They say if you want to be a great writer, you have to be a voracious reader. If you want to be great at creating charts, you have to be a connoisseur of charts. But what if you want to be great at creating marketing plans?
I ran into this many years ago in one of my earlier marketing roles as a paid media marketing manager at AwesomenessTV. The answer then was to ask around and see what other people on the team had created. Since we were a young company with a relatively young staff in a new and quickly evolving new media industry, there wasn't a whole lot to see.
When I tried looking online for examples, I was only able to find marketing plans that were part of university pitch competitions or final projects from MBA level courses. The problem with these marketing plans (and they're always PowerPoint presentations published as PDFs for easy reading) was they generally tended to skew more "learning exercise" than "real world."
Eventually, I realized the reason you can't easily find good examples of marketing plans is due to the fact that they are business plans full of trade secrets and strategies. These documents should, therefore, never be public! And that's why you never see them.
However, once in a while something unusual will happen and you get a sneak peek into how another company works and what their marketing plans look like. One example of this is the Peloton marketing plan leak I came across on Reddit a few years ago. It was Peloton's Internal Brand Positioning deck which covered their primary consumer target, how they wanted to position their brand for that segment, and how it should all come to life through the creative.
Here are some of my favorite slides from that deck:
If you're in consulting, then it's a little easier to find examples of strategy decks. All you have to do is type into Google "filetype:PDF BCG strategy presentation final" or some permutation of that and you'll find lots of examples like this one from their public sector work with the City of Dallas. SlideScience.co is also another site that has done a great job collecting publically available consulting-style presentations.
I was reading an article about the Opioid Crisis in the NYTs and the article linked to a full strategy presentation hosted on a UCSF website.
In summary, if you're looking to read examples of good strategy presentations, then you're in luck because there's a lot out there on the interwebs and it's super easy to find. If you're looking to read examples of good marketing plans to inspire your marketing plans, then you may have to continue looking. If you find a good one, or know of a place where they are available–and legal, of course–please send it my way!
