Sean’s the man, the man with a plan. A marketing plan!
If you’ve been meaning to rewatch some of our older episodes, now is the time! Today we are talking about making a marketing plan, and what questions are important to ask!
This month is donate life month. If you are interesting in becoming an organ donor, or you would just like to know more, please visit https://donatelife.net/.
Our previous episodes mentioned today:
Interview with Jolien part 1: https://youtu.be/vQYCxTDZESU
Part 2: https://youtu.be/qE7ULN5mPgA
BCG Matrix: https://youtu.be/JVXPAAuSlDU
Ansoff Matrix: https://youtu.be/NO69hbh9wus
GSTIC Plan: https://youtu.be/_yj30lLT2H0
SOURCES
Adapted from this list: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/basic-marketing-questions
The Ultimate List of Marketing Strategy Planning Tools | 14 Editable Templates
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway_is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: youtube.com/themarketinggateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
Transcript:
My son is a middle school chess player, and when he and I sit down and play a round, one of the first things I caution him against is playing without a strategy.
“I’m going to play aggressive and reckless, and I want you to watch for opportunities that’ll give you,” I’ll tell him.
Or maybe, “I’m going to do everything I can this game to avoid losing pieces, so I’m going to make you force me to give them up.”
Or “I’m going to bring my queen out early, so be ready for her.”
I don’t do this to make it easier on him. Quite the opposite. I want him to see the possibilities on the board as something he can respond to in real time, not something he tries to defeat by doing the same thing every time he plays. I’ve noticed, for example, he loves to do a move called Castling where he has the King’s Rook and king do this little move behind the pawns where they sort of trade places. It’s an effective move, but it’s not always the right one, and if I can get him to see that there are times when his doing that prevents him from being able to respond to his opponent quickly enough, I can get him to broaden his play style and think more strategically about the game.
And it works. I’ve watched him play chess matches where he’s absolutely dominated the other player because he has a good adaptive strategy. And I’ve also watched him get crushed because he got in a hurry to do something and didn’t realize he was leaving himself open because he forgot to come up with a strategy first.
I try to remind him that he’s at a level where knowing the rules and a few fun little tricks isn’t enough anymore, because playing competitive chess means everyone else is trying to get better, and so he has to as well. Otherwise, their strategy is going to be iron-clad, and his is going to fall apart like Swiss cheese.
And you know what? The same thing applies to marketing. We cannot approach what we do in marketing without a strategy, and if you choose to do things by need and instinct, you’ll find yourself so much more stressed and so much less effective than if you operate from strategy and planning.
So let’s spend some time today talking about that most important topic – crafting a great plan for executing a brilliant marketing strategy.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So I teach a class on marketing strategy for MBA students, and one of the first things I tend to notice when those students first walk into the room is that they don’t know much of anything about how you actually create a marketing plan before you launch a campaign.
Sure, maybe they’ve taken a marketing class before or even been in a marketing role. They’ve probably used some of the basic tools like a SWOT Analysis or SMART goals or developed a marketing mix or written a communications brief. Maybe they’ve even created a budget for a plan or priced out what advertising costs or even created an ad of their own.
But putting it all together into a plan? That’s a big task, and it’s not something you can just create with a template or an AI tool because it requires a lot of thought, a lot of planning and a lot of research to do it right.
It also requires a framework, and the one I teach is called the G-STIC plan – Goals, Strategy, Tactics, Implementation and Control. I’ll talk about it briefly here, but hey, I did a whole video on this in an earlier episode you can check out for more detail!
But today, we’re going to go a little higher level and talk about what a marketing strategy plan is, why you need one and how to create it in a way that will ensure you’re not wasting time and money and effort when it comes to marketing.
Here’s where I want to offer you a caution – doing things that are flashy and exciting is interesting, but it rarely translates into something that’s actually meaningful. Many major brands have spent millions of dollars hiring big name celebrities or working on trendy collaborations to attempt to boost their brand, only to find they’ve spent a bunch of money without much return. Many brands spend millions of dollars on advertising that no one cares about, and many others spend millions on launching products or services that land with a thud and which they ultimately wind up shutting down because the market doesn’t want them.
