How To Create a Small Business Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

You don’t need to run a large corporation with a dedicated marketing team to have a successful marketing plan. Whether you’re a solopreneur or manage a small team, a small business marketing plan can break down the process of promoting your business into a series of actionable strategies, and it can help you learn about your target market and competitors.

Ahead you’ll find a marketing plan template and step-by-step instructions to simplify the process. Plus, read about some of the most popular marketing strategies, with tips from successful small business owners.

What is a small business marketing plan?

A small business marketing plan is a document that outlines a company’s strategies and goals for promoting itself. It includes information on timelines and budgets, market research, messaging, marketing channels and methods, and how to measure success. Small businesses use these documents to plan their marketing activities and ensure their marketing efforts stay on track.

A marketing plan is typically divided into the following sections:

• Executive summary. This is an overview of the rest of the plan, typically written last.
• Market research. This includes data on your target market and competitors, including your competitive advantage.
• Marketing strategy. This section comprises information on your messaging and outlines which marketing channels and methods you’ll use to communicate those messages. It also includes goals for each of your marketing initiatives.
• Measurement. This shows whether or not you reached your goals and offers a space for reflection on what went well and what didn’t.

How to develop a small-business marketing plan

1. Use a marketing plan template
2. Set overarching goals
3. Analyze your target market
4. Research your competitors
5. Craft your messaging
6. Choose marketing channels
7. Track results and make adjustments

Here’s how to develop an effective marketing plan for your business:

1. Use a marketing plan template

A marketing plan template makes writing a marketing plan easy. Shopify’s free marketing plan template walks you through each step of developing your plan and ensures you format your plan correctly. 

2. Set overarching goals

Clarify what you hope to achieve with your marketing plan. For example, do you want to raise brand awareness, acquire new customers, or increase sales? Your marketing objectives will help you determine which marketing tactics are right for your business, and they can also affect your messaging. You’ll hone in on hyperspecific marketing goals later.

3. Analyze your target market

Market research is a core component of creating a marketing plan. This involves looking at both your target market and your competitors. Start by analyzing your target market.

Ask yourself: Who are my customers, and what do they want? The more you know about your target customer’s demographics, the easier it will be to craft a marketing message that resonates. You can also compile what you learn into an ideal customer profile that can help you understand your target audience at a glance. 

Here’s what to consider:

• Age 
• Education level
• Annual income
• Location
• Hobbies and interests
• Pain points
• Goals and motivation

4. Research your competitors

You’ll also want to understand your competitors and how your small business fits within your competitor set. Conduct competitor research by gathering information on the following marketing elements. For every item, you’ll jot down information on each of your competitors, as well as your own business: 

• Unique selling proposition (USP). Why is a particular product better than other available options? 
• Tagline. This is the short sentence consumers associate with a brand, like Nike’s “Just do it.”
• Product price. This notes a particular company’s pricing strategy.
• Sales channels. Where do you sell your products (i.e., in-store, on your ecommerce website, on a marketplace like Etsy)?
• Marketing channels. Where do you and your competitors market your products?
• Messaging. How do you describe your products in your marketing materials?

To further understand how your small business compares to competitors, conduct a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis). For each category, note where your business stands in relation to competitors. For example, you might note that your business can make products cheaper than competitors (a strength) but that you’ll have longer shipping times (a weakness).

5. Craft your messaging

Now it’s time to hone in on the USP you considered in the previous step. You’ll use this to craft your marketing messaging—the way you’ll describe your products to consumers and succinctly convey your value proposition. Here a few examples:

Olive oil company Graza’s USP is “Olive oil so fresh, you can taste it.” A play on the idiom “So close, you can taste it,” Graza’s USP reflects its fun brand personality while also communicating its two main differentiators: freshness and flavor.

“In our category, generally, it was pretty easy to see that, on one side, things were really luxurious. And on the other side, things were really pared-back and private label and no investment in product quality or brand,” Graza founder Andrew Benin says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I found a way to cut right through the middle.”

