# Marketing plan template, a fill-in model and a real example
Source: https://unrivals.com/blog/marketing-plan-template/
Site: UNRIVALS · Language: en · Updated: 2026-11-09
> A marketing plan template with 10 sections, ready to fill in, then completed on a real company with public filings. Plus a growth benchmark from 17,940 balance sheets and a budget cap you can calculate from your margin.
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A *marketing plan template* is a fill-in document that states which business number your company wants to move in the next 12 months, who you sell to, through which channels, on what budget, who is accountable for it, and when a cost that brings nothing gets stopped.
**TL;DR.** We analysed the balance sheets of 17,940 Romanian companies with sales above €3 million in 2024 that also filed balance sheets for 2025. Of those, 6,385 sold at least 10% more, and 4,501 managed it without losing profit.
That is why, in the template below, every unit of budget sits under a business number, has one person accountable for it and a threshold at which it stops. The template has 10 sections. You get it blank, then filled in by us on a real company, Conti Grup.
Romania is a useful place to learn this, because private companies there file public balance sheets. Anyone can check the numbers in this article, including those for the company we picked as an example. A plan you can check against public filings is harder to fool yourself with.
Maybe in your company the strategic thinking is done, the plan sits in a file, and nothing starts. Or maybe you gave up on long plans because the rules keep changing, while profit falls in the very years when sales grow.
We built the template for those situations. You can paste it into a document now and start filling it in from your last annual accounts.
## What is a marketing plan, and how does it differ from a strategy?
A marketing plan turns a decision already made into amounts, dates and names. Strategy answers why a customer should choose you. The plan answers how much you spend, where, in which month, who is accountable for it and which number has to move. **A marketing plan cannot repair a position nobody has chosen.**
[Our guide to marketing strategy](/blog/marketing-strategy/) covers the first question at length, including why a plan does not replace a strategy. Here we stay with the document. If you searched for a strategy template and want a page you can actually fill in, the table in the next section is what you need.
The difference also shows in how long each one lasts. Positioning decisions hold for years. A plan gets rewritten every year and corrected every 90 days, since prices, competitors and rules move faster than your place in the market.
That gives us a simple test for any plan that lands on a desk for approval. Read the first page and look for the sentence that says why customers choose you. **An empty section is a decision not yet made, and your budget pays for it.**
## What does a marketing plan template look like, ready to fill in?
Our marketing plan template has 10 sections and fits on two pages. Paste the table into Word or Google Docs, replace whatever sits between square brackets with your numbers, and leave blank only the section you cannot yet defend. The blank shows you what to decide before you spend.
| No. | Section | The question | What you fill in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Why customers choose us | What can we say that a competitor cannot? | Customers choose us for [one advantage]. The proof anyone can check is [number, certificate, track record]. |
| 2 | Starting numbers | Where do we start from? | In [year] we sold [amount], with profit of [amount] and a margin of [%]. We have [number] employees and [number] active customers. The top 5 customers bring [%] of sales. |
| 3 | The 12-month goal | Which business number does the plan change? | From [sales] to [target sales] by [date], with a margin of at least [%]. |
| 4 | Target customer | Who do we sell to, and who decides? | Companies in [industry], of [size], in [region]. [Role] signs. [Roles] influence. |
| 5 | Market and competitors | Who does the customer compare us with? | Our closest competitors are [3-5 names], with their sales and margins from public filings. We hold [%] of the combined sales of this group. |
| 6 | Message and proof | What does each decision-maker hear? | For [role] we say [message], with the proof [proof]. Repeat for every decision-maker. |
| 7 | Channels by stage | What moves the buyer to the next step? | At the [suspect (fits your customer profile, no contact yet), prospect (in contact), analysis, negotiation, contract, retention] stage we use [channel] and [material], with the goal of [next step]. |
| 8 | Budget | How much can we afford? | The cap is [extra sales × margin]. The budget is [amount], or [%] of sales, split across [foundation, pages, ads, sales materials]. |
| 9 | Calendar | What happens when? | Days 1-30 [measurement and foundation]. Days 31-60 [pages and materials]. Days 61-90 [test on one product and one channel]. Then [quarters 2-4]. |
| 10 | Owner, metrics, stop threshold | Who is accountable, and when do we stop? | [Name] is accountable for [metric], with the target [value] by [date]. We stop if [metric] stays under [threshold] after [number] days. |
The order of the sections is the decision that matters. [Adobe's marketing plan guide](https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/marketing-plan-templates), for example, lists an executive summary first, then mission, target market and a [SWOT analysis](/blog/swot-analysis/) (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), with the budget near the end.
