Build your marketing plan

Why writing it down matters

In a study in the British Journal of Health Psychology, people were asked to exercise regularly. In the control group, 35% did. A group that read a pamphlet on the benefits managed 38%. A third group read the pamphlet and wrote down exactly when and where they would exercise each day: 91%. The difference was not desire. It was a concrete, written plan.

A goal without a plan is a wish, and hope is not a strategy.

Start with an honest SWOT

Look outside and inside the business with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. But a SWOT in a vacuum is useless: ask “strengths in what context?” Run it across what decides whether a business lives or dies: customers and cash, profitability, people, culture, products, processes and marketing. Then look for connections, where strengths meet opportunities and weaknesses meet threats.

From there, name your three to five biggest objectives, one to three years out. A business trying to do twenty things has no strategy, because strategy is about choices.

Objectives to initiatives, with an owner and a date

For each objective, define its goals, the strategies that achieve them, and the initiatives under each strategy, and give every initiative a lead and a due date.

Lead metrics, not lag metrics

Your weight is a lag metric: you only see it after the result is decided. Calories eaten and burned are lead metrics: you can measure and influence them, and they predict the outcome. Build your plan on lead metrics. Not “grow revenue 15%,” which you can only watch, but “30 quality leads a month” and “average sale up to $7,500,” which you can act on this week.

Write milestones as deliverables. “Start scoping the project” is a bad milestone. “Project scope completed with key phases and dates” is a good one.

Make the plan a living habit

• One page, nine-point font minimum, so the team can see it all at once.
• Write it with your team. A plan people helped write is a plan people own.
• Start small with one initiative, attach it to an existing routine, and celebrate when it is done.
• Review it monthly. A plan in a drawer changes nothing.

Avoid rocking-horse syndrome

A rocking horse moves furiously and goes nowhere. Many marketing plans do the same: full of activity, disconnected from any outcome. “We posted daily, refreshed the site, ran the promotion.” All motion. An outcome is a changed behavior: a new customer, a repeat purchase, a bigger basket, a referral.

The cure is a one-page plan that answers, in order:

1. Objective: the single outcome we must move
2. Metric and target: how we measure success, and by how much
3. Audience: whose behavior we are changing
4. Behavior change: from what, to what
5. Belief to shift: the lever that produces the new behavior
6. Key actions: the few things we will actually do

Notice it mirrors the very first idea: whose behavior, what behavior, which belief, how to change it. The one-page plan is first-principles marketing made operational.