How to write a marketing plan for the year

Most annual plans are a list of activity with a budget attached. The useful ones are a short set of decisions, written down clearly enough that somebody can disagree with them.

A plan earns its place by making the next twelve months easier to argue about. If it cannot be contradicted, it is a wish list. The test is simple: can a sceptical finance director read it and point to the thing they think is wrong?

Start with the diagnosis, not the calendar

Before any channel appears, state what the problem actually is. Not enough people know us. People know us and choose someone else. People choose us and leave. These are three different businesses and they need three different plans. Writing the diagnosis down first prevents the most common failure, which is a plan full of tactics that address whichever problem is most fun to solve.

The evidence for the diagnosis should be in the document. Search trends, win and loss reasons, repeat rates, what customers say when asked to describe you without prompting. An outside-in audit is the fastest way to assemble it if nobody has done so recently.

The four decisions

• Who we are for, and who we are not for. The second half is the one that changes anything.
• What we want people to believe that they do not currently believe.
• Where the money goes, split between creating demand and capturing it.
• What we will stop doing. A plan with no subtractions is a budget request.

Targets you can defend

Set one business target, two or three marketing targets that plausibly cause it, and a leading indicator for each. Pipeline or revenue is the business target. Qualified enquiries, cost per acquisition and repeat rate are marketing targets. Share of search, branded query volume and content citations are leading indicators, which matter because they move months before the others do.

Resist the urge to set a target for everything. A plan with fourteen KPIs has none, because nobody can tell which one you would protect in a bad quarter.

Quarterly, not annual

Write the year, commit the quarter. The first quarter should be specific down to the work. The remaining three should state intent and budget, with the detail filled in as evidence arrives. Teams that fully specify twelve months spend the second half defending decisions made with worse information than they now have.

Review quarterly against the leading indicators. Change the tactics freely. Change the diagnosis only when something real has changed, because a diagnosis rewritten every quarter is not a diagnosis, it is a mood.

What to put in the document

Keep it short enough to be read. One page of diagnosis with the evidence. One page of decisions. One page of the quarter ahead. One page of budget and what each tranche buys. A measurement appendix for anyone who wants it. If the plan runs to forty slides, the thinking is somewhere inside it, and nobody will find it.

The part that gets skipped

Write down what would have to be true for you to change course. Name the number, the date and the decision. This is the single most useful paragraph in any plan, because it converts the inevitable mid-year argument from a debate about confidence into a check against something you already agreed. It also protects good work from being cancelled in month four, which is the fate of most brand investment: see brand versus performance.