Most small and midsize companies we’ve talked with since 1997 haven’t had much of a marketing plan. Some have a budget, a trade show schedule, a list of campaigns, or a collection of things they intend to get done. Others have done considerably more. But it’s unusual for a new client to arrive with a marketing plan that is clearly connected to the business, understood by the people involved, funded appropriately, and actively guiding the work.
We’ve also met companies that were quite clear that they didn’t want one. They wanted execution. Planning would take too much time and cost too much money. “We just want to get the word out” is a phrase we’ve heard more than once.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to move quickly, and there are plenty of firms happy to take an assignment and start producing. We’ve simply been doing this too long to believe we can consistently make good decisions about the work without understanding enough about the business, the customer, the goals, and the resources available to do it.
Companies that skip planning to save time end up making those decisions later anyway. They make them one at a time, in the middle of the work, when the website needs fixing, the salesperson needs a brochure, the trade show is four weeks away, or somebody decides the company should be doing more on LinkedIn.
The planning didn’t disappear — the decisions just moved downstream
Unmade decisions are more expensive later
Consider something as ordinary as rebuilding a website. It sounds like an execution project, and much of it is. Designers need to design, writers need to write, developers need to build, testers need to test, and somebody eventually needs to press publish.
Before they can do good work, though, questions start showing up. Who is the site really for? Which audiences deserve the most attention? What does the company want those people to understand? Which services should be prominent? What are the security requirements? What makes the company a credible choice? What should visitors do next? How does the site connect to sales?
If those questions weren’t answered before the project began, the website team inherits them. Now they’re being answered while pages are being written and designed, often by people who were hired to execute rather than make decisions about the direction of the business.
This is the marketing version of pay me now or pay me later, and later is almost always more expensive. Work gets revised. Pages get added. Messaging changes after design has started. Sales sees the site and says it doesn’t address the conversations they’re having. Somebody realizes halfway through that an important audience has barely been considered.
There’s a less visible cost. A website, campaign, event, sales program, and customer communication can each be perfectly competent on its own and still fail to reinforce the others. One team learns something useful, and the next team never hears about it. A strong idea appears in a sales conversation but never makes it into the campaign. Money gets spread across disconnected activities instead of allowing the pieces to support each other.
Planning costs time and money, but avoiding it adds a tax to the cost.
A marketing plan should be useful before it is impressive
There are plenty of respectable ways to build a marketing plan. We’ve seen detailed strategic plans, short working documents, spreadsheets, annual calendars, presentation decks, and tactical action plans. We don’t have a philosophical objection to any of them.
We do have a problem with plans that require a great deal of work to produce and don’t provide enough help once the work begins. That doesn’t mean deep planning is wasteful. Our own planning work can be extensive because customer research, positioning, goals, strategy, tactics, budgets, and action plans all have a job to do. The issue is whether the depth is useful and whether the thinking eventually gets translated into priorities, responsibilities, and work people can actually execute.
The length of a plan doesn’t necessarily correlate with how good it is. A huge plan may include market analyses, market penetration research, competitive assessments, SWOTs, objectives, strategies, budgets, calendars, and enough background to demonstrate that serious work had taken place. All can be useful, and much is necessary for responsible planning. But the plan has little value if the person responsible for marketing could still get to the end and reasonably ask, “Okay, but what am I supposed to do?”
The opposite may be true. A relatively simple tactical plan may be exactly what a business needs if the goals are modest, the direction is clear, messaging is unique and meaningful, and the people responsible for the work know what they’re doing. A company that wants to clean up its website, improve its sales materials, and establish a consistent promotional program probably doesn’t need a planning process designed for a company launching in new markets and targeting hockey stick growth.
There’s one important catch: simpler planning works much better when the foundation is already there. If a company has never done the customer research, competitive work, positioning, or message strategy needed to understand who it serves and why customers should choose it, that work still needs to happen. It won’t need to be rebuilt every year, but skipping it because the immediate tactical need looks simple usually creates problems later.
Planning should be right-sized to the business and to what the business is asking marketing to accomplish. A company with modest goals and a strong foundation may need a relatively modest plan. A company that has been spinning its wheels for years without doing that foundational work probably needs to go deeper.
