Marketing Plan Template: How To Create a Marketing Plan (2026)

Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies plan to increase marketing spend in 2026, with 49% of B2C marketing executives expecting their marketing budget to grow by at least 5%.

A solid marketing plan template can help them—and you—stay competitive. Without one, even the best marketing ideas can end up like spaghetti thrown at a wall: nothing sticks.

A thorough marketing plan helps you maximize your marketing spend, devise effective marketing tactics, and track progress toward your marketing initiatives.

The free marketing plan template in this guide provides a step-by-step approach to crafting an action plan that helps you hit your targets and maximize your marketing budget. You’ll also hear from successful merchants, who share their tips for optimizing your marketing efforts.

What is a marketing plan template used for?

A marketing plan template provides structure and guidance for creating a marketing plan. A marketing plan includes detailed information on the marketing strategies a business will use over a given time period. 

A marketing plan includes a budget, competitor and audience research, and success metrics. A well-developed, well-implemented marketing plan can help you reach new customers, increase sales, and build brand awareness. 

While typical marketing plans cover all aspects of a business’s marketing strategy, you can also create tailored marketing plans for specific types of marketing (e.g., content marketing or social media marketing) or for specific time periods or events (e.g., a product launch). This free marketing plan template helps you create a comprehensive plan for all types of marketing over one year.

How to fill out a marketing plan template

1. Write an executive summary
2. Set your budget and projections
3. Conduct market research
4. Develop a marketing strategy
5. Set up plans for measurement and reporting
6. Stay on track

The more detail you put into your marketing plan, the more you get out of it. Here’s what to do:

1. Write an executive summary

Your marketing plan should start with an executive summary that includes basic information, such as your business objectives and marketing team members. It should include:

• Company name. Your registered business name.

• Year founded. The year you started your business.

• Location. Your headquarters. If you run a physical store with several locations, list them here.

• Mission statement. A one-liner that explains why your business exists. For example, Starbucks’s mission statement is: “To be the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world, inspiring and nurturing the human spirit — one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”

• Business objectives. What you hope to achieve in the coming year. Most often, business goals include financial projections or big-picture plans, like opening a physical store or launching a new product or line.

• Marketing goals. How you plan to achieve company goals with marketing, for example, “Increase brand awareness with TikTok marketing” or “Improve cart abandonment rate with email marketing.”

• Marketing team. List the names, titles, and duties of everyone in your marketing department to clarify responsibilities and foster accountability.

2. Set your budget and projections

Assess how much money you can afford to spend on marketing this year. Then, use the marketing plan template to detail your budget.

Outline your quarterly budget for each marketing channel, along with a SMART goal (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Whether you reach them or not, writing your goals out like this can help you determine whether certain investments are worth it. 

For example, if you’re using Google Ads to promote your business, your budget might be $1,500 per quarter. The SMART goal could be “Drive new customers to the website at a cost per acquisition (CPA) of less than $25.”

3. Conduct market research

Market research helps you understand your customers and competitors, differentiate your products, and establish product-market fit. 

Before getting into the weeds, consider using market research tools like Google Trends, Statista, and Pew Research Center reports for a broad industry assessment. These resources can help you determine whether your industry is expanding or contracting and identify its customers.

Figure out your target market

Researching your target audience helps you understand its demographic and psychological characteristics, so you can create marketing materials that resonate with your ideal customers.

Develop a solid understanding of your consumers: who they are, what they like, where they hang out online, and what drives them to purchase. This information will inform your product offerings, branding, and messaging.

Conduct thorough audience research, even if you don’t have many customers yet. It can save you headaches down the line. Take it from Laura Thompson, cofounder of natural skin care brand Three Ships. 

“We thought that our consumer would be really, really young; they ended up being a lot older than what we expected,” Laura says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “So our branding, which was really cheeky—lots of pink and florals—didn’t really resonate with the more mature audience that we ended up appealing to.”

This audience mismatch prompted a rebrand. Three Ships now features a muted color scheme featuring white, blue, and green.

To figure out who will buy your products, you can conduct surveys or focus groups, or you can analyze your existing customer base with a platform like Shopify Analytics. You can also use social media analytics platforms, such as Instagram Insights, to gather demographic data on your brand’s audience. 

Once you understand your target audience, use your research to create buyer personas. Here’s what to include:

• Age. Which demographic purchases your product the most?

• Education level. Did they graduate from high school? Are they college-educated?

• Job title. If you’re selling to a business, list the job title someone purchasing your products would have—such as “merchandising manager.”

• Annual income. How much does your target customer earn per year?

• Hobbies and interests. What do your consumers do for fun? Relating your products to their interests can help you secure market share.

• Pain points. What problems do your products solve for each persona?

• Goals and motivations. What does the consumer hope to achieve by purchasing your products?

• Sales objections. What sales objections prevent customers from completing their purchases? Common sales objections include price, lack of trust, and lack of urgency. Use this part of the marketing plan template to brainstorm ways to overcome these objections.

Conduct a competitive analysis

Learning about your competitors is learning how to stand out in your market. Once you’ve analyzed rival brands, ask yourself what you can provide that your competitors can’t. 

Ty Hiss, co-founder of flower delivery company Fresh Sends, used competitor research to differentiate her service.

