Crystal Clear Communications Blog

Free Template for a One Page Marketing Plan

What is a 1-page marketing strategy?

Most marketers try to create content marketing without a written strategy. That’s a big mistake.

Content Marketing Institute (CMI) research found that most marketers lack a written content marketing strategy:

Marketing strategy often may seem too daunting to take on.

Maybe that’s because you’re thinking about those big 3-inch binders many marketers create at the beginning of each new year, only to shelve and ignore them the rest of the year. You have permission to ditch the big binders of strategy. No one will miss them because no one uses them day to day.

Take a simpler approach that’s vastly more effective to create your written content marketing strategy.

Use a 1-page content marketing strategy template to simplify your content marketing strategy and intensify its focus. A 1-page strategy offers you many advantages:

1. Since your whole strategy fits on one page, it crystallizes and focuses on your content marketing plans.
2. When you co-create your strategy with leaders and peers, you gain faster, stronger buy-in from executives and internal clients.
3. Since your strategy fits on one page, it’s easier to align all your internal clients and content producers.
4. Having a written content marketing strategy puts you miles ahead of your competitors who lack a written strategy.

Use our free template to create your 1-page content marketing strategy

Here’s a free downloadable 1-Page Content Marketing Strategy Template to create your content marketing strategy on one page:

For details on how to write your 1-page content marketing strategy, here’s my guest blog on the Content Marketing Institute website.

Use your 1-page strategy to guide content marketing every day. You’ll gain many benefits from doing so, spelled out below.

How B2C marketers gain from a written strategy

Consumer marketers gain many advantages with a written content marketing strategy: a more aligned team, a focus on priorities, an easier way to determine content types, clear accountability, better resource allocation, greater clarity about the audience, and even an easier way to identify key metrics.

How B2B marketers gain from a written strategy

Business marketers realize similar benefits from a written strategy: a better-aligned team, content types that are easier to determine, a team focused on priorities, better resource allocation, clarity about the target audience(s), stronger accountability, and easier-to-identify metrics.

You can use the same 1-page marketing plan template to create strategies for other marketing disciplines and deliverables, including your:

• Blogs
• Website
• Social media
• Trade shows and events (live, virtual, and hybrid)
• Demonstrations
• Videos and presentations
• Infographics
• News media and social media relations
• Customer magazines.

1-page strategies keep your content marketing flowing

One-page plans align content marketing activities to help you advance customers from curiosity to conversation to conversion.

I’m grateful to my mentor, Dick Notebaert, for teaching me the value of 1-page plans. As CEO at Ameritech and Tellabs, he expected strategies on any critical matter to fit on one side of one piece of paper.

You can use this same one-page template to set strategy for tactical work you plan for your brand, reputation, content, advertising, evens and more.

Few executives will ever read page 2 of your strategy. People are too busy and too impatient for that. So put it all on 1 page.

With 1-page plans, you can focus fully on the real issues. Your clients can challenge your thinking, down to exact words, to sharpen up the plans and build buy-in.

Clients can make decisions crisply and quickly when you start with a 1-page strategy template.

In a world where so many people are so impatient, a 1-page strategy works like magic to gain and hold people’s attention.

Tape your 1-page strategy to the wall above your computer, to remind yourself where to focus day to day.

For more information on content marketing strategies, subscribe to our blog.

Free Template for a One Page Marketing Plan