By cchi@hubspot.com (Clifford Chi)

For a while now, you’ve been spearheading your organization’s content marketing efforts. Your team’s performance has convinced management to adopt the content marketing strategies you’ve suggested.

Now, your boss wants you to write and present a content marketing plan, but you’ve never done something like that before. You don’t even know where to start.

Fortunately, we’ve curated the best content marketing plans to help you write a concrete plan that’s rooted in data and produces results. But first, we’ll discuss what a marketing plan is and how some of the best marketing plans include strategies that serve their respective businesses.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.

Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign’s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all of this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You’ll also discover what works and what doesn’t. Thus, measuring the success of your strategy.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

Looking to develop a marketing plan for your business? Click here to download HubSpot’s free Marketing Plan Template to get started.

Types of Marketing Plans

Depending on the company you work with, you might want to leverage various marketing plans. We compiled different samples to suit your needs:

• Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans: These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you’ll take on in a certain period.
• Paid Marketing Plan: This plan could highlight paid strategies, such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media promotions.
• Social Media Marketing Plan: This could highlight the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media.
• Content Marketing Plan: This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you’ll use content to promote your business or product.
• New Product Launch Marketing Plan: This will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you’ll implement to promote a new product.

Keep in mind that there’s a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software they’ll use to execute that mission and track its success.

For example, while a greater plan or department might handle social media marketing, you might consider your work on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy.

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It is the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

For example, your company is launching a new software product, and it wants customers to sign up. This calls for the marketing department to develop a marketing plan that’ll …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron