Most marketing plans answer familiar questions. What are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to reach? What are we going to do? What will it cost? Who will do the work? How will we know whether it worked? Those are essential questions, and we ask them, too.
But they’re table stakes. “We need more leads” is a goal. So is “We need to get the word out,” “We need a better website,” or “We need to do more at trade shows.” Each describes a real need, but none tells us enough to decide where the company should put its marketing energy.
That is ultimately what a marketing plan needs to do. It should leave the organization with a small number of priorities it understands, can support, and is prepared to act on. Getting there usually requires more than accepting the first answer or filling in a blank in a template.
Don’t stop at the stated goal
Suppose a company tells us it needs more leads. But how many more? From whom? Which customers are most profitable? Which are expensive to acquire or difficult to serve? Does the sales team have the capacity to follow up? Is there a segment the company has historically pursued simply because someone decided years ago that it was important?
We have worked with companies that were putting considerable sales and marketing energy into winning business that was less profitable than other business available to them. Of course, a less-profitable segment might influence other buyers, create strategic relationships, or open a larger opportunity. But somebody should know why we’re pursuing it.
Sometimes the answers change the priority altogether. We worked with a company doing roughly $70 million in revenue that wanted to pursue new business more aggressively but didn’t have a CRM. Its sales operation was largely managed through an outdated spreadsheet, and key sales metrics weren’t readily available. During planning, a customer survey sent to more than 900 contacts produced about a dozen responses, another indication that the underlying customer data needed attention.
More leads still mattered, but increasing sales activity wasn’t the only priority anymore. Before putting substantially more energy into generating leads, the company needed better infrastructure underneath the sales and marketing effort.
Some priorities are “but-fors”
We like to call dependencies “but-fors”—but for this, we can’t responsibly do that. But for usable customer and prospect data, a major outbound effort may be premature. But for clear positioning, spending heavily to send more people to the website may simply expose more people to a message that isn’t working. But for a solid trade show strategy and follow-up process, dramatically increasing the event budget may be ill-advised.
These aren’t universal rules. Sometimes we act precisely because doing the work will teach us something we need to know—one of the goals of that action is to learn. But marketing plan priorities should account for dependencies. The thing a company most wants to do isn’t always the thing that belongs first.
That can make some priorities less glamorous than people expect. Fixing the CRM may not generate much excitement at the company meeting. Neither will cleaning customer data, clarifying positioning, or establishing brand standards. We always want to build something inspired into a marketing plan, but sometimes there is basic, heavy lifting that has to happen first. A good plan makes room for both.
A plan with too many priorities has made too few decisions
We usually try to narrow a plan to address three to five meaningful goals. There can be plenty of work underneath them, but we want enough time, money, and attention to actually make progress on each one. If everything is a priority, the organization will spread its energy and budget across too many things to do any of them well.
Getting to those priorities requires looking beyond the ideas everyone brought into the planning meeting. We have a longstanding principle: inventory everything before you prioritize anything. Until we understand the opportunities, problems, existing commitments, customer needs, available resources, and competing ideas, we don’t have enough context to decide what matters most.
That inventory should include more than the first few ideas that come to mind. We have another saying at Outmark: it takes ten good ideas to come up with one great idea. Ten isn’t a quota. The point is that ideation often stops too soon. The first two or three ideas are usually the most obvious ones. We ask our specialists to develop ideas independently before bringing them together so we have a much larger pool to consider. Sometimes the best idea emerges late. Sometimes seeing all the alternatives sends us back to an earlier idea with a better understanding of why it deserves to win.
A healthy inventory also means some good ideas won’t make the cut. We don’t like throwing them away, so we keep worthwhile ideas as tracking items. They may be worth revisiting next quarter, next year, or when something changes. Saying “not now” to a good idea can be harder than saying no to a bad one, but not every good idea is entitled to time and budget now.
Get the people with knowledge and authority into the process
Good marketing plan priorities aren’t created in isolation by marketing. Depending on the business and the decisions being made, we may want marketing, sales leadership, business-unit leaders, customer service, account management, or other people who spend meaningful time with customers involved at different points. That doesn’t mean everybody needs to attend every planning meeting. It means the people whose knowledge should affect a decision need a way to contribute to it.
Decision authority matters, too. We have seen companies put a marketing leader in charge of planning, only to have a senior executive parachute into the process late and overturn substantial pieces of the work. Sometimes the executive asks excellent questions. The problem is that those questions would have been much more valuable several weeks earlier.
Responsibility and authority should be nearly concentric circles. If someone retains the authority to materially change the plan, that person needs enough involvement in planning to understand how the decisions were made. Otherwise, the company can spend weeks carefully answering questions only to have the final decision made by someone who wasn’t around to hear the answers.
Connect goals to work people can actually do
Plans often become strangely thin in the middle. A company has a goal at the top—say, increase business in a particular market—and a collection of tactics at the bottom: advertising, events, email, social, content. What’s missing is the strategic thinking that explains why those activities belong together and how they’re expected to move the company toward the goal.
