3 Marketing Plan Examples To Inspire Your Business

With real-world marketing plan examples, learn how to outline your business’s promotional strategies and goals.

Picture this: You’ve developed What Was I Saying, a new smartphone app to help those who lose their train of thought mid-sentence. To prepare for launch and jumpstart your marketing efforts, you ask your team to line up social media influencers and buy ads; you also task the engineering team with submitting your product to the App Store.

But the launch date arrives and there aren’t any marketing campaigns to be found. The influencers are silent, the ads appear on the wrong sites, and the app isn’t available for download. It turns out the timeline was unclear and no one was on the same page during preparation. 

A formal timeline and clear marketing goals could have prevented this miscommunication. For businesses, detailed marketing plans provide the framework for communication and execution. 

Read on for three marketing plan examples to inspire building your own marketing plan.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a comprehensive outline of the promotional strategies and goals a business hopes to achieve within a specific timeframe. Marketing leaders build these plans and use them to communicate priorities and new initiatives to relevant team members. 

A successful marketing plan includes all of the marketing objectives your team aims to meet as well as the details your team needs to begin building marketing campaigns—including information about marketing budgets, marketing mix, and marketing channels.

Depending on your goals, your plan may involve all available channels or focus on just a few. For example, if you run a clothing brand that partnered with an Instagram influencer on a capsule collection, you might prioritize a social media marketing plan to take advantage of your collaborator’s audience. 

These plans may also include timelines and spending priorities. A foundation of market research supports successful marketing plans, meaning demographic insights and competitive analysis shape the marketing planning process.

Marketing strategies vs.marketing plans

While both marketing strategies and marketing plans are necessary to meet key performance indicators (KPIs), the two are not the same. 

• Marketing strategy: the overall efforts you take to position your business, wherein the marketing goals you set ladder up to company-wide initiatives.
• Marketing plan: the specific steps you’ll take to achieve your business objectives within a specific timeframe.

For example, to increase traffic to your ecommerce site, your marketing strategy might be to run ads on social media platforms where your content has performed well organically. Your marketing plan would include the steps needed to bring that social media campaign to life—including a paid marketing plan for when to run ads and for how long.

3 marketing plan examples

1. Great Jones
2. Sabai
3. ALOHA

A comprehensive marketing plan includes research, goals, and an overview of the company’s newest marketing initiatives. Marketing plans typically follow a standard structure, but their contents are unique to each company. Consider the following examples to see how several Shopify merchants created plans to support their own business goals:

Great Jones

Great Jones

Known for its colorful enamel cookware, Shopify merchant Great Jones launched its first product line in 2018. As a new, rapidly growing company, the Great Jones team embraced experimentation and adaptation as core components of its marketing strategy. 

Great Jones CEO Sierra Tishgart explains that a detailed marketing plan helps the team focus its creative efforts: “It’s really helpful to have the structure of goals while also recognizing that we’re a young creative brand.”

Great Jones’s cast-iron Dutch ovens are designed to last a lifetime, but Sierra says this makes it difficult to attract repeat customers—once you’ve purchased one, you probably don’t need another. Recent customers represent a significant portion of the company’s email subscribers and social media followers, so the team adjusted its annual marketing plan to appeal to this audience by incorporating a gift-giving program. To support this marketing strategy, it implemented marketing tactics that added appropriate language to email copy and formed a partnership with the gift-giving platform Zola. It also added an option to include a personal note to the gift recipient. 

Key components of this successful marketing plan example

This creative marketing plan example was informed by the Great Jones team’s: 

• Deep understanding of their products and target audience
• Ability to identify the right marketing channels for their detailed marketing programs

Sabai

Sabai 

Crafted in the US, Sabai is a modern, eco-friendly furniture retailer. Its founder and CEO, Phantila Phataraprasit, says consumer research helped her company craft a digital marketing strategy that resonated with its audience. Sabai’s team defines its target audience as “individuals who are passionate about sustainability and the well-being of our planet, particularly those juggling busy lives and family responsibilities.” 

Phantila emphasized Sabai’s commitment to understanding customers: “Data analytics is pivotal in shaping our marketing decisions. By continuously measuring web, email, and social media analytics on a monthly, weekly, quarterly, and yearly basis, we gain deep insights into our customers’ preferences and behaviors.”

Insights gained from customer data inspired Sabai to develop a new program called Repair Don’t Replace.

“We meticulously considered every touchpoint to create a program that resonated with our audience’s commitment to sustainability and practicality,” Phantila says.

Sabai designed the Repair Don’t Replace initiative to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability and deepen relationships with customers committed to an eco-friendly lifestyle.

Key components of this successful marketing plan example

This creative marketing plan example was informed by the Sabai team’s: 

• Nuanced insights into customer behavior via marketing data analytics
• Drive to stay true to the brand’s mission statement

ALOHA

ALOHA 

Plant-based protein bar brand ALOHA is committed to providing easy access to nutritious food. Its VP of brand and content, Julia Shapiro, described the competitive consumer packaged goods sector as one of the brand’s biggest challenges. The ALOHA team used in-depth market and competitive analysis to build an effective marketing plan that made the product stand out.

“In a rapidly changing category, research allows us to keep an ear to the ground, tracking shopping, eating, and media consumption habits,” Julia says. 

The ALOHA team used multiple market research techniques in its competitive analysis—including customer surveys, category surveys, and focus groups—to sharpen its assessment of the competitive landscape. 

“We conduct[ed] primary research of the broader category to gain a better understanding of the different shopper segments and how and where we might reach them,” Julia adds. “This allowed us to learn things we wouldn’t otherwise learn through our own shoppers, helping to lay out a path for growth and expansion.” 

To complete its research, the marketing team conducted a SWOT analysis, which focused on the business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. “Our SWOT helped us to better understand the options shoppers are faced with and why they might choose one brand over another, including ours,” Julia says.

 

Combining the insights from these market research efforts helped the team develop a differentiation strategy to market its new product.

“The recent launch of our Paʻakai bar is a great example of a campaign success story,” Julia says. “The Paʻakai is our second special edition bar and was created using ingredients from local farms in Hawaiʻi, including macadamia nuts and 100% pure Hawaiian sea salt. Ten percent of proceeds from this bar also goes to our local non-profit partner, to help fund education programs in Hawaiʻi. This bar represents what people have come to expect from ALOHA: providing healthy food with top-quality ingredients while using business as a force for good.” 

Key components of this successful marketing plan example

This creative marketing plan example was informed by the Sabai team’s: 

• Market research tactics
• SWOT analysis 

💡Ready to create a marketing plan for your business? Download a free marketing plan template to get started today. 

Marketing plan example FAQ

What is the difference between a marketing plan and a business plan?

Marketing plans outline a business’s goals and different marketing strategies for product promotion. Marketing teams use them to make decisions and plan marketing activities. Business plans, on the other hand, cover the entire organization’s strategic direction. These plans include broad business strategy goals as well as product development programs and financial projections. Company leaders often present business plans to external stakeholders and investors.

What makes a good and effective marketing plan?

A winning marketing plan provides all the information your team needs to start promoting your product. Effective plans establish clear marketing goals and provide the steps to follow to achieve them. The best examples include specific success metrics that derive from a solid foundation of consumer and market research.

How do you prepare a marketing plan?

To create a marketing plan, start by researching your target market. Select a set of specific, measurable goals that support your overall business initiatives. Determine the digital marketing mix you will use to achieve your goals and write out an implementation plan. To jumpstart the process, consider reviewing a sample marketing plan or downloading a free marketing plan template.