A 2024 study in the Marketing Management Journal offers some support for the value of doing that thinking. Researchers examined 135 U.S. printing companies, averaging $7.33 million in annual sales and 41 employees, and found that marketing planning fully mediated the relationship between sales management and firm performance. They defined marketing planning in practical terms: understanding target customers and the value delivered to them, establishing objectives, examining the business and competitive environment, and creating an action plan. In plain English, the sales function performed better when marketing planning connected the work to customers, goals, the market, and an action plan.
It’s one study in one industry, so we can’t come to broad conclusions, but what caught our attention was how ordinary the elements of planning were. The researchers also described a problem we recognize in smaller businesses: leaders with limited time and resources are easily pulled toward reactive decisions, even though planning can provide clearer customer and market direction.
That’s the practical value. Planning gives the business a reference point before the next urgent request becomes the marketing strategy.
Inventory everything before you prioritize anything
A marketing plan can become theoretical quickly when the marketing starts taking shape before the business has gotten clear enough about what it wants marketing to accomplish.
Sometimes the goal is wonderfully specific. A company wants to reduce customer erosion from 13% to 8%. That points the conversation toward retention, customer experience, communication, and the reasons customers leave. A company that wants to grow 30% next year has a different problem. The existing customer base, sales capacity, market opportunity, lead flow, conversion rates, pricing, and marketing investment all start to matter differently.
In smaller companies, the starting point is often less tidy. “Get the word out” may genuinely be the closest thing to a marketing goal. So might “we need more leads,” “our search isn’t working,” or “sales needs help.” Those statements give us somewhere to start asking questions.
Businesses rarely want only one thing. Leadership may be thinking about growth while sales wants leads now. Customer service may be worried about retention. A product team has a launch coming. Somebody sees an attractive new market. The website is dated, a trade show is approaching, and everyone has a reasonable explanation for why their priority deserves time and budget.
One of our longstanding planning principles is simple: inventory everything before you prioritize anything. You can’t make a very good decision about one opportunity while pretending the other demands on the same money, people, and time don’t exist. Getting the competing needs into view makes tradeoffs visible.
The work is figuring out what those competing needs mean for marketing right now. Improving retention could contribute directly to the growth target. Entering another market might require messaging and sales support that don’t exist yet. Some goals reinforce each other. Others compete for the same money, time, and attention.
There’s much more to say about the decisions a marketing plan should actually make. At this stage, the problem is simpler: a list containing every legitimate business need isn’t much help to the person deciding where the next dollar or hour should go.
Eventually, you have to choose
We once worked with a company pursuing 22 vertical markets. There were legitimate opportunities in many of them, which was part of the problem. Each market had its own trade shows, outreach, sales effort, messaging, content, partnerships, and other marketing activity.
The company didn’t have the budget to pursue 22 verticals in any meaningful way. Within months, we analyzed where the company already had the strongest evidence, deepest experience, and which customers were most profitable, then recommended narrowing the focus from 22 markets to two. There was some pushback at first, which wasn’t surprising. Walking away from 20 plausible opportunities doesn’t feel especially comfortable. The client ultimately agreed with the recommendation.
The other 20 didn’t suddenly become bad markets – we simply identified the two places where the company had the strongest case for concentrating its resources. Thus freed up time and budget and helped the company break out of a spot they’d been stuck in for years.
Goals, budget, and time eventually meet
We tend to see two basic approaches to marketing budgets, plus plenty of combinations in between. Some companies start with the money they have available and ask us to build the best plan we can within it. Others start with a business goal and ask what level of investment the goal is likely to require.
Both are legitimate. The first gives us a firm constraint and asks what we can accomplish inside it. The second starts with the result and works backward toward the resources needed to support it.
Sometimes a company asks us to recommend the budget required to pursue a particular goal. We do the planning, come back with a number, and discover that the company had a lower number in mind. That’s okay. Now the real planning starts: Do we adjust the scope, timing, expectations, investment, or some combination of them?
Marketing planning isn’t improved by pretending resources are unlimited. Time matters, too. A plan that calls for a constant stream of content, events, campaigns, sales support, social media, website improvements, customer communications, and measurement has to account for who will actually do those things and what else is already on their plate.
If the goals, budget, and available time fit reasonably well together, the team can get to work. When they don’t, something has to move. It’s considerably cheaper to have that conversation before twelve underfunded initiatives are underway.
