A marketing plan is essential when you are launching a new business or product. This plan guides your marketing activities, which can include building brand awareness, establishing your competitive advantage, growing your customer base and attracting new leads.
Marketing plans can be complex because they provide a lot of detail about your overall marketing goals and supporting activities. That’s why it’s important to also write an executive summary for your marketing plan.
What is an executive summary for a marketing plan?
As the name suggests, an executive summary provides a high-level overview of your marketing plan. Its primary purpose is to reduce complex topics and projects within your greater marketing plan to the basics and show your short-term and long-term goals. In one or two pages, it describes the key results of your marketing research and provides an overview of your brand objectives, marketing goals and related activities.
A marketing plan executive summary is usually one or two pages that provide an overview of the marketing plan.
How to write a marketing plan executive summary
The executive summary should cover the main parts of your marketing plan, as well as information about your company and brand, your products or services, the market, and your overall direction. While the marketing plan is typically written in sections separated by subheadings, the executive summary is usually written as a series of paragraphs, with each paragraph focusing on one section of the marketing plan.
Here’s how to write your executive summary and what information you should include in each paragraph:
1. Write an introduction.
Your executive summary should begin with an introduction that briefly explains what the reader can expect. It provides valuable context and will make the subsequent points easier to understand. Concisely explain the project, the purpose of your marketing plan, and the key benefits it provides to potential customers. Keep the introduction simple, short and direct.
Example: This plan is presented for XYZ Company, which sells widgets for the IT industry. We’ve created a new widget for the healthcare industry, and our marketing plan will show that we have a unique opportunity to expand into a new market.
2. Describe your company and team.
Briefly describe your business, including its history, structure, customer base and sales figures. List the main people involved with the business, including their positions and responsibilities, their respective skills and experience, and their responsibilities with respect to achieving your marketing goals. Include relevant external service providers (e.g., accountants, marketing experts and suppliers) and your company’s name, location and contact information.
Example: XYZ Company has been around since 2010 and is based in Anaheim, California. We sell widgets for the IT industry, which are designed to increase energy efficiency and reduce operating costs.
3. Outline market factors and trends.
Describe the marketplace and industry sectors in which you sell your products and services, and the main trends that affect them. List the factors that influence the market, the innovations that are taking place, and the main drivers or players involved.
Example: There are several large companies and a few smaller specialty companies that sell similar widgets to the IT industry. Innovations in this market can cause disruptions, but only when they provide significant benefits in cost savings or efficiencies.
4. Describe products or services being marketed.
Describe your products or services and explain their key features and benefits. Outline your products’ or services’ unique selling propositions to show how they differ from or are better than competitors’ offerings.
Example: We’ve created a new widget for the healthcare industry, which is outside our current market. This new product provides healthcare companies with greater efficiencies and cost savings not currently offered by existing products. Similar products exist in other industries, but there are currently no widgets designed specifically for the healthcare industry.
5. Define your customer base and related marketing activities.
Describe the key aspects of your target audience, as well as how you identify those customers. Briefly explain where you find your target customers and how you will reach them. Outline your promotional strategy, including its main objectives and related timelines. Describe your key marketing priorities and how they relate to specific business activities (e.g., entering a new market or creating new products). Explain what methods you will use to distribute your products or services.
Example: Our target market is large healthcare companies, including hospitals, clinics and manufacturers of healthcare devices. We plan to do a marketing campaign through direct sales and social media marketing. [Learn more about how to design an email marketing campaign you can include in your marketing plan/executive summary.]
6. Define any financial plans and projections.
Clearly define key financial information related to short-term and long-term marketing activities. Provide line-by-line budget details for individual activities and related metrics to determine their success.
Example: Our marketing budget for the year is $100,000, which will be spread over the following marketing activities.
7. Summarize your overall objectives and any related strategies.
Briefly describe the project’s goals and the strategies that will be implemented to achieve those goals. Conclude with a couple of sentences that will encourage the reader to review your marketing plan.
Example: We’ve developed a marketing plan that will help us to quickly reach key stakeholders in the healthcare industry and become the main provider of widgets to this market. We will use our experience in selling to the IT industry to showcase the benefits of our widget.
Additional tips for writing an executive summary
These tips should help you create an effective executive summary of your marketing plan:
Write the executive summary last.
