How many different types of marketing plan does a business need?

Six different types of marketing plan – our recommended options for developing and streamlining your marketing planning activities

Planning is a must for any business that wants to succeed, but choosing the right type of plan to define your strategy and structuring it can be difficult. Especially since there are so many different types of marketing plan within marketing and business, all with a different scope.

The challenge is compounded if you are new to creating plans, or to the culture of planning within a business. It seems that the difficulty of choosing the right type of plan and how to structure it to deliver results stops many in their tracks. Our research shows that, shockingly, as many as half of businesses don’t have a digital marketing plan or, perhaps worse, a marketing plan on which to base it.

Optimize your marketing strategy with structured planning

Thousands of marketers around the world are applying the RACE Framework to help them react to the changing environment and adapt their marketing strategies to attract and retain new customers. Strategic marketing planning is crucial to making the right decisions to execute an efficient and effective marketing strategy.

Our marketing funnel, the RACE Framework, offers a simple structure for marketers to quickly get to grips with the customer data and behavior insights needed to improve their marketing funnel from planning to reach, interaction, conversion and engagement.

If you’re looking for a new data-driven approach to plan, manage, and optimize your marketing strategy, I recommend you book your free 1-2-1 consultation call to get started today.

Our consultation calls are designed to put you in the driving seat, using key metrics integrated throughout the RACE Framework to identify challenges, solutions, and new opportunities for your business at each stage of the funnel.

Book a call with a member of our customer team to discuss your marketing strategy in the context of RACE, and discuss our recommended next RACE steps for your business. 

How many types of plan are needed, and why?

A single plan would be ideal, but in practice, different types and scales of businesses will need a different type of plan. It can help to define the scope and purpose of each one, you should define, for example for a multichannel marketing plan, this could be:

• Purpose: To define a strategy and plan resources needed to achieve business sales targets.
• Timeframe: Annual, typically. Could have a longer-term outlook e.g. 18 months to three years.
• Scope: The focus is on marketing communications techniques to deliver leads and sales targets for defined products. It can apply to a complete business, or if there are multiple markets and product categories, a single market.
• Channels: Includes online channels and offline media as required.
• Key outputs: Marketing objectives. Marketing budget. Campaign plans. Resource plans.

Here’s another way to understand the context of a plan, to put it into context with other types of plan as shown in this table.

Type of plan	Purpose	Scope and content
Business	Define strategies for growing profitability over a long-term period	Annual to three-yearly – New product development – Revenue sources and cost management
Marketing	Define strategies to engage audiences to achieve business objectives	Typically annual
Brand marketing	Define audience engagement to achieve brand sales	Typically annual
Digital marketing plan or transformation plan	Define how to compete more effectively with digital marketing	Typically annual Transformation plans may be longer – Review digital capabilities – Define digital marketing technology – Define resource requirements for digital
Multichannel marketing	A long-term integrated communications plan for using different digital media to hit lead or sales targets	Annual plan – Engaging audiences – Content marketing – Integrated media schedule of always-on and campaign activities
Marketing campaign plan	A shorter-term integrated communications plan for using different digital media to hit lead or sales targets	Shorter-term plan – Engaging audiences – Content marketing – Integrated media schedule
A 90-day marketing management plan	A short-term plan of activities to review and optimize activities need to hit targets for other plans	Review of actions – Covers always-on and campaign activity

Depending on the type and scale of business there may be even more plans for individual channels where different people are responsible for each. For example:

That’s a lot of plans and a lot of complexity! So we provide guidance on all of these at Smart Insights. Yet, all of these types of plans are used in different ‘use-cases’ in different types of business. It’s likely that only in the very largest types of business you would need all of them and to be honest, we wouldn’t advise that.

But if you only have one marketing plan, we recommend using a multichannel marketing plan structured across the RACE Framework, since it will give you a focus to boost your leads and sales with a planned approach that enables you to select the best strategies and marketing channels to improve your results.

That’s why we designed our RACE Framework to help marketers keep their marketing strategies simple, streamlined, and actionable. Through RACE planning you can quickly identify the action needed to optimize your customer journeys.

Book your free 1-2-1 consultation call with a member of the customer team and use the RACE Framework to talk through your omnichannel marketing activities in the context of your marketing strategy. Our popular marketing structure integrates reach, interaction, conversion, and engagement, it is applicable for both large and small businesses and will help you streamline your marketing plan.

Our recommended types of marketing plans

Here are our top five types of plans that you can read about in our new guide or click through to our detailed members’ guide for each type of plan. Or book a call to find out more.

To help with the ‘planning challenge’, in this guide we have created a concise list of the important plans you need to consider. Here’s a summary of what we see as the essential 2 types of plan a medium to large business needs.

Business plan

This is a must! It outlines objectives, goals and strategies in order to achieve those objectives. Your business plan should outline how you will change and become more competitive in the future. Remember to include strategies,

Typically, you should be looking at 1-3 years with the aim to answer the most important question of any business: how do I plan to make my business succeed? This is the end goal – a successful business with clients (or customers) and profit. You need to include 3 key points:

• New product development
• Revenue sources
• Means of cost management

But when should you use a business plan?

• Gaining initial investment as a new business or startup
• Planning market expansion for an existing company
• Undertaking product development
• Preparing for acquisition
• Planning divestment
• Gaining or sustaining a competitive advantage
• Evaluating resource allocation and strategic goals

Marketing plan

A marketing plan should include your organization’s target market, marketing objectives, and the activities to achieve those objectives and budget.

Your marketing plan should define strategies to help you achieve business objectives. Think about including information such as:

• Geographically based
• Product-based
• Business unit based
• Focussed on segmentation