6 Steps to Building a Strategic Marketing Plan That Drives Results

#2 - Most marketing plans don’t fail because of bad ideas. They fail because they’re disconnected from the business goals that actually matter — or they get abandoned by February.

In this episode, Mandy Hornaday walks through the six-step strategic marketing plan framework she uses with every client: a proven process for building a plan that earns executive buy-in, aligns tightly with business goals, and actually gets executed.

Whether you’re building your first strategic marketing plan or rebuilding one that’s been collecting dust, you’ll leave with a clear process, practical tools, and the confidence to lead your planning cycle like an operator.

The 6 steps covered in this episode:

• Step 1: Conduct a Marketing Landscape Review — internal and external research that sets the foundation
• Step 2: Vision and Goal Setting — how to set 3–5 high-impact marketing goals aligned to business outcomes
• Step 3: Strategy Ideation and Planning — growth strategy, campaign strategy, content, and channels
• Step 4: Build Your Execution Blueprint — quarterly roadmap, resourcing plan, and budget
• Step 5: Secure Executive Buy-In — how to get your peers, CEO, and CFO aligned and on board
• Step 6: Implementation and Operational Readiness — measurement, team structure, and systems

Chapter Markers:

• (00:00) Why Most Marketing Plans Fall Short
• (04:30) Step 1: Marketing Landscape Review
• (14:00) Step 2: Vision and Goal Setting
• (21:00) Step 3: Strategy Ideation and Planning
• (31:00) Step 4: Building the Execution Blueprint
• (43:00) Step 5: Securing Executive Buy-In
• (51:00) Step 6: Implementation and Operational Readiness

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Growth Activated is hosted by Mandy Hornaday — strategist, fractional CMO, and coach for B2B marketing leaders ready to lead like operators. New episodes drop weekly.

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Transcript

Mandy Hornaday:  Hey everyone, welcome back to Growth Activated. I’m your host, Mandy Hornaday. Today we’ll be diving into one of the most critical tasks you’ll tackle as a marketing leader: how to build a winning marketing plan. Have you ever felt like your marketing plan is more of a to-do list of marketing activities rather than a roadmap to achieving real business results? Or perhaps you have a strong plan you believe in at the start of the year, only to change it within 30 to 60 days and never look back? Or worse — you don’t actually have a marketing plan? If that’s you, you are not alone. One of the most foundational mistakes I see marketing leaders make today is not having a realistic, up-to-date strategic marketing plan that clearly ties back to the business outcomes their executives are aiming to achieve. Today I’m going to share with you how to fix that.

Mandy Hornaday:  During this episode, I’ll teach you how to create a marketing plan that aligns with your business goals, gets buy-in from your leadership team, and delivers measurable results — all within six actionable steps. A great marketing plan should be your strategic blueprint that ties your business goals, customer needs, and team capabilities into one cohesive framework. Whether this is your first time building a strategic marketing plan or you’ve been building plans for years and know you have room for improvement, you’ll leave this episode with actionable insights to transform your marketing planning process. Let’s get started.

Mandy Hornaday:  Step one of your six-step marketing planning process is to conduct a marketing landscape review. Your marketing landscape review should be a combination of internal and external research and findings. What I’m aiming for in this step is a full system view of everything happening in the external marketplace and internally within my business, my marketing team, and my organization — bringing all of that information together to get a clear picture of my current marketing landscape and identify the gaps and opportunities I can focus on in the coming year.

Mandy Hornaday:  The first thing I do is conduct external market research: industry trends, competitive research, a SWOT analysis, and sometimes a PESTLE analysis depending on the business. I also look at what’s happening within marketing specifically — how are buyers in the broader marketplace interacting with different channels and programs? What’s highly saturated? What’s breaking through the noise? Once I have a solid grasp on external research, I move to internal performance research. I’m doing an internal marketing SWOT of sorts — reviewing campaign performance, program results, channel performance, customer funnel conversion across sales, marketing, and customer success, customer feedback, business feedback, and overall business performance. I’m also looking at my internal marketing organization: how are team members performing, and where are the functional gaps?

