Most businesses that produce a marketing plan produce it correctly.
The format is right. The sections are there – target audience, channels, budget allocation, KPIs, timeline. The document looks like a marketing plan should look. And within six months, the plan has been either abandoned or quietly replaced by whatever the team is doing week to week.
The problem is not the plan. The problem is what the plan was built on – and whether the assumptions underneath it were ever examined before the document was written.
What a marketing plan actually is
A marketing plan is a set of decisions made in advance about who the marketing will reach, what it will say, how it will reach them, what it is trying to move, and how you will know whether it is working.
Each of those decisions is a hypothesis. The plan works when the hypotheses hold – when the buyer the plan was written for is the buyer who actually shows up, when the message the plan assumes will land actually lands, when the channels the plan commits to are the channels the buyer is actually using when they are making the relevant decision.
When the hypotheses do not hold – when they were assumed rather than confirmed – the plan produces activity that does not compound. Campaigns run as written. Budgets are spent as allocated. And the results do not follow in the way the plan suggested they would.
The plan was not wrong. The foundation it was built on was not confirmed.
The four assumptions most marketing plans do not examine
- Who the buyer actually is.
Most marketing plans describe the buyer in demographic terms – age, location, income level, job title. These describe a category. They do not describe the specific person making the specific decision the marketing is designed to influence.
The buyer the marketing needs to reach is a person with a specific problem at a specific stage of deciding, who has already tried something, who is comparing alternatives, who has a specific objection that needs to be addressed before they will commit. That level of specificity requires research, not assumption. Most marketing plans are built on the latter. - What the message needs to accomplish.
A marketing plan that states “increase brand awareness” as an objective has not identified what needs to change in the buyer’s understanding for the business to grow. Awareness is not a commercial outcome. It is a precondition for one. The plan needs to specify what the buyer currently understands, what they need to understand, and what the marketing needs to change in that picture. - Whether the channels connect to the buyer’s actual journey.
Channel decisions in most marketing plans are made based on where the business’s competitors are visible, or where the marketing team has existing capability, rather than on where the confirmed buyer is when they are making the specific decision the marketing is trying to influence. The channel is a tool. The buyer’s journey is the map that determines which tools are appropriate at which stages.
What success looks like at each stage.
A KPI of “20% increase in Instagram followers” does not tell the business whether the marketing is working. It tells the business whether Instagram followers increased. The marketing plan that connects activity to commercial outcomes – leads generated, pipeline produced, revenue attributed – requires the measurement infrastructure to be designed before the activity starts, not built retrospectively to explain what happened.
What a marketing plan built on confirmed foundations looks like
The document is shorter. The sections are the same but the content is specific rather than aspirational.
The buyer section names a real person with a real problem at a real stage of a real decision, because the research has been done. The message section names what needs to change in the buyer’s understanding, because the gap has been identified. The channel section names where the buyer is when they are making this decision, because the journey has been mapped. The KPI section names commercial outcomes – because the measurement infrastructure has been designed to track them.
The Strategic Direction Review is the examination that produces those confirmed foundations before the marketing plan is written. Not the plan itself – the bedrock the plan is built on.
Build a marketing plan on confirmed foundations