A useful plan connects goals to strategies, strategies to tactics, and tactics to resources. It should account for time, money, available competence, dependencies, and ownership. If the execution will involve employees, freelancers, agencies, or several specialists, someone also needs to be responsible for hiring, managing, and coordinating them.
That requires more than assigning names to tasks. A plan can look great on paper while assuming ten hours from someone who has two, assigning specialized work to someone learning it for the first time, or depending on several people whose work nobody is responsible for connecting. Those are planning problems, even if they don’t reveal themselves until execution begins.
The marketing plan itself doesn’t need to contain every project-management task. We don’t need to list every email someone will send or every conversation required to arrange a photo shoot. People need enough room to do their jobs. But the plan should go far enough to establish that the work can be staffed, supported, coordinated, and completed at the standard the organization expects.
Build the plan for the people who will use it
Our planning work can be extensive. Research and positioning alone can fill a large presentation. Goals and strategies may require dozens of slides, followed by another substantial layer of tactics, budgets, resources, and timing. Yet the potency of a marketing plan has very little to do with page count.
The right amount of detail depends on how the plan will be used. A team responsible for executing complicated work may need access to the research, assumptions, budgets, dependencies, and thinking behind the decisions. An executive team or board that needs to align on direction may need a few clear pages with the supporting work available as backup. Trying to make both groups use the same version simply because that is the “marketing plan” can make the plan less useful to everyone.
That’s one reason we often use presentation decks rather than long narrative documents. A slide can make one idea easy to understand, while the full deck can still contain substantial thinking. But slides aren’t the point. The client shouldn’t have to carry the complexity of the planning process in order to understand what has been decided.
A short plan isn’t automatically simple-minded, and a long plan isn’t automatically rigorous. The quality is in the thinking that produced it and whether the people who need the plan can actually use it.
Give the team a frame for the decisions that come later
No marketing plan can anticipate every decision the team will face. That’s where standards and guardrails become useful. Positioning, messaging, ideal customer profiles, personas, brand standards, language guides, and quality standards provide a shared framework for decision-making after the planning meeting.
A writer shouldn’t need to reopen the marketing plan every time a piece of content is created. A designer shouldn’t need an executive ruling every time a visual decision comes up. The plan establishes direction, and the standards around it help people stay aligned while doing the work.
That matters even more when execution is spread among several people. Without that shared frame, each person can do a perfectly competent job and still produce marketing that doesn’t quite belong together.
The plan will get punched in the mouth
Mike Tyson’s famous quote, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” applies to marketing plans, too. Every marketing plan eventually has to survive the real world, which is why it needs to be more than a document sitting in a directory nobody can find.
A social campaign may not resonate. An old article may unexpectedly start attracting substantial search traffic. A partner may begin sending a new audience to the website. A new sales opportunity may appear. Reality keeps giving us information after the planning is finished, and some of it deserves a response.
A marketing plan is a point-in-time expression of marketing planning. We work from it, measure against it, and revisit it as we learn. Sometimes the new information confirms that we should keep going. Sometimes it deserves additional time or budget. And sometimes it is important enough to displace something we thought was a priority when the plan was developed.
That doesn’t weaken the plan. It makes the planning stronger. Marketing changes, customers respond in ways we don’t always expect, and even good assumptions sometimes turn out to be wrong. A useful plan assumes we’ll learn something once the work meets the real world and gives us a way to decide what to do about it.
That still isn’t permission to chase every shiny object. We have a plan precisely so we can judge new information against decisions we’ve already made. Sometimes we adjust. Sometimes we stay the course. Either way, we’re making the decision with more information than we had when planning began.
A good plan contains something people want to do
There’s one more test we use that we’ve never seen in a marketing planning template: Is there anything here we’re excited about? That doesn’t mean every plan needs a giant campaign, expensive rebrand, or flashy stunt. Inspiration can be surprisingly inexpensive.
Years ago, a trade show plan included the idea of placing a series of clever floor graphics throughout the event that eventually led attendees to the company’s booth. It cost little more than some of the conventional promotional options available, but it gave the team an interesting way to make more of an event that mattered deeply to the business.
Foundational work still has to get done. Some of the work that matters most will never be the work people get excited to talk about. Nobody gets to skip the CRM cleanup because stickers sound more fun. But a plan asks people to put their energy behind a direction, and we want them to see something worth building.
So, what should a marketing plan actually decide? It should decide what the company is trying to accomplish, who matters most, what it wants those people to understand or do, what strategies and tactics deserve resources, what has to happen first, who owns the work, and how progress will be judged. More than anything, it should decide where the organization’s limited marketing energy is going—and what isn’t going to get that energy yet.
Getting those decisions onto a slide is relatively easy. Doing enough thinking to make them good decisions is the real work.
