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What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a tool that can help you to identify what you need to do to achieve your marketing goals and objectives. It usually spans over a specific time period, most typically a year, with periodic deadlines set against key tactics to measure the success of your campaigns.

Our one-page marketing plan compiles all the necessary details on a page, in the style of a storyboard, so you can create a clear roadmap to achieving your marketing objectives.

RELATED: How to segment your audience for maximum impact.

The difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan.

Marketing strategy and marketing plan are two important concepts in business. A marketing strategy outlines the specific actions a business will take to achieve its goals and objectives. This includes identifying the marketing campaigns, content, channels, and software that will be used to execute the mission and measure its success. For example, if a company’s social media marketing is handled by a different team or department, then working on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy can be considered.

On the other hand, a marketing plan is a comprehensive document that includes one or more marketing strategies. It serves as a framework that guides the development and implementation of all marketing strategies. In addition, it helps businesses align each strategy with a larger marketing operation and overall business objective.

RELATED: Content marketing strategy [TEMPLATE].

How to create a marketing plan.

Start by downloading your one-page marketing plan template. Before you begin filling it in, let’s walk through each step of the process with relevant examples, so that you have a clear understanding of what’s involved.

Step 1: What makes you, you?

Outlining your overarching business goal is a great place to start.

Let’s say you run a gym. If your business’ mission is ‘to make fitness fun’, your marketing strategy might be ‘to attract an audience of fitness enthusiasts, educate them on different ways of working out, and convert them into members of your fitness gym community’.

Step 2: What’s your target audience?

If you’re creating a marketing plan, it’s likely that you already have a clear understanding of your business’ audience so this step should be a relatively quick one. The different buying personas of your business should reflect current or potential customers, and may include things like age, sex, location, occupation and who they live with.

Step 3: SWOT analysis.

An analysis of your marketing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) is an effective way to evaluate how you compare to your competition. It also helps business owners to plan ahead and look beyond the ‘now’.

Here you can think about:

• Strengths – How do you exceed your competition?
• Weaknesses – How does your competition exceed you?
• Opportunities – What market area could you tap into if you were to modify your business?
• Threats – What could threaten your current position in the market?

Step 4: What are your SMART marketing objectives?

SMART is a common framework used by marketers to set realistic objectives for their businesses. So, what does it stand for?

• Specific – Be clear and distinct in what you want to achieve
• Measurable – The success of your objectives must be quantifiable
• Achievable – Is this a realistic goal for you to achieve within this given time frame?
• Relevant – Your marketing objectives must link back to your business objectives
• Timely – Each objective must have a time frame attached to it in order to be measurable.

An example of a vague marketing goal may be to ‘increase traffic to your website via social media’. To ensure this is a SMART objective, we would tweak this to ‘increase Instagram click-through rate by 15% in 12 months’.

Step 5: Why are your objectives important to your business?

Let’s focus on the ‘R’ or ‘Relevant’ in SMART. Your marketing objectives need to link back to your broader business objectives to ensure their relevance.

As an example, if your company’s marketing mission is to engage an audience of fitness enthusiasts, then creating a goal to increase your click-through rate on Instagram makes a relevant objective to set.

Step 6: How will you achieve your objectives?

What tactics will you use in order to achieve your marketing goals? Use the same SMART framework to make sure the tactics you choose are attainable.

You may choose to use existing strategies that are already contributing to your marketing growth. For example, if your goal is to increase Instagram click-through rate by 15% in 12 months, which happens to be the same growth you saw in the past 12 months, your tactic may be to continue what you’ve been doing: i.e. re-optimise calls-to-action for impact.

Step 7: When will you perform these tactics?

Assigning deadlines to the tactics you have set in the previous step will create structure and help you to achieve your marketing goals.

For the example above, you could trial different call-to-actions such as ‘Get a call’, ‘Buy now’, or ‘Get a quote’ every 3 months. Setting incremental periods within your objective’s set time frame (in this case 12 months), will help you to keep on track for success.