The executive summary is a brief overview of your marketing plan. Write the complete marketing plan before you provide a summary of that plan. Once you have all of the information for your marketing plan, you can decide what’s important enough to include in the executive summary.
Whoever reads the executive summary should come away with a complete understanding of your marketing goals. Tell your story. Explain what your company does and why you chose to do what you do. Talk about what matters to you, the people who are helping you meet your goals, and what you want to achieve with your marketing.
Take notes.
When you’re creating your marketing plan, make note of anything that stands out. This could include interesting statistics, memorable moments, key findings about your competitors, anecdotes from leadership, ideas to support promotion and newsworthy events. Check out what your favorite brands are doing, note anything interesting you’ve read in a blog or article, or recall an interesting tool or technology that you can apply to your business. These ideas can be inspiration for an engaging executive summary.
Do your research.
Your executive summary must contain key data and findings, including an analysis of the market and your competition, as well as budgetary and financial considerations. Your full marketing plan will provide more details, but the executive summary should contain important research data to get your reader interested in your marketing plan.
Watch your language.
An executive summary is a professional document, so you should write in a professional manner. However, the language should also reflect who you are as a person and as a company.
Your executive summary tells your story. What is your style? What is your audience’s style? The tone of this document should match the tone of your marketing material and your company.
Avoid clichés and hyperbole, as they come off as inauthentic and can rub readers the wrong way. Clichés tend not to match the reality of your situation, as they can overpromise on what you can actually deliver. Is your company the best in its category among all competitors? What determines “best”? Ensure any claims you make are specific and measurable.
Remember the marketing.
Keep in mind that the purpose of your executive summary is to market your business. The summary should concisely position what you’ve written in the marketing plan in a way that compels the reader to continue. Include a brief explanation of the most important and interesting information and the key takeaways that will matter to the reader. [Learn more about effective offline marketing tactics you could potentially include in your marketing plan.]
Keep it current.
Your marketing plan should change over time, and so should your executive summary. Include any updates to your products, services or technologies, or any significant changes in your market and competition. For example, COVID-19 forced many companies to change their marketing strategies and business practices. Your executive summary should reflect the changes your company has made to its marketing plan to deal with the changes in the market.
Treat your executive summary as a living, breathing document that is subject to changes, just like your marketing plan. Write it with the expectation that it will change over time to reflect any serious changes in your business’s market.
Importance of the executive summary in a marketing plan
A marketing plan has several benefits:
- It helps you understand the needs of your target audience.
- It enables you to market your products to meet your customers’ specific needs.
- It determines what content you should produce to support your marketing efforts.
- It describes your competitive advantage and unique selling points.
The marketing plan is your guide to marketing your business effectively. The executive summary highlights the most important goals, actions and research results of your marketing plan. It is designed to grab readers’ attention and ensure they quickly understand where your business is going and how it plans to get there.
Additional reporting by Sean Peek.
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What if I tell you there is a writing style that is so powerful that an experienced writer out there is not willing to share?
This is THAT type of article.
If you have chanced upon this article, lucky you! Because in this article, you will find out the easiest ways to make your content 100 times easier to sell, how to break down your content, learn my SEO technique that works well with Google search engines, and end it off with a high conversation rate technique that I use myself!
Step 1 — Story Building
Great! Now that you are hyped up about this writing style, I will break it all down to simplify it for you. The first step you need to work on is pushing your audience in the right direction.
Get who you need
8 out of 10 are going to view your content but only 2 out of 8 are going to read it. You need to decide who should be reading this content.
Get your title right! It’s okay to not have every reader read your article because you are looking for a higher conversation rate. Therefore, your title needs to capture the right audience.
Readers aren’t going to make you money(ads and MPP pay little), you make the most through affiliate and paid posts. Here are some small easy techniques you can start right away to increase readership and make more money.
20 Supposingly OBVIOUS Ways for your Content to Get more Readers and Make More Money
I have been working for free for the past 3 weeks as an editor on Medium. Although working on top of my job as a…medium.com
Rule №1
So now I will be going through rule number one.
Know your product in the back of your head.
It’s pretty crazy how there are plenty of writers out there that are writing simply for the sake of writing and complain about not many enough income from it. Of course, you aren’t making any money!
You could be making an easy $5 commission from just recommending an affiliate you generally enjoy. Whereas if you are trying to make an income through ads or MPP, it going to take around 10 views to make probably $0.01. That means you need 5,000 views just for $5. You can’t survive with that!
