1.2 Choosing a Marketing Plan Template

A marketing plan truly sets the stage for your success. No matter what kind of business you're in, it's key to build out a clear marketing strategy. You've already seen that PowerPoint presentations are one way that you can do this. You may have a great business plan, but to be effective, you have to build out a marketing plan that supports it. Building out that marketing plan using PowerPoint templates is one of the best ways you can do that. Now, you could build out your PowerPoint marketing plan from scratch, but why should you? Chances are that you're not a professional designer and even if you are, why spend the time on it? Instead, let's save many hours of design by using pre-built templates from Envato Elements. Elements is an unlimited download service for creatives that offers slide templates, photos, fonts, graphics and more. As part of the subscription fee each month, you can use as many of these files as you want. Let's say that I want to build out a marketing plan for a fictional company called Everylitics. The vision behind my idea is that analytics or data insights can really help businesses succeed at what they're doing. Everylitics will be a service that helps them find insight about their data through analytics. I have an idea to bring this reality to market, but to do that I wanna capture my best ideas in a marketing plan. We'll build that out in PowerPoint in this course. Instead of spending hours building slides from scratch, I'm going to use a pre-built template from Envato Elements. I'm on the elements home page here. And you can see these promotions for the different types of content available. Since I need a marketing plan presentation template, I'll start off by narrowing down the category a little. I'll come up here to the browse drop down, and from this menu I'll click on Presentation Templates. Elements will jump over to the Presentation Templates section. To browse all of the available options, I can just start scrolling. But to find a marketing plan, I want to narrow it down a bit. To do that, let's type marketing plan up here in the search box. And to make sure I'm seeing all the templates for Microsoft PowerPoint, I'll check this box here on the left side to filter my results. Elements will display a series of options here. I can browse these thumbnails to find one that looks right for me. I like the look of this one here. So to get a better view, I'll go ahead and click on the thumbnail. Elements will take me to a preview page where I can browse preview images, read the templates description and more. As I browse through those here, I think I found the template that's right for this marketing plan. You can see the full list of slide options here below. This template should be versatile enough to fit the needs of the plan. To download it, I'll come up here and click Download on the right side. This menu will pop up, asking me to enter a license used for the file. This is basically a short description of my intended use for the file I'm downloading. I can enter one in the box or select the previous option as you're seeing me do here. Remember that even if you stop subscribing to Elements, you're still licensed to use what you downloaded while you were a member. When I'm finished, I'll click Add a Download. Elements will download my file here and when it finishes I can jump over and extract the ZIP file. This will let me edit the slides. As I open up the file, you'll see that the slide templates live in this PowerPoint folder. This particular template has four color options, and I'll double-click to open the one I like. PowerPoint will launch and I can start editing my slide template. As you can see, it's a breeze to select a custom marketing plan template on Envato Elements. You get full access to professionally designed slides without having to build them from scratch. Now it's as easy as dropping your own content onto these slide designs to build out the marketing plan, which is the exact focus of this course. Thanks for watching.