As a Marketing Manager or a Chief Marketing Officer at your organization, periodically you may be required to prepare a Marketing Plan presentation to various business stakeholders as well as your team. If you are not sure of how to go about it, then read this post to learn about the key elements of a perfect Marketing Plan.

Typically, your presentation should include these 10 pointers with each one in a separate slide.

Image credits - Get2Growth

1. Business Information

Include a brief summary of the business, your products, the industry you cater to and type of customers you sell your products to. This slide may appear redundant at first, but if you are a CMO presenting the plan to a group of Investors or board of directors who have been onboarded recently, then you may need this. Also if you are a Marketing consultant or an agency hired to do marketing for another business, then you may definitely need this slide so as to keep your team on the same page.

2. Define Goals

In this slide, try to define your long term and short term marketing goals. Ensure to keep reasonable yet challenging goals. You may use the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based) framework for creating goals. Having a clearly defined goal helps other business stakeholders and business unit heads to be aligned with your Goals and they shall align their departmental activities accordingly. 

3. SWOT Analysis

Before you go big bang executing any marketing plan, you should do a deep dive of your internal and external situation as well as current and future potential. Keep a slide with SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of the business from a marketing perspective.

4. Competitive Analysis

Before planning out your marketing strategy, you may want to do a deep dive on the competitors who work in the similar space as yours. Explore what they are doing for Marketing, their standing in the market, comparison against your offerings, etc. In short you may want to have a summarized SWOT and key points you want to highlight to the stakeholders about the market competition.

5. Target Market

Often, marketing teams put a lot of efforts on marketing yet fail to get any traction or interest from prospects. Most of the time, the root cause of this problem lies in incorrect targeting. They tend to choose the wrong marketing channel which appears cool yet has little or no one from your ideal customer profile. Define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and then commit to your Target Market. Include this slide in your marketing plan presentation to keep everyone on the same page.

6. Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

When you start executing marketing campaigns, you may start getting a flow of leads who might be interested in your offerings. But often the deciding factor which helps your sales team to close the deal is a unique selling proposition which is attractive from the buyer's perspective. Define your USP and include it in the marketing plan. This will help the stakeholders from the Sales team to stay aligned and they would be able to provide their inputs during the presentation to iteratively carve out a perfect marketing plan.

7. Marketing Strategy

Use this slide in your deck to write about your Marketing strategy. This slide should be in line with the classic 4Ps of Marketing which are Product, Price, Place and Promotion. In case you are involved in a Service Business, then you may want to include another 3Ps of service marketing which are People, Process and Physical Evidence. Having a marketing strategy clearly defined under these heads prevents you and your team from getting misaligned and going off the track in future.

8. Marketing Channels

Distribution plays a crucial role in marketing execution. You may have the best product in the world with the best marketing content, yet it may fail due to bad distribution. The organizations who invest in building marketing channels and distribution tend to sustain longer in the business. Keep a small slider with your plans around marketing channels you want to pursue. 

9. KPIs for measuring progress

Lots of execution without performance measurement prevents you from getting to know what works and what doesn’t. Having a defined set of KPIs to measure your efforts and outcomes will help you deep dive into what works for you and where you may need to pivot in order to get expected outcome. Have a plan to monitor the KPIs frequently, say weekly, biweekly or monthly as per your context. Keep these KPIs in your slide so that your team will commit to meet those KPIs and align their efforts accordingly.

10. Conclusion & Summary

At the end, you can have a short conclusion and summary about your marketing plan to close the presentation.

Hope you found this post useful to prepare a marketing plan presentation. 

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