Some writers don’t like to recommend affiliates because they are afraid to share a bad product or feel that they aren’t BIG yet. That ridiculous! As long as you enjoy what you share and constantly recommend it, readers are going to take notice and one day make that purchase.
ClickBank
If you want to promote an affiliate but don’t know where to start, you can sign up for ClickBank. They are for free and will provide you with over 10,000+ affiliate links for you to choose from and share. You could start by recommending something low costs such as an E-book or an online course. Those are easy to start selling!
Amazon
Photo byChristian Wiediger on Unsplash
I’m sure almost everyone has heard of Amazon. They are the largest multi-technology company. One of their biggest money-maker is warehouse sales. That’s where you come in!
Amazon is always happy to have affiliate marketer promoting their products. Simply join as an affiliate marketer and fulfill an affiliate purchase every 6 months to keep your membership.
Step 2 — Creating Value
Now that you know how you can get started selling, the next step is learning to market yourself. You need to invest in your readers(yes pretty interesting right!).
Before you get all excited to make an income pushing out affiliates, you need to be generating enough value for your readers. That means researching to understand what readers are looking out for, what they need, and how you can value add to your writer.
People Care More about the Writer than the Story
Let’s find outmedium.com
Read the article above to understand the power of story-telling and how it can influence your reader.
Knowing how to write a proper story-telling to create an environment where it relates to the audience is a major game-changer.
Rule №2 — Proving Yourself
So you make $1,000 today, prove it!
The easiest way to instantly prove your value is by showing results. That’s the technique commonly used by most get-rich-quick users. NOT HEAR TO PROMOTE SUCH TOPICS.
The simplest way you can prove yourself is by showing yourself using the product itself. For example, I constantly share my pictures with dogs because I provide pet boarding service as a side hustle and recommend PetBacker for users to get started taking care of pets.
Photo byEdmund using Samsung Note 10
You don’t have to show off a huge amount of dollar bills or anything to recommend readers to click on your link. All you need is to follow rule №1 which is to know your product in the back of your head and execute rule №2 of proving yourself.
Step 3 — Provide a Solution
Now that you build a story and created value, that’s when your authority speaks volumes. Most likely if you have read all the way here, you want the SOLUTION.
The solution has to be something amazing that anyone can get started. In this case, I will be sharing the most profitable writing style that every writer needs to learn to get to the NEXT LEVEL is SEO writing.
“SEO Experts” are Lying to your Face About Ranking your Articles
This article will determine whether you can make 6-figures or 4-figure based on how you write in the futuremedium.com
SEO writing is not something you can learn for free and translate into writing. If you read the article above, you will find out the deep secret of why SEO writers are hiding this knowledge from you. The reason is simple, it’s as this title says, this is the most profitable writing style.
An average normal piece of response post(500 words) costs about $5 to $30. With SEO writing, you could easily charge $50 to over $100 per article(exactly 500 words). So once again, I highly recommend you to read the article above to understand how SEO writing works and learn how to use RankIQ.
RankIQ – The AI-Powered SEO Toolset for Bloggers
Make post outlines in minutes, create content in half the time, and get access to the lowest competition keywords on…www.rankiq.com
Rule №3
Was step 3 which is to provide a solution helpfully? If not, here’s a reason why:
Your CTA must be something worth clicking onto
The writing above was intentionally meant to be long-winded. To close the deal with your writing, your links must be able to catch your reader’s attention.
You could use this strategy that I use in my writing. Which is creating GIFs in my content to hint readers to click on it. If you want to find out other strategies to make readers click on your links. Check out the article below!
Adding this SIMPLE Trick could Easily make you a Better Writer
The problems I noticed as a content editormedium.com
You can also Remind your Readers
Photo byEdmund using Canva Pro
An easy way to end your article while trying to push them to get more information is to remind them about you!
Summarizing
Step 1 — Story Building for the Right Target
Rule №1 — Know your product in the back of your head
Step 2 — Create Value for the Target Audience
Rule №2 — Proving yourself
Step 3 — Provide the Solution
Rule №3 — Your CTA must be something worth clicking onto
Once again, if you found this content useful and valuable. Share it with others readers or support me by buying me a coffee by clicking on the image!
Photo byEdmund using Canva Pro
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