How To Create A Marketing Plan (8 Things You Need + 3 You Don't)

You’re ready to learn how to create a marketing plan for your business. Exciting! Except . . . what exactly do you need to include?

If you’ve never made an official plan before, it can feel overwhelming. There are infinite ways to market your business and find more clients, so how do you decide what to prioritize and what to ignore?

If you’ve been wondering how to create a marketing plan that actually works, start by setting aside an hour or two to think intentionally about your business and what you want to accomplish. Inside my Creative Marketing Partnership, I create quarterly marketing campaigns to keep your marketing focused and make results easier to track.

What Makes a Good Marketing Plan?

The secret to a good marketing plan is understanding your customer journey—every step from discovery to consideration to purchase—and making strategic decisions based on your business goals and capacity.

Let’s walk through my foolproof step-by-step process for how to create a marketing plan that helps you reach your goals with clarity and ease.

What To Include In Your Marketing Plan

If you’re learning how to create a marketing plan for the first time, these eight steps will give you structure, focus, and practical next actions to take.

1. A Specific Offer to Promote

The first step in any effective marketing plan is deciding what you’re selling. Marketing your entire business is too broad—you’ll get better results focusing on one product, service, or offer.

If you’re an accountant, that might be one-time tax strategy sessions.

If you’re an interior designer, maybe it’s a home walkthrough service for new builds.

Specific offers speak to specific clients. Decide what you’re trying to sell and who it’s for.

Add to Your Marketing Plan:

➡️ Marketing Plan for: [INSERT OFFER NAME]

➡️ For: [INSERT AUDIENCE INFORMATION]

2. A Clearly Defined End Goal

Once you know what you’re selling, define your end goal.

I know it’s cheesy, but it really does help to write it out in the SMART format (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound) to clarify (and simplify) your goals. How many sales do you want to make? What’s realistic based on your past performance? What’s the timeline?

Add to Your Marketing Plan:

➡️ End Goal: Sell [X NUMBER] of [OFFER]

➡️ Timeline: [BY X DATE]

3. A Bridge from Discovery to Conversion

Now that we know what we’re trying to accomplish, we can work backward to create a bridge from where they are now to where you want them to be (purchasing your product)!

Think about what needs to happen for someone to feel confident in saying yes. That might be a live training, a challenge, a referral, or even a personalized audit—whatever naturally moves someone closer to trusting you and making the sale.

In my business, that bridge is conversations. The more 1:1 conversations I have, the more clients I sign. So I focus most of my marketing efforts on creating conversations through discovery calls, voice messages, and even lunch dates. These are all part of the bridge between potential clients discovering I exist and actually hiring me.

Add to Your Marketing Plan:

➡️ What 1–2 things need to happen to move someone to YES?

➡️ Bridge Goal: [INSERT ACTIONS]

➡️ How many of [ACTIONS] are needed to reach your end goal?

4. 2–3 Focused Marketing Channels

Let’s continue working backward to the top of your funnel. You know what needs to happen to move someone toward saying yes—now it’s time to decide how you’ll make that happen.

There are infinite ways to market your business, so don’t limit yourself to just social media. Think outside the box! I’ve literally mailed branded packages to local businesses I wanted to rebrand, just to get their attention.

The key is choosing marketing channels that make sense for you. Consider where your audience already spends time, what you actually enjoy doing, and where your best clients have come from in the past. For a long time, Instagram was my main channel—until I realized I hated it. Now, I focus on blog content like this instead.

Add to Your Marketing Plan:

➡️ Where do you already have an engaged audience?

➡️ Which channels will you focus on?

5. Consistent Execution that Matches Your Capacity

Your marketing efforts should align with your time, energy, and resources.

If you can afford thousands of dollars in Spotify ads, great—but often, a single thoughtful email to your list will perform better. If you’re short on time, simplify. Focus on consistent, meaningful communication.

I’ve also found it helpful to define what kind of marketing I’m going to do on each channel. If I’m going to be using email, I’ll write out the three types of emails I’ll be sending with examples of all three so I’m never lost.

Add to Your Marketing Plan:

➡️ What kind of content are you creating?

➡️ How often will you market on each channel?

6. Core Marketing Assets, not One-off Content

Think of these as the backbone of your marketing system:

• A strategy that connects and differentiates your offers

• Clear messaging that sounds like you and speaks directly to your ideal client

• A sales page that addresses objections, establishes you as the best choice, and (obviously) makes the sale!

• Content templates for social, email, and video that create consistency and recognition

If you don’t have time to do this yourself, that’s exactly what we do inside my Creative Marketing Partnership. With just a couple of hours of input each month, we create and execute your marketing plan together.