You cannot approach marketing the way you would a carnival. It’s not a bunch of fun little activities meant to give you a few quick thrills in exchange for a bunch of your money. That’s just not how it works. You can pick that one attraction you really care about and have a great time with it without breaking your wallet and still get a nice return. You can also go try to win every stuffed toy at the midway and walk away with a bunch of worthless trophies that you have to take home and convince yourself were worth all that time, effort and money to earn.
I don’t want to make it sound like we’re not allowed to have fun when we’re creating a marketing plan. Sometimes, it’s fun to experiment and see what works, but if you’re in a really competitive market where you need to keep the revenues coming in, you’re much better off having a good marketing strategy as your foundation and building on top of it.
So, let’s start with what a marketing strategy plan looks like. It’s not a pitch deck, it’s not a sales presentation, and it’s not a scribbled idea on a napkin. It’s a detailed document that is going to articulate a few things:
What do I want to accomplish?
How do I know this is a market opportunity worth investing resources into?
How do I plan to address this opportunity with marketing?
How do I execute this plan in terms of people, costs and time?
How do I hold myself accountable to make sure I actually accomplished what I set out to do?
That last point is really important because a good plan is always going to have some sort of measure of accountability built in. What we want to avoid in marketing is exactly what a lot of people criticize marketers for doing – spending a lot of money without being able to demonstrate concrete results. That’s no good.
We need to have something we’re holding ourselves to that is realistic. If we’re trying to boost sales, which is honestly what we’re often doing much of the time, we need to provide a way of measuring that so we can show that we did.
If we’re trying to boost brand awareness or interaction, we need to be able to show how that’s happening.
If we’re trying to capture higher market share, we need to be able to show we’re not just capturing market growth.
If we’re trying to boost referrals, we need to have a way of tracking that, perhaps with a program that rewards our customers so they’ll want to ensure referrals are be reported to us.
If we’re trying to increase foot traffic, we’d better be measuring how many people are coming into our stores, and when.
Whatever we ultimately want to do, we need to set that goal at the beginning, figure out how and why it’s worth our trouble to address it, and then figure out how we’re going to be absolutely sure we did what we set out to do.
But a lot of people don’t really bother with that, and let me tell you why. For a lot of brands and organizations, it’s very easy to see a rise in sales, brand awareness and overall interactions by simply advertising more. That advertising may be traditional methods like print and broadcast and out of home or mailers. It may also be digital or driven by social media or influencers. And if you’ve been doing little to no advertising and start doing some, you will find a pretty quick return because people who weren’t aware of you suddenly are.
But advertising is like dieting – it works well at first when you haven’t been doing it, but if you want to continue to see gains, you need a strategy, because those gains are going to get harder and harder over time. If you’re dieting and depriving yourself of all the foods you love, you’re eventually going to stop dieting and go back to enjoying cake and cookies and sugary drinks and having bread with a side of bread with every meal.
The same is true for advertising. That money you’re spending to advertise is going to come from somewhere else that might need it, like staffing or upgrading your office or improving your products or services or paying your executives a higher salary. Eventually, someone’s going to eye that marketing budget and want to incorporate part of it into their own, and their best and most logical argument is going to be, “advertising’s not even working for us anymore.”
So don’t fall into that trap.
Instead, think about marketing as an activity that’s strategic in helping to grow and maintain a space in a very crowded marketplace. Strategies never work forever – they have to be adapted and changed over time to meet the conditions of the market. What works in good times doesn’t work in bad times. What works in Q3 and Q4 doesn’t always work in Q1 and Q2. What works when you’re shiny and new doesn’t always work when you’re seen as being old and out of touch.
But being willing to change and adapt will keep you vibrant and keep you focused. And that’s why a marketing plan is a good idea!
So let’s go back to those five steps I mentioned.
#1: What do I want to accomplish?
This is the core articulation of what our strategy is about. Something as simple as, “I want to grow awareness of our brand among our target market” is completely fine as a starting point. Something bolder like, “We are leaving half a million dollars in revenue on the table by failing to address this consumer need” is even better because it helps everyone involved to understand what the stakes are and why we need to have a strategy in the first place.
