marketing strategies are about reaching the right people efficiently and sustainably. Identify how you’ll optimize your marketing efforts across acquisition, retention, and monetization.
– For acquisition, you might segment customers to target different buyer personas with tailored messaging and use channels where they spend their time.
– For retention, create an engagement strategy to regularly update customers on new features and drive them to expand their feature usage. Use personalized lifecycle campaigns with educational content.
– For monetization, implement tiered pricing based on product usage and commit to excellent customer service to enhance customer lifetime value.
3. Define What Sets You Apart in a Strategy Statement
– Consider your marketing strategy within a larger market context and define how you’ll stand out against your competitors. Complete market research and competitive analysis, then fill in the strategy statement using the following template:
– Compared to [COMPETITOR], which we consider to be a(n) [A], we are [B] when it comes to our ability to [CAPABILITY]. Therefore, we must [C].
– For example, you might say: “Compared to [legacy bank], which we consider to be a legacy player, we are highly differentiated by offering a user-friendly mobile experience with personalized financial insights. Therefore, we must maintain this position and continue to innovate in user experience design.”
How to Create a Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve done all the top-level thinking, it’s time to create an implementation plan, including all the details such as marketing tactics and an editorial calendar that align with your strategy statement.
Here are some best practices to follow when creating a marketing strategy plan:
– Define Marketing Goals and KPIs: Clear, measurable objectives and metrics provide direction for marketing activities and ensure they contribute to business goals.
– Develop Messaging for Each Persona: Craft core and supporting messages based on key themes important to your target customers and test them with your audience.
– Select Distribution Channels: Choose channels that will help you efficiently deliver your messages, maximizing reach and engagement. Adjust and refine your approach based on channel performance.
– Collaborate with Stakeholders: Integrate your marketing strategy with sales and product work. Share your strategy with team members in different areas of the company and consider incorporating their insights.
Get Our Example Marketing Plan Template
Creating a new strategy from scratch can be overwhelming. To help you get started, we’ve created an example marketing plan template with exercises designed to tackle the big-picture, strategic thinking necessary for a successful marketing strategy. Get the Amplitude digital marketing strategy template for free.