A Better Approach to Marketing Plans
Every summer for many years, my professional life followed a predictable pattern. As soon as the calendar turned to planning season, my days became consumed with fitting our marketing strategies into the company’s standardized planning template. I often felt like I was forcing a round peg into a square hole, though I understood the corporate need for consistency across all brands. The lesson from that yearly routine was clear: the strategy should lead, not follow the template.
The Traditional Planning Challenge
Most marketing professionals have been there—you receive the new strategic plan template that needs to be completed and presented to senior management. The document is usually brimming with predefined tables, mandatory SWOT grids, and tightly prescribed slide counts. Its primary purpose is uniformity; leadership finds it easier to compare plans across different brands and divisions when every team uses the same headings, formatting, and color codes.
Maintaining consistency does offer real advantages. Boards and C-suite leaders can review dozens of brands in a single afternoon. Finance can roll numbers from every franchise into one master budget without decoding bespoke spreadsheets.
Shared templates create a kind of institutional memory—new hires can look at last year’s plans and immediately grasp corporate shorthand. Yet the strengths of the template often become its weaknesses. When a plan is optimized for comparability, it can become generic by design. Brand teams end up writing to the boxes instead of to their market realities, trimming nuance to fit predetermined character limits. A template that presupposes a traditional AIDA funnel, for instance, leaves little room to explore a community-driven adoption path or a purely digital self-serve model. As a result, creative thinking sometimes takes a back seat to formatting compliance, and the most valuable conversations about true market obstacles and white-space opportunities get squeezed to the margins.
Two Critical Areas for Improvement
Through countless workshops and post-mortems, I’ve noticed that two elements of the traditional process consistently undermine effectiveness:
• Clear Direction
Many templates prioritize tactics (e.g., “Run 15 webinars” or “Increase social impressions by 10%”) rather than the fundamental market changes needed for success. Teams dutifully fill columns labeled channel, frequency, and metric without first articulating the behavioral or perceptual shift they must trigger among customers, payers, or partners.
• Budget Allocation
The default approach is an incremental plus or minus in relation to last year’s spend. If total
company revenue is slated to rise three percent, many brand teams simply add three percent to every line item—irrespective of whether those dollars fuel growth or merely maintain the status quo.
Conversely, when cost cuts loom, the same across-the-board reduction often jeopardizes high-ROI initiatives while sparing legacy programs that have outlived their usefulness.
“The goal is to surface a handful of crisp, observable “market deltas”—conditions that, if they shifted, would unlock growth.”
These two shortcomings are not minor. When direction is fuzzy and money is misallocated, even the most elegant slide deck can’t mask mediocrity. Fortunately, fixing them doesn’t require a brand-new system—just a flipped mindset.
Turning the Process Around
The antidote is to invert the sequence: start with outcomes, then shape activities, and finally map everything back into the template. The payoff shows up in faster alignment, stronger resource cases, and more persuasive leadership discussions.
Start with Desired Market Changes
Rather than beginning with the template sections, we encourage teams to identify what specifically needs to change in their market to achieve success. This exercise can be as lowtech as a whiteboard or virtual sticky notes. The goal is to surface a handful of crisp, observable “market deltas”—conditions that, if they shifted, would unlock growth. For example:
• “Patients aren’t advocating for better options because they don’t know alternatives exist.”
Here, the priority might be a multichannel awareness campaign featuring patient voices, decision aids, and simplified benefit-verification tools.
• “Payers view our solution as interchangeable with lower-cost alternatives.”
This delta calls for a robust costof-care model, real-world evidence dossiers, and strategic contracting to prove long-term savings.
Because these statements are free from template jargon, they resonate with colleagues in sales, medical, and access who may never read the deck cover to cover. They also become the litmus test for every tactic: Will this activity move the dial on our defined market delta? If the answer is no, the tactic either evolves or disappears.
Rethink Budget Allocation
The second transformative approach involves challenging the traditional incremental budgeting process. Instead of automatically applying small percentage increases or decreases to last year’s budget, we advocate data-driven investment decisions grounded in business cases. That means:
• Mapping Elasticity–Estimate how responsive each delta is to additional spend or effort; a heavily regulated payer landscape may show low elasticity, while consumer preference shifts could react quickly.
• Prioritizing High-Elasticity, High- Value Zones–Fund initiatives sitting at the intersection of sizable revenue upside and demonstrably strong responsiveness.
Will this approach always result in budget increases? No, but it shifts the conversation from defending historical line items to maximizing future value. It also protects your most strategic initiatives when corporate belts tighten, because leadership can see the direct link between those dollars and the revenue forecast.
“…Senior leaders are far more interested in your growth thesis than in the tiny font size you used to squeeze it into slide 14.”
The Value of This Approach
Reversing the planning sequence (outcomes first, resources second, template last) delivers several tangible benefits:
• Clarity of Purpose
Teams rally around a concise set of market deltas. When everyone can recite the same three sentences describing the change they seek, silos fade and execution speeds up.
• Strategic Alignment
Activities and investments directly connect to desired outcomes. Instead of a laundry list the plan becomes a coherent narrative.
• Resource Optimization
Budgets follow strategy rather than historical precedent. Highly effective pilots can scale quickly, while lowyield legacy tactics sunset without hand-wringing.
• Persuasive Storytelling
Data-backed business cases resonate with senior leadership. When you show how reallocating funds for under-performing legacy tactics to high impact and measured tactics will affect the brand your approval meetings turn from scrutiny sessions into partnership conversations.
• Organizational Credibility
Most importantly, this approach demonstrates that marketing isn’t merely filling slides; it’s proactively seeking ways to add enterprise value. Finance appreciates the rigor, R&D sees a path to faster market penetration, and leadership gains confidence that funds are being stewarded responsibly.
• Energizing the Team
Having tangible plans and goals energized the brand team and supporting players. When teams know what they are pushing towards, and it can be measured, team members find themselves more connected to the tasks at hand providing an energy not felt with templated approaches.
Putting It All Together
The next time you face the annual planning process consider turning it around. Start with the market changes you need to drive, build data-driven cases for your investments, and then fit these elements into the required template. You might find that the round peg fits more comfortably in the square hole when you’ve shaped it with purpose, and that senior leaders are far more interested in your growth thesis than in the tiny font size you used to squeeze it into slide 14.
When the deadline nears, you’ll still deliver the familiar deck with every mandated header intact. But beneath those headings your story will be richer, your numbers sharper, and your strategy unmistakably your own. In other words, you’ll have converted a compliance exercise into a competitive advantage, and thatis the real purpose of strategic planning.
