A well-organised marketing plan is always essential. But like every year before it, 2025 brings new developments and challenges. Marketers will have to adjust their strategies to account for the rise in generative AI, voice search, virtual reality and user-generated content. Social media, which already has more than five million users, is set to increase its reach, with the biggest apps and platforms packing even more e-commerce, news and communication features.
Creating marketing plans is as important as ever. Without a plan in place, it’s harder to budget for marketing projects throughout the year, including any hiring or outsourcing you may have to do. A marketing plan is a roadmap that both B2B and B2C businesses can use to organise, execute and track their goals. While a marketing strategy outlines a company’s long-term objectives, a marketing plan describes the specific actions to take to achieve them.
Marketing has always required being strategic, adaptable and innovative, and this year is no exception. As a business that has helped many brands craft the right marketing strategy, here is Anchor Digital’s guide to creating great marketing plans in 2025.
What Should a Marketing Plan Include in 2025?
Marketing plans lay out your strategies for increasing sales and conversions, set goals for your whole team and help you clarify the right techniques. Some common elements that every marketing plan should include regardless of the year are:
Objectives
A marketing plan should establish what you hope to achieve this year, whether that’s increasing e-commerce sales, boosting brand awareness or generating more leads.
Business summary
A business summary gives stakeholders a refresher on the nature of your brand and lays out the more strategic parts of your plan.
SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is a planning technique that analyses your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This technique helps you make the most of your strengths and pay some much-needed attention to your weaker spots.
Buyer personas
A profile of your ideal customer drawn from research, a buyer persona includes traits like age, location and demographics.
Budget
When you know what you want to achieve, it’s easier to lay out a budget for your yearly marketing plan.
Other areas that should be part of creating marketing plans in 2025 include:
Social media
More than half the world is already on social media, and the number continues to grow. This new year brings new trends and challenges for marketers, such as AI, social listening and content experimentation.
Blog posts
Blog posts remain an essential element of any marketing plan, with companies that blog attracting significantly more leads than those that don’t.
Website optimisation
A responsive, user-friendly website is always essential for rankings and conversions.
Marketing Plan Timeline
A marketing plan timeline maps out the schedule of a project. It makes all its campaigns, events and tasks visible in one place—along with their deadlines. By referring to the timeline, everyone on your team can see when each task is due and when to start on the next one.
The steps of creating a marketing plan’s timeline include the following:
Brainstorming
This is when you first meet with your team and stakeholders to determine your goals, their deadlines and the actions you need to take to achieve them.
Planning
In this stage, you map out the full scope of the project, including its budget and which team members you have working on particular tasks.
Execution
Decide on a date to launch your project. In the meantime, set up the metrics and KPIs to track your progress.
Analysis
This is the stage of the process when you measure your performance data and assess the success of your project.
How to Create an Effective Marketing Plan in 2025
Creating marketing plans for 2025 requires paying attention to current industry trends while keeping in mind the marketing principles that haven’t changed. Here are some tips for brands and marketers looking at creating marketing plans:
Define your target audience and objectives
Launching an effective marketing campaign requires knowing who’s buying your products or services. If your brand already has buyer personas, it pays to review your existing personas for the new year. If you don’t have any, it’s time to create some.
Your buyer personas should include information like age, gender, location, and factors like needs, wants and pain points. When you have your audience figured out, you can begin to define your goals. For best results, goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Consider AI and platform changes
Changes to Google and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram (e.g. Meta moving away from independent fact-checkers) all have an impact on your marketing plan. In 2025, voice search is expected to account for more than 50% of all searches, and almost 50% of voice searches have local intent. Brands that optimise for voice search (e.g. by using longer, more conversational keywords) will see benefits.
Google’s AI-featured snippets can quickly pull together information from a variety of sources. Brands that find themselves featured in these snippets as links can also find their conversions increasing because of it.
Rethink influence
Reaching the right demographics is not only about working with influencers with the most followers. Reaching out to micro-influencers in your specific niche can help you directly bring your service to those who directly need it. When there’s so much digital chatter out there, this focused approach is often more effective than one that casts a wider net.
Embrace edutainment
Edutainment is basically content that’s both informative and entertaining, and it’s an effective way to increase your online presence. It keeps your followers engaged, builds deeper connections with your audience, solves people’s problems and positions you as a thought leader in your field.
Take an omnichannel approach
An omnichannel marketing strategy can increase your sales by significantly improving the experience for your customers. Rather than merely promoting your brand across multiple channels (what’s known as a “multi-channel” approach), the omnichannel strategy ensures the experience remains consistent and personalised. This leads to a better customer experience that helps your brand stand out now and long into the future. As marketing trends increasingly shift away from siloed channels, the omnichannel approach is definitely a keeper in 2025.
When you’re busy running your business, it’s sometimes hard to take time out of your routine to plan an effective marketing strategy.
Effective Marketing Strategies with Anchor Digital
Anchor Digital can work with you to build a strategy that works in 2025. A Brisbane-based digital marketing agency with more than a decade’s experience creating marketing plans, we keep on top of new developments in the industry without abandoning the strategies that have always worked.
If you need to start from scratch, our strategy services can help you identify your unique selling proposition (USP) and gather data on target demographics. If you need to turn your results around or just want to keep your strategy going strong in 2025, we can help with those goals, too. We anchor every campaign we launch with a solid strategy and make sure that it reflects your brand identity and business goals. To find out more, contact the Anchor team.