We put the reason customers choose you first, since the message, the channels and the budget all depend on it. **Write the executive summary last, if you still need one.**
Section 2 comes second because a goal with no starting point cannot be checked. Section 5 asks for names and filed numbers, and our guide to [competitor analysis on public data](/blog/competitor-analysis/) shows how to gather them. The budget comes after the channels, so you know what you are funding when you write the amount.
The stop threshold in section 10 is the part most worth stealing. It says in advance at which number a cost gets closed. **Without a stop threshold, a weak campaign survives on inertia.**
Three rules make the template work. Every section ends in a number, a name or a date. Two pages are enough, and the analysis behind them lives in appendices. You fill it in together with whoever sells and whoever approves the money, so it does not become one department's document.
## What growth goal should you write in the plan?
You write two numbers, sales and margin, and tie them to a fixed date. Balance sheets give you the benchmark for sales. Among the 17,940 companies we analysed, the company at the midpoint of the list, ranked by growth, sold 3.6% more in 2025 than in 2024, in local currency, before inflation.
For comparison, [Romania's statistics institute](https://insse.ro/cms/sites/default/files/com_presa/com_pdf/ipc12r25.pdf) reported average inflation of 7.3% in 2025.
We set the €3 million threshold on 2024 sales, the year before the comparison. Set it on 2025 and the list also takes in companies that crossed the line because they grew, and the middle company appears to have grown 8.5%.
**A fair benchmark starts from your plan's base year.** You can repeat this check on any data set you use, in any country.
Out of 100 companies with sales above €3 million in 2024, how many hit each goal in 2025
Sold more than in 202459
Sold at least 10% more36
At least 10% more, with profit at least equal25
Sold at least 20% more21
Sold at least 30% more14
Source · balance sheets filed with Romania's Ministry of Finance for 2024 and 2025, UNRIVALS calculation on 17,940 companies, in lei, before inflation
The red bar is the benchmark we use when we write a goal. Growth of at least 10% was achieved by 6,385 of the 17,940 companies, and 4,501 of them also kept their 2024 profit. That comes to 25 companies out of 100.
Bigger goals are rarer still. Growth of at least 20% was achieved by 3,749 companies, and growth of at least 30% by 2,422. **A plan promising +30% asks you to be one of 14 companies in 100.**
It can be done, as long as the plan says what changes in the offer, the distribution or the positioning to make it happen.
High growth rarely repeats. Of the 5,632 companies that had grown by at least 20% in 2024, 1,641 did it again in 2025, or 29 out of 100. A goal copied from last year and raised by a few points ignores that number.
Margin is the second number in the goal, and it helps you protect profit. Of the 10,567 companies that sold more in 2025, 4,021 ended with lower profit than in 2024. **You can hit a sales goal and still end up with less profit.**
The exercise takes ten minutes. Take sales and profit from your last three annual accounts, work out your yearly growth and put it next to the bars above. Then write in section 3 the goal you can explain through a concrete change inside the company.
## How much budget belongs in a marketing plan?
At most what the goal can bring in as profit, and the calculation takes one multiplication. Multiply the extra sales from the goal by the margin in your accounts to get the extra profit. That is the first-year cap. Above it, the plan runs at a loss in year one and has to show what you recover later.
We use net margin because you can read it straight from your accounts. It is a cautious benchmark, since some fixed costs are already paid and an extra sale may leave more. If you know your margin by product, use that one and write in the plan which number you used.
A common benchmark is a different kind of number. [Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260511321750/en/Gartner-2026-CMO-Spend-Survey-Finds-CMOs-Allocate-15.3-of-Marketing-Budgets-to-AI-but-Only-30-Are-Ready-to-Scale-AI-Capabilities) puts marketing budgets at 7.8% of company sales.
It surveyed 401 chief marketing officers (CMOs) and other marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe, most of them at companies with revenue above $1 billion. **That percentage describes a different size of company from yours.**
Even in that group, 56% of CMOs say they lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy. So the second decision in section 8 is the order in which you spend. [Our guide to the marketing budget](/blog/marketing-budget/) shows how to diagnose the foundation before raising the amount.
In SIGNAL DOCTRINE™, the doctrine we work by, the marketing budget is for development, not for endlessly optimising the same channel. The right strategy lowers the real cost of winning a customer, while adjusting an ad changes it only a little.
So we split the amount across foundation, pages, ads and sales materials, and **ads get their money only once measurement exists**.