Marketing planning requires alignment, not unanimity
Marketing planning involves people who are paid to worry about different things, and that’s healthy. Sales should care about sales. Finance should care about the money. Leadership should care about the direction of the business. The people closest to customers may be hearing things nobody else in the room knows.
Trouble starts when all of those perspectives become separate marketing agendas.
We’ve been in planning conversations where sales wants more leads, leadership wants a stronger brand, one business unit wants its own campaign, another group wants to protect an existing program, and someone has a new opportunity that wasn’t on anybody’s list a week earlier. Add a fixed budget and finite staff time, and marketing planning can quickly become a battle for the same resources.
The goal isn’t to make everybody happy. A plan created by giving everyone an equal share of the budget and one favorite initiative may produce harmony for the afternoon, but it rarely produces much focus.
Useful alignment is more practical. People understand the direction, how the company arrived there, and what it means for their part of the work. Sales doesn’t have to stop caring about leads. Leadership doesn’t have to stop thinking about the brand. They do need enough shared understanding to make decisions without reopening the entire marketing strategy every time somebody has a new request.
That agreement becomes particularly useful a month later. A salesperson asks for a campaign aimed at one prospect. The CEO sees something a competitor is doing. A partner offers a sponsorship. A new platform starts getting attention. Some of those opportunities may deserve a yes.
But without alignment, each one can start a new argument. A plan people understand gives the organization something to map the opportunity to. Circumstances can still change the decision, but marketing doesn’t have to reinvent its priorities every Tuesday.
Customer understanding makes alignment easier
Companies naturally plan from what they know. Sales brings the objections it hears. Leadership brings business priorities. Marketing brings performance data and experience from previous campaigns. Finance brings the numbers. All of that belongs in the conversation.
The voice of the customer can make many of those decisions easier. If customers consistently describe the same pain point, tell the account team they need help with the same issue, or repeatedly show up in the same places looking for information, the planning conversation changes. “I think we should exhibit at this trade show” becomes “our customers and prospects are there.” “I want a content series about this topic” becomes “customers keep asking us about this.” Those are very different reasons to spend time and money.
We’ve long used the phrase, “Before they get you, you’ve got to get them.” Customer research can change more than messaging. It can reveal what customers actually value, how they make decisions, what they misunderstand, where they look for information, whom they trust, and why they chose one company over another. Those findings can change which audiences deserve attention and which marketing activities make sense.
Without that perspective, planning can become a very well-organized collection of internal opinions. Everyone in the room may agree on what customers want while the customers remain blissfully unaware of the consensus.
This is particularly important when marketing hasn’t been working well. The squeaky wheel gets the grease: not enough leads, poor website traffic, weak social engagement, inconsistent sales materials. They all deserve attention. Planning creates room to find out whether the issue that got noticed first is actually the one holding the business back.
Your plan needs something worth promoting
“We just want to get the word out” raises an obvious question: What word?
A company can have clear goals, a sensible budget, a campaign calendar, and people ready to do the work, then spend the year promoting messages that could belong to half its competitors. Great service. Experienced people. Customized solutions. A commitment to quality. More marketing activity doesn’t fix that problem. It just gives more people an opportunity to ignore you.
Planning needs to identify the unique and meaningful differences the marketing is supposed to promote and protect. Sometimes a company already has a strong handle on those differences. Sometimes customers see them more clearly than the company does. And sometimes the work uncovers an uncomfortable but useful answer: the company hasn’t given customers enough reason to choose it yet. That may require positioning and messaging work, changes to the offer or customer experience, or a harder look at where the company can genuinely stand apart.
This is foundational work, and it doesn’t need to be reinvented every time the marketing plan is updated. A company that understands its customers, competitive environment, positioning, and message strategy can build a much simpler tactical plan on top of that foundation. When those things haven’t been worked through—especially when marketing has been spinning its wheels for years—the planning may need to go deeper before another campaign goes out the door.
Once the difference is clear, the plan helps reinforce it. The website, sales presentations, campaigns, events, content, and customer communications give the company repeated opportunities to make that difference easier to understand and remember. When those activities are disconnected, the company can miss that cumulative effect even when the individual work is good.
There’s an inspirational side to this, too. We have a saying at Outmark: “Nobody gets big excited about small plans.” We don’t mean every company needs an enormous plan or an enormous budget. A meaningful direction gives people something worth building toward. When the team understands where the company can be genuinely better, different, or more valuable to customers—and sees marketing organized around making that real—the plan can create energy as well as order.