Skin care company Dieux uses the USP “Rituals, not miracles” to emphasize its brand value of transparency. “Everyone’s skin is so different,” Dieux cofounder Charlotte Palermino says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I find that when a customer feels duped into buying something … there’s a lot of bad blood there. And I don’t want that with consumers. I want people to understand what our products do and what they don’t do.”

6. Choose marketing channels

Think back to the overarching goals you set, and consider how different marketing channels could help you achieve those goals. Let’s say your goal is to increase brand awareness, for example. An email newsletter campaign might not help in this case, since customers will already need to have known about your brand and signed up for your emails in order to see your campaign. A robust organic Instagram marketing campaign, on the other hand, might help get your small business in front of new eyes.

Once you decide on specific marketing channels, nail down a budget and specific goal for each channel, and organize them by quarter. For example, maybe you decide on a $500 Instagram ad budget for Quarter 1, and decide that your goal for the quarter is to increase returning customer sales by 3%.

As you craft these goals, make sure they are SMART—specific, measurable, actionable, and time-bound. This can help ensure they’re realistic and can help you measure success down the line. 

7. Track results and make adjustments. 

Consistently measure your progress toward your SMART goals, and adjust your campaigns and goals as necessary. You can measure key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rate with the native Shopify Analytics. Shopify Analytics can also let you track sales data for individual products. Experimenting with different messaging, designs, and communication frequencies can improve the success of individual campaigns.

11 marketing plan strategies for small businesses

1. Influencer marketing
2. Content marketing
3. Word-of-mouth marketing
4. Brand collaborations
5. Email marketing
6. Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing
7. Search engine optimization (SEO)
8. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
9. Pop-ups
10. Public relations campaigns
11. Referral and loyalty programs

As you compile your small business marketing plan, consider the following marketing strategies. You can launch many of these strategies with a small budget.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing can help you tap into new audiences, and it can help you convince potential customers to purchase your products. In fact, 49% of consumers make daily, weekly, or monthly purchases because of influencer posts, according to the 2024 Influencer Marketing Report from social media marketing company Sprout Social. 

You can either pay influencers in cash or gift them your products. Pickle brand Good Girl Snacks used the gifting method in its early days and secured endorsements from popular TikTok influencers like Alix Earle, Hallie Batchelder, and Kit Keenan. Just make sure you have something to offer creators—ideally, a catchy content idea in addition to a free product. 

“We have a theory that because the name of the product is Hot Girl Pickles, it serves as a hook for these content creators in their videos, because if they’re showing that product, people are going to be like, ‘What is that?’” Good Girl Snacks cofounder Leah Marcus says in Shopify Masters. “They’re also one of the first people to try it, which gives them a little bit of hype.”

Leah notes that influencer gifting is a “win-win situation.” “It’s created a lot of buzz around us and allowed for a lot of sales,” says Leah, “while still maintaining a zero-dollar customer acquisition cost because we just gift—we don’t pay anybody.” 

While gifting products to famous influencers can give you access to a massive potential audience, you might also consider giving away products to smaller content creators as a way to create user-generated content (UGC). 

UGC is a form of social proof, meaning it shows potential customers that people love your products and are willing to vouch for them. You can see this at play with skin care brand Starface: The company’s Instagram feed is full of reposted photos of real people wearing the company’s iconic star-shaped acne patches.

“We give out as much product as possible to people who genuinely want it, and then those fans of the brand, those who resonate with it, amplify it for us by wearing it and sharing pictures,” Starface president Kara Brothers says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “And we just go right back and spread that love back to them.” 

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Content marketing

Content marketing can include written or video content across your social media profiles, YouTube channel, or blog. These posts don’t explicitly advertise your products, but rather, they share entertaining or informative content for curious viewers or readers. Over time, content marketing can help you develop credibility, solidify brand trust, and even increase brand awareness. 