## What does a completed marketing plan look like on a real example?
We filled in the template on Conti Grup, a Romanian distributor of professional equipment for hotels, restaurants and cafes, registered in 2000 and based in Bucharest. The numbers come from filed accounts, the [company website](https://contigrup.ro/despre-noi/) and [our published analysis of Conti Grup](https://unrivals.ro/deck/conti-grup) (in Romanian).
The goal, budget and calendar are our proposal, written from the outside, and the company has not validated them.
We chose this example because the accounts raise exactly the questions a plan has to answer. In 2025, Conti Grup sold RON 29.8 million (Romanian lei), about €6 million, 29.5% less than in 2023. Out of every RON 100 sold, it kept RON 13.97 as profit. Headcount reached 23, its highest level in seven years.
| Section | What we wrote for Conti Grup | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Why customers choose us | 25 years in hospitality equipment, and one company that designs, installs and maintains the kitchen. | Track record, from the registry and website. The wording is our hypothesis. |
| 2. Starting numbers | In 2025, sales of RON 29.8 million, profit of RON 4.16 million, margin of 13.97%, 23 employees. | 2025 accounts. Active customers and top-5 share are not public. |
| 3. The 12-month goal | RON 3 million more than the last year analysed, from 29.8 to 32.8 million, with a margin of at least 13.97%. | Our hypothesis, calculated on 2025. |
| 4. Target customer | People opening or refitting a restaurant, hotel or pastry shop. The owner signs, the head chef and the kitchen designer influence. | Sector pages on the website. The decision-makers are our hypothesis. |
| 5. Market and competitors | Bilancia Exim, RON 103.2 million. Hendi Romania, 70.2. Maxigel, 51.3. Lancom Distribution, 28.7. TOPK Utilaje Alimentare, 15.5. Conti Grup holds 7.48% of the combined sales of the ten companies compared. | 2025 accounts. The share comes from our analysis of ten companies. |
| 6. Message and proof | For the owner, the kitchen opens on time and has one party responsible. For the head chef, the equipment can be seen in a showroom before buying. The proof is 25 years, 15,403 products and three showrooms. | Proof from the website, on 4 November 2026. Messages are our hypothesis. |
| 7. Channels by stage | Google search by product, service pages, showroom visit, project quote, service contract. | Our hypothesis, on Ahrefs volumes. |
| 8. Budget | Cap of RON 419,100. Budget of RON 300,000, or 1% of sales, split into 120,000 foundation, 80,000 pages, 60,000 ads, 40,000 sales materials. | The cap comes from the accounts. The budget is our hypothesis. |
| 9. Calendar | Days 1-30 measurement and the decision on the second brand. Days 31-60 pages. Days 61-90 test on one product and one channel. | Our hypothesis, on the findings of the analysis. |
| 10. Owner, metrics, threshold | One director is accountable for quote requests from the website and for margin. The stop threshold gets set after the first month of measurement. | Our hypothesis. Measurement was partly missing on 7 September 2026. |
Comparing the numbers led to the goal in section 3. Per RON 100 sold, Bilancia Exim kept RON 4.95, Hendi Romania RON 3.16 and Maxigel RON 0.22, against RON 13.97 at Conti Grup. **Conti Grup has volume to recover and margin to defend.** That is why the goal includes a margin condition.
The four-year comparison shows the size of the loss. Between 2021 and 2025, Conti Grup's sales fell 18.5%, while those of Lancom Distribution, close in size, grew 39.9%. In the combined sales of the ten companies in our analysis, Conti Grup's share fell from 10.61% to 7.48%.
The RON 3 million goal means 10% growth, a target that 36 of 100 companies analysed reached in 2025, and 25 of 100 reached it while keeping profit at least equal. It does not take Conti Grup back to its 2023 peak of RON 42.3 million. We pick it as a first step because we can tie it to what is missing today from search and from the website.
The cap comes straight from the accounts. RON 3 million extra at a 13.97% margin means RON 419,100 in profit, about €84,000. **We proposed RON 300,000, so year one stays in the black.**
The Gartner benchmark would have given a different answer. At 7.8% of sales, the budget would be RON 2.32 million, or 56% of Conti Grup's 2025 profit. A percentage taken from a survey ignores your profit, while a cap calculated from margin starts from it.
## What goes in the first 90 days of the calendar?
Start with measurement, continue with repairs and only at the end run one test. In our doctrine, a client company rarely has a marketing problem, it has a lack of infrastructure, meaning systems, channels, positioning and a brand foundation, a clear reason to be chosen.
Marketing started on a weak base burns money. **The calendar shows what you repair before you buy traffic.**
Conti Grup, the first 90 days in the plan we propose
Days 1-30
Measurement across the site and a decision on the second brand
Days 31-60
Product pages built on real searches, plus service pages
Days 61-90
Test on a single product and a single channel, with the stop threshold applied
Month 6
Review of the goal against measured quote requests
Month 12
Comparison with the accounts and next year's plan
The first month deals with what cannot be measured. On 7 September 2026, the company's second brand, topgastro.ro, had 40 products, 7 of the 12 checked categories were empty and 11 articles had placeholder text, with no tool for measuring ads.
On 4 November 2026, the address showed a suspended-site page, so the first decision in the plan is what happens to this brand.
The second month answers what buyers search for. A Romanian search term for dough mixers, “malaxor aluat”, gets 3,400 searches a month with a difficulty of 0 out of 100, according to Ahrefs.
On 7 September, Conti Grup ranked 25th for it, and Ahrefs estimated 151 monthly search visits for contigrup.ro against 7,926 for Lancom's site. By 4 November the site listed 15,403 products.
The third month applies the rule we also wrote in [our analysis for Therezia](https://unrivals.ro/deck/therezia) (in Romanian), one product, one channel, ninety days. **A test on one product shows what works without mixing the signals.** Only after it does the budget extend to the rest of the range.
Sequencing educates the market gradually, and it tells you why you cannot skip these months. Each stage has its own goal, and skipping it means burning stages and losing. Burning a stage means using it up before it has done its job. In Conti Grup's case, ads started on day one would have sent buyers to pages whose results nobody could measure.
## How do you connect channels to sales stages?
For each channel you choose the sales stage it supports and set one goal, moving the customer to the next step. We call this model the *double funnel*, because it overlaps two funnels, two paths in which the number of customers shrinks from stage to stage.
The first is marketing and runs from suspect to prospect and analysis. The second is sales and runs from negotiation to contract, retention and development. **Every marketing material serves one concrete sales stage.**
Conti Grup, one channel for each stage, in the plan we propose
Suspect
Searches for a product on Google and finds its page
Prospect
Reads the service page and asks for a quote
Analysis
Comes to the showroom and sees the equipment
Negotiation
Receives the project quote, written for the owner
Retention
Signs the monthly service contract
In this example, we see the red stage, analysis, as the decisive point. According to its website, Conti Grup has showrooms in Bucharest, Suceava and Oradea. Each showroom is a marketing channel in its own right, so the plan gives it a goal and a budget, as it would an ad.
Section 6 needs several messages, because the decision does not belong to one person. [Forrester's 2026 report on business buying](https://www.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-2026-the-state-of-business-buying/) says a typical B2B buying decision includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers. [The difference between a buyer persona and an ICP](/blog/buyer-persona-vs-icp/) and [the real B2B customer journey](/blog/b2b-customer-journey/) help you name yours.
Marketing leaders are putting less into retention. A [June 2026 Gartner survey](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-06-08-gartner-marketing-survey-finds-awareness-and-conversion-account-for-62-6-of-total-media-spend) shows awareness and conversion at 62.6% of total media spend, with loyalty and retention down to less than 15%. **Our hypothesis for Conti Grup is that, after selling a kitchen, the company could earn monthly from a service contract.**
“AI can help marketers optimize faster, but optimization is not the same as strategy,” says Ewan McIntyre, VP Analyst at Gartner, in the same release. The sentence applies directly to section 7, since an automated tool can steer money toward the stages easiest to tune if the plan has not chosen them first.
## Which layers do the plan's sections sit on?
The plan has four layers. L1 covers performance marketing, L2 revenue and sales, L3 the AI Brain, meaning the company's data gathered in one place an AI model can read, and L4 positioning. Placing the sections on layers shows you where the plan breaks. **A positioning problem cannot be solved in a channels section.**
Where each template section sits
L4 · Positioning
Sections 1 and 6, why customers choose you and what decision-makers hear
L3 · AI Brain
Sections 2 and 10, numbers and metrics in one place
L2 · Revenue and sales
Sections 3, 4 and 5, the goal, the customer and the competitors
L1 · Performance marketing
Sections 7, 8 and 9, channels, budget and calendar
The red layer is L4, positioning, because the others depend on it. At Conti Grup, eight of nine public statements checked on 7 September could have been said word for word by a competitor. Only the statement about 25 years passed the test. A bigger performance marketing budget would have taken more buyers to the same sentences.
L2 ties marketing to sales. The goal, the target customer and the competitors are the sections a sales director can challenge with numbers, which is why that person sits at the table when the template gets filled in.