Mandy Hornaday:  The outcome of this step is to identify and synthesize key findings. What have I learned? Where do the opportunities sit, externally and internally? Where are my weaknesses? This starts to shape how I’ll respond and build a plan that aligns with both the external marketplace and my own organization. I typically give this step two to four weeks. Four weeks is appropriate if you have a large, robust marketing function with many programs to analyze. The shorter end works if you have a smaller team, fewer competitors, or you already know much of this information and are mostly updating it. I also involve my team in this step — each function or program lead does their own mini SWOT on their area. I want them to self-reflect, assess their programs, understand what’s happening in the marketplace, and identify where opportunities lie. This is a critical first step. In order to identify where we want to go, we need to understand what’s surrounding us and what got us to where we are.

Mandy Hornaday:  Step two is your vision and goal setting stage. After completing step one and starting to identify what’s working, what’s not, and what’s happening in the marketplace, you can leverage all of that information to set clear, realistic goals and a marketing vision for the year ahead. Before we can set marketing goals, we have to identify what the business goals and KPIs are. That’s where I start: meeting with your CEO and C-suite to identify the top-level business goals. What are we looking to achieve? Revenue growth, gross margin improvement, operational efficiency goals? Understand what your CEO and CFO are aiming to achieve within the business.

Mandy Hornaday:  From there, I meet with individual department leaders on their specific goals. What does sales have planned? Is product launching any new product lines or major features? Does HR have a big talent acquisition push that requires us to strengthen the employer brand? Is engineering making data or tech stack changes that would impact our MarTech tools? Understanding the business goals at a high level is critical — but to build a truly proactive marketing plan that addresses the needs of the entire business, we need to understand what each stakeholder’s vision is.

Mandy Hornaday:  Once we have a good handle on both of those inputs, the target outcome of this section is to formalize clear marketing goals and KPIs in direct alignment with what the business is looking to achieve. I like to choose goals that make me squirm a little bit, but don’t feel completely out of reach. Aggressive but attainable. And try to stay within the sweet spot of three to five goals for the year. If you’re setting more than five marketing goals, they’re either too small or you’re going to spread yourself and your team too thin. To make a strong impact, go deep rather than wide. I strongly advise not building more than five marketing goals a year.

Mandy Hornaday:  Step three is the strategy ideation and planning stage — and this is the fun part. Now that your marketing goals are defined, it’s time to strategize how you’re going to achieve them. The first thing I do is determine the growth strategy. Not which programs or campaigns yet — but where are we anticipating growth to come from? New customers and customer acquisition? Existing customers through upsell or cross-sell? A new product launch or a new market entry? So many marketing leaders skip this step and go straight to tactics. I like to hone in on my growth strategy first: where are the biggest bets, where do the biggest opportunities lie, and what are the biggest challenges standing in my way?

Mandy Hornaday:  From there, the second strategy to figure out is your campaign strategy. Now that you know where growth is anticipated to come from, which campaigns do you need to run to achieve growth within those segments? If part of your growth strategy is launching into a new market, you’ll need a market launch campaign. If it’s upselling existing customers, you might have an ongoing campaign throughout the year targeting that segment. Figure out which campaigns you need to achieve your growth goals. From there, the next strategy is your content strategy. Content — especially long-form content — is still foundational. The campaigns you’ve just decided to run will need content to fuel them. Figure out which content you need for those specific audiences within those specific campaigns.

