How many different types of marketing plan does a business need? [2022]

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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.

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 across:

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:

While you're at it, don't forget to check our top 18 digital marketing techniques recommended by Dr. Dave Chaffey in his dedicated blog - What is digital marketing?

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.

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.

The RACE Framework 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.

Here are our top five types of plans that our Business Members are using to transform their approach to marketing.

You can read about each type of plan by clicking through to the guide, or enquire about our membership types to speak to a member of the team and find out more.

To help with the 'planning challenge', 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.

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:

But when should you use a business 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: