Creating your marketing plan for 2026

The new year is just around the corner, so if you haven’t taken the time to work on your marketing plan for 2026, then December is the perfect time to create your strategy for next year. 

But what should be in your marketing plan? If you’re new to marketing or are putting together a yearly marketing plan for a brand for the first time, then you might need some advice on what you should be including in your 2026 strategy and why it’s important to your success next year. 

Here are just a few of the most important things you should include in your 2026 marketing plan: 

Business overview 

What are your overall business goals for 2026? The answer to this should be the foundation for your marketing activity over the next 12 months. 

Whether you want to achieve more sales, expand your business into another area, or gain ground on a competitor, knowing what the overall company goals are is key to your marketing. Your marketing strategy should be heavily linked with the overall goals of the business, and if it isn’t, then what are you actually achieving with your marketing plan?  

For example, if you are targeting a 20% increase in the sale of a specific product as one of your company’s goals for 2026, then having a focus on this product in your marketing campaigns for the year is key to driving traffic to product pages, increasing conversions and encouraging repeat customers to buy again. 

Marketing content calendar 

Once you have identified your business targets for the year, you can begin to set out your marketing content calendar for the year. When outlining your activity for the next 12 months, you should make it clear what type of content you are going to produce, and also which business objective you are targeting. 

Creating the calendar should help you to spread out different types of activities to create a consistent schedule, and also ensure that there are no gaps in the calendar. Planning out the content in advance will also give you time to prepare for upcoming campaigns and gather any information you might need. 

Your content calendar can, and should, cover all of the types of content you would like to produce over the year, including: 

• Social media content and paid social ads 

• PR campaigns 

• Email marketing 

• In-person events (e.g. trade shows or speaking engagements) 

• Influencer marketing 

• Website content and SEO focuses 

• Any major events like product launches

• Print advertising and OOH. 

Budget allocation

Getting a budget at the start of the year for marketing activities isn’t always straightforward (believe me, we get it), but if you can get a budget assigned to you at the start of the year, or financial year, then this will make it clearer to plan to hit your goals throughout the next 12 months and even if there’s no budget available, at least you’ll know to focus on organic content in your campaigns. 

Once you have your budget, you will be able to assign how much you would like to spend to each quarter to distribute between any social media advertising, print advertising, events, etc. Working in this way should make the process easier for everyone involved and should prevent you from having to repeatedly get budget approved for different marketing activities throughout the year. 

Reporting & KPIs 

We all know that measuring and reporting on your marketing activities are key to understanding how your campaigns are performing, but how many of us actually set clear targets and KPIs at the beginning of the year?

KPIs are what help you to evidence the performance of your campaigns and will look different for a variety of activities. Some examples of KPIs could be: 

• Grow brand awareness through social media content and increase impressions by X% in the first quarter of 2026.

• Achieve X pieces of PR coverage in the first quarter of 2026 and secure X backlinks. 

• Drive a X% increase in traffic to key product or service pages in January. 

When you are setting your targets for 2026, one key element is to make sure you are defining a timeframe to achieve your goal in and making sure that you are tracking the right analytics to prove you are either achieving or not achieving your goal. 

If you need more support with your marketing strategy for 2026 and beyond, click here to send us a message, and we can arrange a chat to discuss your plans for the future.