7. A Visibility Strategy

Visibility is an important part of marketing—but it’s not the whole picture. Visibility gives you leads, not necessarily sales.

Think of it like this: visibility fills the top of your funnel. Conversions happen at the bottom. So before you spend energy trying to get seen by more people, make sure the path from awareness to conversion actually works. Once you’ve built a system that converts, visibility becomes easy—you’re simply inviting more people into something that’s already proven to work.

There are endless ways to increase visibility, but here are a few examples that work well for service-based businesses:

• Guesting on podcasts or panels

• Collaborating with complementary brands

• Writing blog posts or articles that rank for key search terms

• Creating shareable content like carousels, reels, or how-to guides

• Hosting or participating in local events or virtual summits

Visibility should amplify what’s already working, not distract you from what’s not.

Add to Your Marketing Plan:

➡️ What will you do to build visibility during this marketing campaign?

➡️ How will you measure whether those tactics are turning visibility into leads?

8. Market Research—At the End

I think market research is effective, but only when you have something to research. After your launch, look for patterns: What did people respond to? What questions did they ask? Which parts of your marketing got the most attention, clicks, or replies? Send surveys, ask for feedback, and follow up with leads who didn’t buy—sometimes those conversations are more insightful than the ones who did.

The goal isn’t just to collect data—it’s to understand your people so you can serve your clients better and market more effectively to potential clients in the future.

Add to Your Marketing Plan:

➡️ What data or feedback will you collect after this campaign?

➡️ How will you gather input from both buyers and non-buyers?

3 Things Your Marketing Plan Doesn’t Need

Part of knowing how to create a marketing plan is knowing what not to do. There are a lot of shiny objects in the marketing world that can pull your attention away from what actually matters—consistent action and clear strategy. These three things might look impressive from the outside, but they often distract you from your goals.

A fancy tracker.

You don’t need a complex spreadsheet or expensive CRM to measure success. A simple table works. Just record how many eyes saw your marketing, how much you created, and how many clients you signed. That’s more than enough data to make informed decisions and spot what’s working.

Large ad spend.

Ads can help with visibility, but they’re not a magic fix. They work best once you already have a proven system that converts. Until then, focus on organic marketing that builds relationships and trust. A big ad budget can’t replace clarity in your messaging or strategy.

An expensive website.

A website alone isn’t a marketing tool—it’s only effective if you’re directing people to it and it’s built to convert. Beautiful design is great, but if your offers, messaging, or client experience aren’t clear, your website won’t bring in sales. Keep it simple and make sure every page has a purpose.

When you understand how to create a marketing plan that aligns with your goals, you realize it’s not about having more stuff, more to-dos, or more blog posts, it’s about using what you already have, more strategically.

What are the 5 C’s of a marketing plan?

Another common framework for marketing is called the 5 C’s of a marketing plan. It’s a high-level overview that helps you assess what’s happening in your business as a whole. This framework is great for developing a long-term marketing strategy, but it doesn’t necessarily give you the practical tools or daily actions you need to run a successful marketing campaign that drives conversions.

Here’s what the 5 C’s include:

• Company: Analyze your own organization’s strengths, weaknesses, resources, and offerings to determine how well you can meet your audience’s needs.

• Customers: Understand your target audience—their goals, behaviors, demographics, and motivations—so you can speak directly to what matters most to them.

• Competitors: Identify your main competitors and analyze their products, positioning, and marketing approaches to uncover your own differentiators.

• Collaborators: Evaluate your partners, suppliers, contractors, or affiliates and the relationships you have with them to strengthen how you deliver value.

• Climate (Context): Consider external factors—economic, social, political, technological, and environmental—that influence your market and industry.

In The Rebrand Experience, I use the 5 C’s to help my clients see the big picture of their business: clarifying their long-term vision, positioning, and goals so they can grow intentionally.
But when it comes to creating an actionable marketing plan—the kind that helps you decide what to post next week, what offer to promote, or how to increase conversions—you need more than an overview.

Your marketing plan should give you:

• Day-to-day tactics for what to do and when

• Clear priorities that move the needle

• Simplified decision-making so marketing feels intentional, not overwhelming

The 5 C’s are valuable for building a broader strategy. Your marketing plan is about creating the execution. You need both.

Remember: Specific Is Better Than Broad

For a marketing plan that drives real results, specificity wins.

Your plan should clearly outline what you’re trying to achieve, what needs to happen to get there, and how you’ll make it happen, simply and effectively.

If you want learn how to create a marketing plan that actually works (and get done-for-you marketing support, apply for a Creative Marketing Partnership.