Digital marketing plan template
A digital marketing plan says what happens, when, who does it and what it costs. This gives you the one-page plan as an editable Word document, a 12-month planner in Excel where the budget and status totals calculate themselves, and a completed example as a PDF. It also sets out plainly how a plan differs from a strategy, because writing the wrong one is the most common reason plans go stale.
- TEMPLATE
- DOCX
- XLSX
- EXAMPLE
- FREE
- Best for
- Anyone who has agreed a direction and now needs the schedule that delivers it
- Includes
- Word one-page plan + Excel 12-month planner + completed example (PDF)
- Time to use
- 60 minutes for the one-pager
- Download the plan template (Word)
- Download the 12-month planner (Excel)
- Download the completed example (PDF)
Free to download and use in your own client work. No email address required.
Created by Alston Antony Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Brainstorm Force Updated
A plan is not a strategy. A strategy says where you are going and what you are not doing; a plan says what happens, when, who does it and what it costs.
Writing the wrong one is the single most common reason marketing plans are abandoned by March.
Preview of the file
Plan or strategy — which are you writing?
If you are unsure, this settles it. Get it wrong and the document is out of date before it is finished.
| Question | Strategy | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers | Where are we going, and what are we not doing? | What happens, when, who does it, what it costs |
| Time horizon | A year or more | A quarter to a year, in months |
| Changes when | The market or the business model changes | Monthly, as work completes or slips |
| Length | One page | One page plus a schedule |
| Fails by | Listing everything instead of choosing | Having no owner or date against anything |
If you have not written the strategy, start with the strategy examples instead. A plan built on an unstated direction is a list of activities.
The one-page plan
Ten fields. The document is deliberately short, because a plan nobody rereads is not a plan.
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Objective | The commercial result, with a number and a date |
| Audience | Who, and the trigger that starts them looking |
| Offer | What you are selling and the reason to choose it |
| Channels | Maximum three, each with the job it does |
| Not doing | What you are deliberately leaving out this period |
| Key activities | The five things that must actually happen |
| Owner per activity | A name against each. Not a team |
| Budget split | Media / production / tools |
| Primary metric | The single number that decides whether this worked |
| Review date | When you will judge it, booked in a calendar now |
The two fields people leave blank
Not doing and owner per activity. They are the two that require a decision rather than an aspiration, which is exactly why they get skipped — and why a plan without them cannot be judged or actioned.
The 12-month planner
The Excel file gives you three rows per month, which is a constraint rather than a limitation. If a month genuinely needs ten activities, the plan is a wish list and something will silently not happen.
What calculates itself:
- Total budget across every activity, so the plan cannot quietly exceed what you have.
- Status counter — “7 done / 22 planned” — which is the number to open a monthly review with.
Everything else is yours to type. Status is a dropdown (Not started, In progress, Done, Dropped) because “Dropped” needs to be a visible, deliberate state rather than a row that quietly stops being mentioned.
Digital marketing plan example
The PDF is a completed one-page plan for an illustrative B2B services firm, with the quarterly shape it produces.
The part worth studying is the “not doing” line: paid social, general brand content and conference sponsorship, all excluded. Three exclusions are what let the remaining three channels have enough budget and attention to produce a readable result. A plan naming six channels produces six inconclusive experiments and no decisions.
Example figures are illustrative
The numbers in the example are invented to show the format. They are not client data and they are not benchmarks.
Setting the goals
Everything else in the plan depends on this line, and it is where most plans are weakest. A goal has to be a number, a date and an owner — anything less is a direction, and directions cannot be missed, which is exactly why they get written.
The usual advice is to make goals SMART. That is fine as a spelling test and useless as a filter, because almost any vague ambition passes it once you bolt on a percentage. Two harder questions do more work:
- Would we know by the deadline whether we hit it? If the measurement does not exist yet, building the measurement is the goal for this quarter.
- Is it an outcome or an activity? “Publish 24 pages” is throughput. “Reach 40 enquiries a month from non-paid search” is a goal. You can complete every activity and miss the goal, which is the whole reason to write the outcome down.
| Weak goal | Same goal, usable |
|---|---|
| Increase brand awareness | Reach 12,000 non-paid sessions a month by 31 December, from 4,100 today |
| Improve our SEO | Rank in the top five for eight commercial terms we currently rank 11–30 for, by Q3 |
| Generate more leads | 40 qualified enquiries a month by Q4, at under £90 cost per enquiry |
| Grow the email list | 2,500 subscribers from the template pages by year end, at above 25% open rate |
| Get more engagement | Move email click-through from 1.8% to 3% across the nurture sequence by Q2 |
Two rules about how many. One primary metric, because a plan with three primary metrics has none — when two of them conflict, and they will, the primary is what decides. And a stated baseline against every goal, because a target with no starting point cannot be assessed as ambitious or trivial by anyone, including you in nine months.
If the arithmetic does not close, the goal is the problem
Before committing to a number, work backwards through the rates you actually have. The funnel calculator converts a customer target into the enquiries, sessions and impressions it implies. It fairly often shows the goal needs several times the reach the channel can plausibly deliver — which is a reason to change the goal or the channel now, rather than to discover it in Q3.
A sequence that works
If you have no strong reason to order the year differently, this one avoids the most expensive mistakes:
| Quarter | Focus | Why this order |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 | Fix measurement, then publish | Nothing else is worth doing until the numbers are trustworthy |
| Q2 | Scale what worked in Q1 | Double down before adding anything new |
| Q3 | Add one channel, carefully | One, with a stated hypothesis and a kill date |
| Q4 | Convert and consolidate | Retention and repeat purchase are cheaper than acquisition |
The principle underneath it: measurement precedes spending. If you cannot tell which activity produced a result, scaling is guesswork with a larger budget.
Common mistakes
- No owner against any line, so nothing is anybody’s job.
- Twelve months planned in month one, abandoned in month three when reality intervenes.
- Channels listed without saying what each is for, so none can be judged.
- No budget split, so media quietly consumes the production budget.
- No review date, which means the plan is never formally wrong and never formally updated.
- Making the plan answer “where are we going” — that is the strategy, and it will date immediately.
Using the planner in Google Sheets
The workbook is standard .xlsx, so it converts directly: File → Import → Upload, then Replace
spreadsheet. It only uses SUM, COUNTIF, COUNTA and string concatenation, all of which Sheets
has, and the status dropdowns become Sheets data validation.
One thing to watch: paste anything you bring in with Paste special → Values only, or you will overwrite the two total formulas at the bottom.