The plan needs a life after the planning meeting
Someone has to lead the marketing. Work needs to stay connected to the goals and priorities people agreed on. Progress needs to be visible enough that the team can tell what is moving, what isn’t, and what has changed. Results need to make their way back into future decisions.
That’s difficult in smaller organizations for a practical reason: the person responsible for marketing often has another job, usually several. A founder is still selling. An executive is running a division. A sales leader is managing a pipeline. An employee who proved capable at marketing has gradually inherited more responsibility without magically receiving more hours in the week.
This has been part of Outmark’s thinking since the beginning. We repeatedly saw companies with capable specialists and plenty of marketing activity where nobody was responsible for connecting the pieces and keeping the whole thing moving.
A good plan is where it starts, but it can’t call the meeting, ask why the campaign is late, reconcile two competing requests, or notice that the team has quietly drifted back into doing whatever feels most urgent. Somebody has to keep using it.
Using it also means returning to what happened. Six months after the planning work, there should be more to discuss than whether the team completed the original list. What did customers respond to? What did sales learn? Which assumptions held up? What took more time than expected? Where did the company spend money without seeing enough in return? What happened that nobody predicted?
Measurement is part of that, but a dashboard alone won’t keep a plan alive. The more consequential question is whether anything changes because of what the company learned. A repeated lesson that never affects a priority, message, budget, schedule, or action is mostly an interesting fact.
Outmark was founded while our founder was instructing an Integrated Marketing Communications at the University of Washington, so you might expect our approach to planning to have become more rigid over time. It hasn’t. The foundational work still matters: understanding the customer, establishing direction, creating actionable plans, and connecting the work to measurable goals. But the format has become more flexible, and learning has become more explicit.
Once the work begins, reality has a vote. A customer responds differently than expected. A campaign underperforms. An event produces better opportunities than anyone predicted. Sales keeps hearing the same objection. A competitor changes the market. The business itself changes. The plan should provide enough continuity that every surprise doesn’t send marketing in a new direction, while ongoing planning gives the company room to respond when the evidence deserves a response.
Planning should create some energy
There is another quality of good planning that is harder to put into a spreadsheet.
Outmark’s mission is “to inspire better marketing by making it easy and fun to grow responsibly.” The operative word is “inspire” because people tend to put more of themselves into work they care about. They think about it when nobody has asked them to. They notice ideas. They make connections. They want to see what happens next.
We see this with clients when the planning, positioning, and messaging start to come together. People who were frustrated with marketing begin talking about what the new direction could look like on the website or in sales conversations. Sometimes they want to start changing things that afternoon, and we have to remind everyone that there is still an order to the work.
That excitement isn’t proof that the strategy is right, and enthusiasm won’t rescue poor execution. Marketing has to compete for attention with customers, operations, sales, staffing, cash flow, and whatever unexpected problem showed up this morning. A direction that people understand and believe in has a better chance of receiving the thought and energy required to make it real.
We’ve also seen the other kind of planning: last year’s activities moved onto this year’s calendar with new dates. Sometimes that’s entirely appropriate, especially if it’s working. Consistency is valuable, and a business doesn’t need to reinvent its marketing every January to prove that it’s thinking strategically. But if the business has been disappointed with marketing for years, copying the same activities into another calendar isn’t likely to inspire much confidence, curiosity, or energy.
Plan is a verb
We don’t care much what a company calls the thing that guides its marketing. It can be a marketing plan, an annual plan, a roadmap, an assessment, a working deck, or a spreadsheet. It can be extensive because the business is taking on something ambitious, or relatively modest because the marketing problem is straightforward.
What matters is whether the planning reflects the business that actually exists: its goals, customers and prospects, resources, opportunities, problems, people, successes, mistakes, and constraints. It should give the people doing the work a clear sense of what the company is trying to accomplish, who matters most, what makes the company worth choosing, and where its limited time and money belong. The resulting direction should be visible enough to guide the work and sturdy enough to keep people from reconsidering every decision from scratch.
Then the business uses it. Work gets mapped to it. Results are reviewed against it. People learn things that weren’t known when it was written, and sometimes those lessons are important enough to change what happens next. The document may still be sitting in exactly the same folder where someone saved it six months ago, but the planning has continued.
After decades of doing this work, that’s why we tend to think of plan as a verb.