Step 8: How will you remain on budget?

Setting a marketing strategy to remain on budget is a key part of your marketing plan, particularly if cost and return is how you measure success within your business. This may involve setting a budget aside for each individual tactic in your marketing plan.

Once you’ve visually mapped your marketing budget out, you may decide that you are investing too much in one specific area and then shuffle things around until you are happy with the result.

Step 9: How will you measure success?

For each tactic in your marketing plan, you will need to determine how you will measure success. Setting a key performance indicator (KPI), a metric to measure the elements of your marketing efforts, will allow you to set short-term goals to remain on track to achieving your long-term objectives.

If the marketing objective was to increase Instagram click-through rate by 15% in 12 months, the KPI would be click-through rate, and you would measure the growth of this metric via analytics tools over time.

RELATED: How to measure returns on your digital marketing investment (ROI).

Feeling prepped and ready to go? Download your FREE one-page marketing plan template to get started.

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The post Update your marketing plan for 2025 using this one page template. appeared first on Yellow Pages.

Backlinks are currently extremely popular amongst search engine optimisation (SEO) experts and strategists for online marketing, thanks to their value in improving a website’s ranking in search engines and their potential for building new audiences.

Not sure what they are, or how they relate to outreach – or what outreach is? Read on.

What are backlinks and why do they matter?

A backlink is a link from another website that leads to your business’ website.

As you’d expect, backlinks are a great way to drive traffic to your site and attract potential new customers. But the marketing benefits go further than that.

This is because backlinks are a major factor that Google uses to determine a page’s search position. Having a strong backlink profile – links from a variety of trusted sites back to your site – can significantly impact your rankings.

RELATED: What is backlinking and why does your site need it?

How to get backlinks.

Aside from simply hoping the quality of your products and services will organically earn backlinks to your website, the major way to create backlinks is with outreach. Outreach is an email marketing tool where you get in touch with bloggers or websites to ask for backlinks.

Many big businesses dedicate a portion of their digital marketing budget to outreach to help build their backlink profile. While you probably don’t have the luxury of a big budget, you can still conduct outreach on your own.

Keep in mind, though, that not all backlinks are created equal. Ideally, you want to be getting links back to your site from trusted and reputable sites.

One way to evaluate this is by looking at a site’s ‘domain authority’ or ‘domain score’ This is a score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages. The higher a website’s domain authority, the more likely it is to be trusted by Google.

You can find out a website’s domain authority by using Moz’s free domain SEO analysis tool:

The closer to 100 a website’s score is, the more valuable backlinks from that site would be in terms of SEO.

When you’re looking for potential people to approach about links, try to find those that are not only relevant to your brand in some way, but also have a solid domain authority and a reasonable social following.

A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Backlinks have become part of many marketing strategies as they are also good for SEO. This is because when search engines ‘see’ that your site has been listed by someone else, it serves as something of a vote of confidence and can help you move up the rankings.

The source is vital as well. If a hugely popular website with a high ranking of its own links to you, it is worth more than it would from a relatively unknown website.

RELATED: 11 free SEO tools to simplify your marketing strategy.

To find out if a website carries enough weight to be useful by backlinking to you, you can check its ‘domain authority’. The closer to 100 their score is, the more valuable their backlinks are in terms of SEO.

Aside from simply hoping your excellent products and services will earn backlinks on their own merit, the major way to create backlinks is with outreach. Outreach is an email marketing tool where you get in touch with certain bloggers or websites to ask for backlinks.

In your email, you’ll need to be polite, honest, and upfront about your reasons for contacting them. Below are a few email marketing templates to get you started.

Link-building for SEO: Cold email templates.

So you want to give outreach a try. That’s great! But what should you say? How do you contact someone without seeming spammy?

As a general rule, aim to contact people or businesses that would have a genuine interest in your products or services, or could benefit from a partnership with your business.