A group of MBA students turned me on to that latter phrase, by the way, and I talked about it in my interview with Jolene Schaffer, a professional marketer who was in that group! Be sure to listen to that one! It’s in the show notes.
Point #2 is How do I know this is a market opportunity worth investing resources into?
And if the answer isn’t “we’ve done a lot of research and…” then let me advise you as a friend and colleague and marketing research professional – you need to do a lot of research. But not necessarily primary research, which is when you hire someone like me to talk to customers or consumers for you through a survey or focus group or interviews.
No. What you need to do first is secondary research, which involves looking at case studies and existing data – both internal and external! – to see how strong the case really is for the need or opportunity you’ve identified. Primary research is then useful for filling in the gaps that your secondary research can’t address. And I really do recommend primary research as something you should at least consider, even if you conduct it yourself.
And once you’re done with that, then you’ll begin analyzing those data to see what support you have to pursue this opportunity.
Some of the tools you might use at this stage are a SWOT analysis, a Marketing Segmentation exercise, a Porter’s Five Forces Analysis, a Customer Journey Map exercise, A Keller’s Brand Equity model analysis, an Ansoff Matrix, a Brand Identity Prism, a BCG Matrix, or even a marketing data dashboard where you compile all your ongoing tracking information into one place.
If you’re unfamiliar with those tools, I’ve already done some episodes on some of them, and you can also check the show notes for a link to an article that provides some detail on all of them.
Once your analysis is complete and you’ve made your case and articulated your opportunity based on research, it’s time to move on to Point #3: How do I plan to address this opportunity with marketing?
Here’s the fun creative part. This is where you get to start thinking about your marketing mix, your tactics, your big ideas and your cool concepts for how you want to get consumers or customers interested in what you have to offer. This is the actual function of marketing – figuring out how to position something so that it’s valuable to the people who will purchase or utilize it.
This is where you can think about all those things marketers love to talk about like your brand promise and your brand funnel and your go to market strategy and your sell sheets and communications briefs and packaging and distribution plans and all of the other stuff that goes along with getting something ready for the market.
This is also where you can start thinking about what roles you’d like agencies to play in helping you fulfill your goals and how you can best utilize them without having to spend millions of dollars paying them to figure these things out for you. Believe it or not, many agencies will appreciate that you’re coming to them prepared so they can do their best work!
But attached to every single one of these ideas needs to be an understanding of cost, and the more granular, the better, because you are going to have to explain in the next section how you’re going to accomplish all these ideas you’ve come up with.
That’s point #4: How do I execute this plan in terms of people, costs and time?
And this is still fun. You can set a total budget and divvy it up amongst your key players. This is how much we can pay an agency. This is how much we can allocate to media buys. This is how we’ll integrate PR. This is the timeline we want to commit to.
The more detail you can put into this section, the better equipped you’ll be to see things through if you are successful in getting your organization to commit to this plan. You might even want to have contingency plans in case things don’t work out the way you anticipate them to.
And ideally, you can communicate a return on investment here as well so that there’s a clear connection between what you want to do and how it’ll actually generate something of value.
But there’s a 5th point you must also articulate there: How do I hold myself accountable to make sure I actually accomplished what I set out to do?
You need to identify by what metrics you’re going to be measured. Figure out your baseline and your goal. Define what success looks like. Define what failure looks like, too. Make it very clear how this plan should be measured.
Because if you don’t, someone else will! And they may be doing it hoping for a chunk of your budget to fund their own priorities.
Now, as it happens, the plan I’ve just articulated is more or less what a G-STIC framework looks like, but that plan is pretty formal and has a lot of nuances to each section. You may not need all that detail, so you can use this modified, more open approach I’m suggesting and be just fine.
The key is in writing it all down, sharing it with people, revising it, getting buy-in, and then, when it’s finally ready, seeing it through.
I can’t promise every marketing plan will be successful. But I can promise that the exercise pays huge dividends when you approach it thoughtfully.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See Ya Next Time!
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