“When you need to send flowers, and that person is states away, what are the options? You can find a local florist, or maybe you use one of the incumbents in the space,” Ty says on Shopify Masters, noting online competitors like 1-800-Flowers, FTD Flower Delivery, BCO Flowers, and Urban Stems. “I saw how they were positioning themselves and the offerings they had, and how we could differentiate ourselves and have this unique value proposition.”

Fresh Sends’ value proposition hinges on personalization. The brand lets buyers customize cards, boxes, and the arrangements that go in them, for one-of-a-kind gifts. 

Source: Fresh Sends

To complete your competitive analysis, use the marketing plan template to fill in the following information about your business and its top three competitors:

• Unique selling proposition (USP). What makes your product better than others on the market? This is your unique selling proposition, or USP.

• Tagline. This is a short, descriptive sentence that people associate with your products—like Nike’s “Just Do It.” Use Shopify’s free slogan maker if you don’t have one yet.

• Product price. How much does your product sell for? (You’ll detail your pricing strategy later on in the marketing plan template.)

• Sales channels. Where do you and your competitors sell your products? Whether it’s on your ecommerce website, at retail stores, or on marketplaces like Etsy (or all of the above), list sales channels in this section.

• Marketing channels. Which marketing channels do your competitors use? These could include email, social media, paid advertising platforms such as Google or Meta Ads, or traditional marketing channels like billboards.

• Audience size. Figure out how many consumers each marketing channel reaches. (This will be easiest to calculate for yourself.) Look at email lists and impressions for paid ads. You can also assess your reach and impressions on social media platforms.

• Messaging. How does each competitor talk about their product? 

Conduct a SWOT analysis

Now that you’ve outlined what your competitors bring to the table, it’s time to think critically about how your business stacks up. Use a SWOT analysis to uncover your:

• Strengths. Where does your business or product excel? This could range from a diverse network of low-cost suppliers to a patent on intellectual property, such as a new technology.

• Weaknesses. Where does your company struggle? For small businesses, this could be limited brand awareness or high manufacturing costs due to modest scale.

• Opportunities. What external factors can you capitalize on to grow or improve your business? Look for elements beyond your control. For example, a competitor’s declining market share or a fashion trend increasing demand for your products could be opportunities.

• Threats. What external factors could negatively impact your business? These, too, are often outside of your control, such as declining market size or a change in government regulations.

4. Develop a marketing strategy

This section of your marketing plan template details the marketing strategy you’ll use to reach and sell to your target market.

Include each marketing channel you’ll use, such as email marketing, content marketing via blog posts, and paid and organic social media.

Next, select the content formats you plan to use per channel. Then, add information on the following for each channel:

• Stage of the marketing funnel. Which stage of the marketing funnel do you intend to reach by channel? Organic social media posts, for example, may target consumers at the top of the funnel, whereas abandoned cart emails aim to convert those at the bottom.

Source: Shopify

• Budget. How much money will you spend on each marketing channel? Make sure to account for software and equipment costs.

• Software and equipment required. What software and equipment do you need to be successful on each channel? If you’re hosting Facebook livestreams, for example, you need a high-quality webcam and microphone. If you’re running Instagram ads, you might consider using photo-editing software.

• SMART goal. What do you want to achieve through each marketing channel? Make it specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, “Increase repeat purchases by 25% in Q1.” Realistic and measurable objectives make it easier to track progress.

5. Set up plans for measurement and reporting

For each channel and objective, set key performance indicators (KPIs) at the beginning of each quarter. Check in with other members of your organization, even if they don’t work in marketing.

“Each business unit has its own respective goals, but collectively we should all be marching toward the same brand company goal,” says Toral Patel, vice president of marketing and ecommerce at body care brand Kopari, on Shopify Masters. “Understanding what everyone else’s KPIs are and how they’re contributing to those goals is really important.”

Once you’ve set your KPIs, continuously track your progress toward them. Whether you hit your KPIs will give you insight into whether your marketing strategy is working. If your goal is to “Increase website traffic via search engine optimization (SEO) by 10% each quarter,” for example, record the number of organic visitors arriving at your website each week. 

At the end of each quarter, analyze the data you collected. If you hit your KPIs, explain why. Using the same SEO example, you might say, “We met our goal of increasing organic traffic by 10% each quarter. Our investment in internal linking, optimizing product pages, and writing blog content paid off. We plan to continue this in 2027.”

For strategies that didn’t go as planned, explain why you fell behind and how you’ll improve next time.

Working toward preset goals keeps your marketing efforts on track, but don’t be afraid to pivot your objectives and KPIs as your business and the larger market change.

“We set goals at the beginning of the year, and we are tracking to our goal every day, every week, every month,” says Toral. “But because we work in such a dynamic industry, it’s important to recognize that these goals might need to shift at a certain point for any given reason. For example, if you’re finding that TikTok Shop is really driving the overall business, maybe there’s more emphasis on TikTok, and we need to reevaluate those goals halfway through the year.”

6. Stay on track

Whether you’re just getting started as an entrepreneur or scaling an existing ecommerce business, planning is key to healthy, sustainable growth. A little upfront investment of your time can pay dividends in the long run. 

When you build an effective marketing plan, track your progress, and continuously reevaluate your strategies and goals, you put your business on track to achieve its marketing objectives.