For example, if you’re a nutritionist, you could reach out to a local media outlet about linking to your website in an article about a health and wellness festival in your area. Or you could partner with a local gym to offer a 10% first-time discount to their members in exchange for a link back from the gym’s website.

There are lots of ways to propose backlinks and it’s all about thinking creatively. We’ve put together some cold email outreach templates to help you get started.

Email template: To ask for a backlink in exchange for a blog.

Hi [name],

My name is [your name], and I work for a company called [company name]. We [explain your brand or service and what makes you special].

I recently came across your [blog/website], and I’m getting in touch because I had a few ideas for articles that I think your readers would love. I’d be happy to send a blog your way, either on a topic of your choosing or perhaps [suggest a good topic that would fit well with their brand and offer an opportunity to link to your site]. 

Alternatively, I’d love to discuss any other ideas that you have, even in terms of partnering up on a piece of content you’re already working on.

Let me know if this is something you might be interested in and we’ll get the ball rolling! 

Many thanks,

[your name] 

Email template: To ask for a backlink via a review.

Hi [influencer name],

My name is [your name], and I work for [company name]. We [explain your brand or service and what makes you special].

I was recently browsing through blogs in [your industry or field] and came across yours. I particularly loved the article on [name specific article] because [give specific, realistic and fun reason for why you genuinely liked it, expand as much as you can to make this personal].

I’m sure you get plenty of review requests, but I’d love to add one to the mix. I’d like to [offer you a free trial/send you a free product]. [If it’s not immediately obvious, explain more about what the product or service is and what makes it stand out here].

I think it would be right up your alley and we understand that if you don’t like it, it won’t get a positive review (although we’re pretty confident you’ll love it!). To keep our marketing team happy, we are looking for a backlink included somewhere in the review as part of the agreement as well.

Please let me know if you’d like to give it a try, or if you have any questions for me at all.

Many thanks,

[Your name]

Email template: To ask for a backlink directly.

Hi there [name],

My name is [your name], and I work for [company name]. We [explain your brand or service and what makes you special].

I was recently browsing through blogs in [your industry or field] and came across yours. I particularly loved the article on [name specific article] because [give specific, realistic and fun reason for why you genuinely liked it, expand as much as you can to make this personal].

Now I’ll cut to the chase as I’m sure you get plenty of inquiries, but I was wondering if you are open to working with brands? At the moment we’re working on creating a few great backlinks to our site, and I’m only getting in touch with a handful of bloggers that I think would be a good fit for the brand.

Please let me know if this is something you’d be interested in at all and we can take it from there!

Many thanks,

[Your name]

What’s next in your digital marketing plan?

While backlinks are essential to boosting your SEO, there are also a number of other important factors to consider, such as fresh and relevant content, a keyword strategy and many more.

If you need a hand with linkbuilding SEO or your digital marketing strategy, Yellow Pages can help. Our team of dedicated experts have years of experience developing and refining SEO strategies for small businesses. Find out more here.

The post Link-building and outreach email templates. appeared first on Yellow Pages.

Click to download your free CRM template here.

Once you get the hang of compiling and analysing simple customer data, you can import your database into a more sophisticated CRM platform with additional tools like marketing automation and lead management.

RELATED: What should you do with your customer data?

To grow your business, you’ll need a more robust solution that can manage complex data streams in a user-friendly format and help you drive result from your customer relationship efforts.

In the meantime, an Excel-based CRM template can help you organise critical data for each client or customer, including:

• Name
• Phone number
• Email address
• Estimated customer or client value
• Date of last contact
• Next action to be taken
• Next date of contact
• Lead status
• Lead source i.e. how the person was introduced to your business
• Notes i.e. anything unique or worth mentioning about a particular customer

As your customer base expands, moving to a sophisticated CRM system will help you manage these details and more without having to input data manually 

RELATED: Generating leads without driving customers away.

Want to know more about customer relationship management and how it can help your business? Our FREE eBook is packed with easy to navigate information and recommendations. Get your fast, easy download here.

The post Free CRM template for small businesses. appeared first on Yellow Pages.