It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And no, not Christmas yet. It’s 2025 marketing planning! With only two months left in the year, and arguably some of the busiest months, you should be making time to reflect on what went well in 2024 and what you want to achieve in 2025.

Documenting a marketing strategy will help you prioritize tasks and generally give you and your team direction. Having a marketing plan gives you concrete actions you can feel confident will make a difference in your business.

It can be challenging to know where to start, especially if you only have an hour to dedicate to marketing tasks this afternoon. However, spending the time to figure all this out now will help you be more efficient, save money, and get your team aligned, saving time.

What’s the Difference Between A Marketing Strategy and A Marketing Plan?

Put simply, strategy is the idea and the plan is the steps you’ll take to turn that idea into reality. 

This can be as simple or robust as will be useful to you. The best plans are ones that you’ll reference and revise often. You may find that a Word document works for certain aspects, and a spreadsheet works for others. Or perhaps a Gantt chart or a Trello board. You’ll likely end up with multiple formats you can link together as appropriate. Use the tools that fit your routine best.

There are lots of pieces and parts that go into making your marketing dreams (and not nightmares) come true so let’s talk about what goes into each of them.

What Should You Include In Your Marketing Strategy?

Industry Research: You may already have some idea of industry best practices and standards because after all you are a business owner in this space. However, it’s a good idea to check in regularly and keep up with the trends and shifts. This could include market size, key players and their domains, traffic, plus the cost of earning traffic.

Audience Research: You’ll want to understand your current audience as well as your ideal audience as they may not be the same yet. You can also have multiple audiences in each category. For example, bookstores may target parents for their children’s book section, but also readers of all ages for other genres. Besides customers, media, influencers, peers and partners should also be considered.

You’ll want to get a sense of age, geography, stage of life, career, spending power, goals, pain points, and specifics of their hobby like if they prefer whiskey or gin, yoga or HIIT, house plants or garden supplies. You can get some of this information from your Meta Business Suite, tools like One2Target, but also through primary research like polls and surveys in your email or Instagram stories.

Competitive Research: Beyond your traditional SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, it’s also a great idea to understand your own market share as compared to your competitors. Tools like EyeOn and SEMrush’s traffic tracker can give you a peek behind their curtains and see what else is going on beyond what they are posting on social media publicly.

You should also include what products and services they offer that are similar to yours and different to yours as well as pricing and messaging. You may find that if you’re offering a more expensive product that your marketing messaging needs to reflect that premium. You’ll get an up-to-date sense of what makes your business unique and appealing to your customers.

Current Marketing Efforts: Establishing a baseline of what has worked well in the past can help inform what will work well in the future. That’s not a sure thing and we constantly want to be evolving and testing, but it’s a great way to start to prioritize your plans which we’ll talk more about later. This should include just about everything you’re currently measuring. Plus ideas for what you want to tweak or test next. Not sure where to start measuring? We’ve got a handy post for that too.

These next two go hand in hand and likely will need tweaked as you finalize each. It’s kinda a chicken or the egg situation so you gotta just start with one and then work on the other and come back and revise the first one. To decide which to start with, goals or budget, consider which is more critical for your business.

An optimistic view might be to set goals first, then knowing you’ll reach your goals, you can determine what you need to spend to achieve them. If you’re reaching your goals, the money shouldn’t be an issue. However, if you’re a more cautious business leader, you may rein yourself in and want to calculate next year’s marketing budget as a percentage of this year’s revenue, assuming you’ll do as least as good as this year and that will cover your expenses.

Goals: Or KPIs or OKRs or whatever you want to call them. They should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) of course. But you can also consider if you want some goals to be results based or action based. For example, do you want to earn four media mentions next year? Or do you want to reach out to 35 relevant media outlets when you’ve got important news to share? Sometimes you have a lot less control over the results and can struggle no matter what actions you take, or you may get lucky.

Regardless, all of your goals should roll up into your larger business, financial, and sales goals. They can also reflect your personal life goals as well. You may want to hire an additional member of your team, not because it makes financial sense, but because you need to work fewer hours so you can deliver the best customer service and the most strategic and creative leadership for the future of your business and heck, just generally your health.

Reference your baselines from your current marketing efforts and then estimate the impact you want to have on each of those, then of course stretch it a little. We love setting high and low goals. Something that will be easy to achieve and we can feel like we’re making great progress; something we can be proud of. And then something to push us that little extra, but that won’t be a complete disappointment if we don’t get there this year.

You could also have goals based on each state of the buying cycle: awareness, consideration, intent, purchase and retention. Of course your retention goals will be our favorites.

Budget: Of course you’ll have an annual budget, but you may also find you want to break out the budget by goal or tactic, by quarter or month, or by channel or tool. Some contracts or projects may require you to spend well before the results come in so we don’t really recommend taking your annual budget and dividing by 12 equal parts for each month. It’s more nuanced than that. We also like to front load our spend in case things go pear-shaped or exceptionally well and we can adjust later. 

It’s a great idea to match spend to anticipated return. Some fancy MBAs call this a ROMI or return on marketing investment. But it requires you have a lot of clean data, and that you can accurately attribute all of your marketing tactics back to revenue and customer lifetime value, and that’s harder than it sounds. It also doesn’t take into account the intrinsic value of your brand or other measures of success that aren’t monetary. It’ll look like critical infrastructure is overhead that can be cut when in reality, you can’t.

We recommend spending 10-20% of your revenue on marketing, but you should reference your current budget and sales forecasts to get a sense of what you can afford and how quickly you want your business to grow. The lower end should keep you steady and maintain your current customer and revenue base, while the higher end should help you increase that. 

Stay tuned for next week where Part 2 details what should be included in your small business marketing plan and how to ensure you achieve your goals.