Take the seafood company Island Creek Oysters. The brand publishes a Substack newsletter called “Up the Creek,” which includes everything from recipes and how-tos to interviews with chefs. The company also posts organic content to its Instagram account.

These forms of content marketing work to hook potential customers at the top of the marketing funnel. “It’s not all about getting your conversion from day one,” says Island Creek Oysters CEO Chris Sherman on Shopify Masters. “It’s about drawing them in and getting them to sign up for email, and once they’re on email, we know we have such-and-such likelihood that they’ll convert.”

Word-of-mouth marketing

When you’re starting out and don’t have a lot of customers (or haven’t yet made your first sale), the people immediately around you can help get the word out about your business through word-of-mouth marketing. This strategy relies on organic conversations about your company. These conversations can happen on social media or in real life. 

Take frozen soup dumpling brand MìLà, which used online groups to spread the word about their nascent business. Founders Jen Liao and Caleb Wang initially ran a fast-casual restaurant, but when that restaurant shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jen and Caleb started selling soup dumplings. It was a simple operation: The pair delivered dumplings to people’s doorsteps and gathered addresses and order details on a Google form. The messaging platform WeChat helped source early customers.

“My mom had formed the first WeChat group on our behalf to help us when we had the restaurant shut down, so essentially she formed this group and pulled in all of her friends … and that got us off the ground” Jen says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

Jen also used Facebook to spread the word about her new product. “During that time, there were a lot of restaurant support groups on Facebook that were happening very locally,” Jen explains. 

Brand collaborations

Brand collaborations are mutually beneficial partnerships: You’ll gain access to your partner brand’s audience, and they’ll gain access to yours. This can be particularly valuable if you find a brand partner that has a similar audience to yours, since you’ll know this type of consumer is more likely to convert. If you’re a Shopify merchant, you can source potential brand partners with Shopify Collective, a platform that helps you connect with other Shopify sellers.

Here’s an example of a brand collaboration between tinned seafood company Fishwife and chili crisp company Fly By Jing. Both companies sell to an audience of food lovers willing to pay a little extra for high-quality products with fun branding.

You don’t need to create a brand-new product to benefit from a collab. Other options include running a giveaway in which entrants must follow both brands to win a suite of products from you and your collaborator, interviewing both founders for your blogs or podcasts, or going live together on social media.

Email marketing

Every dollar counts when you’re running a small business, so investing in marketing channels with a high return on investment (ROI) is paramount. For direct-to-consumer businesses in 2024, the marketing channel with the highest ROI was email, according to Hubspot’s 2025 State of Marketing Report.

A robust email marketing strategy involves sending a mix of personalized automated emails (like abandoned cart reminders) alongside other types of messages like sale announcements and product drop notifications. You might also create a newsletter to share longer form content with your subscribers. An email marketing software like Shopify Email makes it easy to send all of these types of marketing emails.

In order to build an email list and start sending emails, however, you’ll need to convince consumers to give you their email addresses. This is a form of lead generation. An easy way to do this is with a pop-up on your website and a permanent sign-up form field in the footer of your site. If you’re a Shopify merchant, you can easily set this up with Shopify Forms.

Make sure you’re incentivizing potential customers to sign up. “There should always be some kind of offer for signing up for your email list,” says Desirae Odjick, a senior product marketing lead at Shopify who works on Shopify Email and Shopify Forms.

That incentive could be a discount, early access to product drops, or access to exclusive content. Here’s an example of discount and product drop incentives from shoe brand Larroudé.

Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing

Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing is a type of affiliate marketing in which you pay affiliates for each sale they convert. For example, you could hire a popular TikToker as an affiliate, then pay them a percentage of each sale they convert through the affiliate links they post on their profile. 

CPA marketing can be a great option for small companies with limited budgets. “CPA marketing is a low-risk, high-reward model for ecommerce businesses,” says Jerrid Grimm, head of publisher marketing at creator partnership platform impact.com. “It’s the only marketing model that guarantees that a business only pays when it achieves real results such as product sales.”

