Marketing plan template.

A marketing plan says what your team will do this year, what it will cost, and how you’ll know it worked. The plans that get used are short enough to open in a meeting and check against real numbers.

This template fits the year on two pages: eight fields, a filled-in example on page three, and a checklist plus a quarterly review agenda on page four.

What is in it

Field	What goes in it	The usual mistake
1. Where we are now	What worked, what didn’t, the biggest change	Opinions instead of last year’s numbers
2. Goals for the year	Two or three goals, each with a number and a date	Seven goals, so none of them get priority
3. Who we sell to	The buyer, and everyone else with a say	A job title and nothing else
4. Why they should pick us	One sentence against the real alternative	A slogan nobody in sales would say
5. Channels and money	Every channel, its share of the budget, one owner	Shares that add up to 130%
6. Campaign calendar	The big pushes, quarter by quarter	Twelve monthly themes and no assets
7. How we will measure it	The monthly numbers and where they come from	Ten metrics, none of them tied to a goal
8. Owners and reviews	Who signed off, who can change it, review dates	No review date, so nobody reopens it

How to fill it in

• Start with last year. Pull the real numbers before you write a single goal. What worked gets more money. What didn’t gets fixed or cut.
• Goals. Two or three, each with a number and a date. “Grow the brand” can’t be checked in July. “30% more branded searches by December” can.
• The buyer. Write what they need to believe before they buy, then list who else gets a vote: finance, IT, the people who will use it every day.
• Positioning. One sentence a salesperson would actually say. If you’re stuck, our guide to writing a positioning statement has a simple formula.
• Channels and money. Put every channel in the table, including the ones you’re cutting. The shares should add up to 100%, and each line needs one name next to it.
• Campaigns. Pick three or four real campaigns and give each one a goal, its main assets and an owner. Each campaign then gets its own creative brief.
• Reviews. Put the four review dates in everyone’s calendar the day the plan is signed off. The agenda on page four keeps each review to 45 minutes.

How much to budget

If you have no number to start from, Gartner’s yearly survey of marketing leaders is a fair sense check. In 2026, marketing budgets came to 7.8% of company revenue, barely up from 7.7% the year before. The survey covers 401 marketing leaders, mostly at large companies, so treat it as a reference point, not a target.

The total matters less than the split. That’s why field 5 asks for a share and an owner for every channel, not one big number at the top.

Next steps

If most of your plan is content, our content marketing plan template goes one level down, asset by asset. And if the campaign calendar needs more video and design than your team can make, Moonb works as an embedded creative team alongside in-house marketers.