Plan, budget, and measure your marketing activities and analyze how to optimize them for better results. If you are a marketer who's looking to measure the performance of your campaigns and optimize your marketing activities, you can do it by building a marketing plan.

Here's how to build a marketing plan:

1. Begin by choosing an appropriate purpose for your plan. You can choose from one of the following purposes:
   
• Traffic generation
  
• Passive conversion
  
• Active conversion
  
2. Create objectives to fulfill the selected purpose. For example, increase 1000 visitors in the next quarter.
   
3. Set an attainable target against each objective to complete your objectives. You can also specify the return you expect out of every visit to calculate the ROI of your plan.
   
4. Allocate budget for your campaigning through multiple channels like bulk email newsletters, social media promotions, print media, and television ads.
   
5. Measure and analyse the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by knowing the ROI and accessing the detailed report of your marketing plan.
   

Before we go on to know how to create a marketing plan, here are some terminologies to help you get familiar with marketing planner.

1. Time span - The timeline of the marketing plan you create. You can select the start time and end time for your plan here.
   
2. Objectives - The things you do to fulfill the purpose of your marketing plan could be called objectives. For example, if the purpose is to get more visitors to consume your downloadable content like an ebook, driving more visitors would be your objective.
   
3. Targets - The attainable or doable limit you set against each objective is Targets. For example, the number of leads you expect to sign up is the Target. Targets consist of Target type and Expected number of visits. You are to choose a way (Target type) in which target has to be set and specify the expected number of visits.
   
4. Target type - There are two ways to set target :
   
• Planner goals
  

When to choose Planner goals?


When you haven't created goals in Web Assistant, you can choose Planner goals. Please read the following example to know more.


If your objective requires the visitors to visit multiple pages at a time, you can choose Planner goals as the target type. You can select the URLs of those pages that are to be visited by the visitors. The URLs have to be manually added in Web Assistant for it to show up here in Marketing Planner. 


• Web Assistant goals
  

When to choose Web Assistant goals?


When you have created goals in the Web Assistant that helps you achieve your objectives. To learn more about goals and how to create them in Web Assistant, click here.


5. Expected number of visits - The number of visits you expect for your objective to be complete. You can also include the expected returns per visit. For example, A target of $1000 from 100 visits - $10 per visit
   
6. Marketing Channel - In order to achieve your marketing objectives, you are required to campaign to the intended audience through different marketing channels. You can campaign using different channels like email newsletters, social media, print media, and Television ads.
   
7. Campaigning Budget - You can specify the estimated budget of your marketing plan in the currency of your choice.
   

Next steps

Learn how to create a new marketing plan