Affiliate commissions range from 5% to 50%, and Lizzy Masotta, a senior product lead at Shopify, recommends paying different affiliates different rates. You can segment creators into commission tiers by looking at engagement metrics and proven success. 

“You can always start them at your lowest level and promote them through the levels as you build more trust and see more continued performance from them,” says Lizzy.

To encourage consumers to purchase through affiliate links, you might consider offering a discount. For example, customers who purchase from makeup brand Glossier via TikToker affiliate @bunnysachet receive 10% off their order.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of making your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is important because it can help you increase website traffic.

To optimize your website for search engines, you can conduct keyword research to understand what people are searching for, then incorporate important words and phrases into your website content. An SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush can help you find keywords. 

Product descriptions and blog posts are great places to incorporate keywords, as are meta data elements like meta descriptions. A website builder like Shopify makes it easy to fill in metadata without having to code.

If you have a physical storefront, you’ll also want to optimize your website for local SEO in order to drive targeted traffic to your online store based on location. Listing your business in directories like Yelp, garnering customer reviews, and setting up a Google Business Profile can all help you.

Here’s an example of a Google Business Profile for a specific location of bedding company Brooklinen.

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a form of online advertising where you pay for an ad only once someone clicks on it. Two popular PPC platforms are Google Ads (which show up on Google webpages like search engine results as well as on partner websites) and Meta Ads (which show up on Meta-owned platforms like Instagram and Facebook). 

As you experiment with PPC advertising, consider trying out retargeting ads, which show up for customers who have already visited your website. You can run these types of ads on Facebook and Instagram by installing the Meta pixel (a small piece of code) to your Shopify site. It only takes a few steps to set up the Meta pixel, and you won’t need a coding background to complete the process.

Pop-ups

Pop-ups are temporary physical storefronts where you sell your products in person. Holding these events can be a great way to meet customers face-to-face and get to know them. They can also be a great way to generate buzz about your business, particularly on social media.

Garnering social media attention for your pop-ups, however, likely means cutting through the noise with a unique, compelling idea. For example, canned goods brand Heyday Canning Co. held a New York City pop-up centered on a “bean swap.” Visitors could bring cans of beans from home, then trade them in for Heyday Beans and bean-related merch.

 “It ended up going pretty viral on TikTok and we ended up with a line on the block for most of the days,” says Heyday cofounder Kat Kavner on an episode of Shopify Masters. The event took up most of Heyday’s marketing budget for the quarter, but the risk paid off.

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Public relations campaigns 

Public relations (PR) campaigns help your brand garner media attention. That could culminate in a mention in a product roundup, for example, or a standalone article about how you founded your business.

Internet virality can help get you covered (Heyday’s viral pop-up earned coverage, for example), but you’ll likely need to pitch news outlets in order to have your business considered. You can hire a PR company to do this for you, or you can do it yourself by drafting and sending them to journalists.

This is what Becca Millstein, founder of tinned fish brand Fishwife, did. “I would research journalists that had written about similar things,” Becca says on Shopify Masters. “I would find their email somehow, or I would guess their email, and I would write a press release and reach out to them directly.”

Ensure your messages are relevant for each writer and outlet: “Just make sure that when you’re reaching out, you are personalizing every email,” says Becca.

Referral and loyalty programs

You can encourage customers to refer new buyers to your company by launching a referral program. Just make sure you offer a compelling incentive. For example, you could offer both new and existing customers a discount: This incentivizes current customers to refer new ones, and it encourages new customers to make a first purchase. Here’s an example from sustainable outerwear brand Tentree:

You can also launch a loyalty program to reward happy customers and encourage them to continue supporting your brand. You might offer incentives like loyalty points or free gifts with certain spending levels. You can easily set up referral and loyalty programs by installing a dedicated app (like Smile, for example) to your Shopify store.