L3 means the plan's data ends up somewhere a large language model (LLM, the kind of AI behind ChatGPT) can read it.
On 7 September 2026, we asked GPT-4o in ChatGPT two questions, with web search on. Asked for the best HoReCa equipment suppliers in Romania, it named Conti Grup, last of four. Asked by someone opening a restaurant in Bucharest who can fully equip the kitchen, it left Conti Grup out. Two questions are not a study, but they show where the company drops out.
The model cited competitors' service pages. **The channels section also covers what AI tools say about you.**
## Why do marketing plans end up in a drawer?
A plan ends up in a drawer when nobody is accountable for it, when it has no stop threshold, and when it was written for a year that changes every quarter. Section 10 solves the first two. The third asks for a 90-day calendar you review with the numbers in front of you.
The lack of predictability is real, and founders say so in public. “You don't know what to expect. You don't know whether summer will be the same as now,” Ioan Simion of the Romanian company Confind said [in a 2024 interview](https://www.observatorulph.ro/exclusiv/2712159-interviu-cu-ioan-simion-confind-eu-nu-am-dat-ciubuc-niciodata-nimanui) (our translation).
**That is exactly why the plan has short reviews and thresholds written in advance.** When a new rule appears, you update the section it affects and the rest of the plan stands.
The second cause is who executes. The practical question is who keeps the pace after the meeting where the plan gets approved. Section 10 asks for a name, and that name has to belong to someone with time in their calendar.
If every decision still goes through the founder, the plan stalls each time the founder has an emergency.
The third cause is resources. In the same Gartner survey, 54% of CMOs also report insufficient resources overall. Sections 8 and 9 make you see the problem on day one. **If nobody can execute it, cut the plan before you approve it.**
## How do you adapt the template for digital marketing or a new product?
The 10 sections stay, and the content of sections 4, 7 and 9 changes. The sections on advantage, numbers, budget and stop threshold are the same whatever the channel or industry. **You change the detail inside a section, and the structure holds.**
**Digital marketing plan template.** Section 7 lists online channels only, with the measurement tool next to each one, and the first month of the calendar stays reserved for measurement. This is where you check that you know which ad brought which quote request.
**Plan for a new product.** The product has no history for section 2, so you enter the numbers of your three closest competitors from their public filings, where those exist. In section 3 you write the goal in tests and first orders, and you set the budget cap by the amount you can afford to lose.
**Plan for selling to consumers.** Section 4 gets shorter, since one person decides, and section 7 weighs more. In B2B, section 6 carries one message per decision-maker, and that is where much of the work sits.
**Plan for a smaller company.** The template also works on a single page. Section 10 stays mandatory, because on a small budget a cost that brings nothing shows up in the bank account right away.
## Frequently asked questions
### What should a marketing plan include?
A marketing plan should include the reason customers choose you, starting numbers, a 12-month goal, the target customer, competitors, messages, channels, budget, calendar, owner, metrics and a stop threshold. Our template sets them out in 10 sections on two pages, in the order in which they depend on each other.
### How long should a marketing plan be?
Two pages are enough for the plan, and the analysis behind it goes in appendices. Length matters less than how clear the sections are. A good marketing plan can be read in ten minutes by whoever approves the money, and it states clearly which amount, which number and which names are involved.
### What period should a marketing plan cover?
A marketing plan covers 12 months and gets reviewed every 90 days. The first 90 days are written in detail, month by month, while the other quarters stay at goal level. At each review you compare the real numbers with section 3 and apply the thresholds in section 10.
### Who writes the marketing plan in a company?
The person responsible for marketing writes it, together with whoever runs sales and whoever approves the budget. In a founder-led company, the founder fills in sections 1 and 3. Section 10 has to name someone with time to execute and the authority to stop a cost.
### Can I use this free marketing plan template in Word or as a PDF?
Yes. The table in this article copies directly into Word or Google Docs, where you replace the square brackets with your data. From Word you can save it as a PDF when you send it for approval. Keep the editable version, because you will correct it every 90 days.
## What do you do once the template is filled in?
**Start with the decision in the section you left blank.** That section shows which decision is missing and what you have to do first. **Your accounts and your competitors' accounts show whether the goal is realistic.**
At the end you check one thing, that every unit of budget has a business number above it, a person accountable for it and a stop threshold.
If you want someone outside the company to check sections 1, 2 and 5 against your public data, [ask for a diagnostic](/#diagnostic). We will show you what is missing from the foundation before you approve the budget.