Mandy Hornaday:  That leads to the fourth element: identifying which promotional programs and channels you’ll leverage. How are you going to get your content out there? SEO, paid advertising, social media, email marketing, events, PR? I often see marketing leaders start with the channel and build strategies by channel, rather than starting with campaigns and content and then selecting the channels that best drive campaign results. Your channel strategies should be the supportive factor, not the leading factor. Between growth strategy, campaign strategy, content strategy, and promotional channel strategy, there’s a lot in this section. My tip: let loose a little. Don’t worry about how realistic every idea is. Think big, think out of the box. This is a whiteboarding session, not your roadmap planning session. I love bringing the whole team into this step. Set the stage, give them the goals and vision, and say: let’s have fun. Give me all your ideas. I give this step about three days, then give myself about a week to really work through everything and figure out what will make the biggest impact.

Mandy Hornaday:  Step four is building the execution blueprint. This is where type-A leaders love to be. We’re bringing all of that ideation down to earth and figuring out what we’re going to commit to, what we’re not, and how we bring this plan to life through a combination of prioritization and execution. The first thing I do is build a roadmap. Based on my annual goals and marketing vision, how do those goals break down quarterly? Not always by dividing by four — sometimes you ramp up because you need new programs, initiatives, or team members that won’t be in place at the start of the year. Figure out how your goals break down quarterly, and from there, which campaigns fall when, which major programs or initiatives launch by when, and which key hires need to happen by when. I like to plan on a quarterly basis. It gives room for the unknown and for agility to work its way into the plan.

Mandy Hornaday:  Once you have your roadmap, the second piece is your resourcing plan. Who do you have in-house? Where might you need to go outsourced? What tools and technologies do you need to make the plan come to life? From there, the last major piece of the execution blueprint is your marketing budget. Extra points if you can directly tie your budget to your three to five goals. Structure the budget out by goal: this is how much I need to achieve this goal, this much for this goal, and then a separate line item for marketing infrastructure — tools, technology, headcount. If you can roll your budget up to specific goals, it makes the executive approval step much easier. If your CFO wants to cut your budget, you can say clearly: which goal are we cutting?

Mandy Hornaday:  Two final tips for the execution blueprint. First: if you’re struggling to prioritize among many ideas, use an impact versus effort chart — a two-by-two grid of low to high impact against low to high effort. Take your team through it. Prioritize high-impact, low-effort items and get them on your roadmap. Then evaluate the high-impact, high-effort items and select the ones with the greatest return. This exercise also trains your team to think about quick wins on an ongoing basis. Second: plan for agility. Leave breathing room in your marketing budget — whether for new opportunities or for things that don’t go as planned. Leave room in your calendar and your team’s bandwidth as well. I aim to earmark at least 10% of time and spend specifically for agility. This step can take one to four weeks depending on how much data you’re working with. Estimates are fine, but root them in real historical data where possible.

Mandy Hornaday:  Step five is plan buy-in and approval. If you’ve done your due diligence in step two and captured goals that resonate with each of your business partners, you’re in a strong position here. I know it’s sometimes tempting to just get CEO approval and move on, but when I involve my peers and make them feel part of the plan, they become great business partners throughout the year. I’m talking to my CRO, head of product, head of engineering, and head of HR — sharing the high-level aspects of my plan: my goals, how they map to business goals we all share, and the major initiatives I believe will help us achieve them. For certain peers, I’ll pull in specific campaigns or content that directly speaks to their departmental goals. It makes them feel seen. Get their feedback and their buy-in. You don’t have to incorporate every piece of feedback — we’re marketing executives for a reason — but this step is important for building collaboration and demonstrating the business-minded mindset we talked about in episode one.

Mandy Hornaday:  From there, secure CEO and CFO approval. Often your CEO will want you to run your budget by your CFO. The more you’ve mapped your initiatives and campaigns up to specific goals, the higher your likelihood of getting approved. If you anticipate pushback, prepare conservative, moderate, and aggressive options ahead of time so you’re on the offense rather than the defense. You don’t need to rebuild the entire roadmap for each scenario — just show what three goals can be achieved at the conservative budget, four at moderate, five at aggressive, and what each costs. This step typically takes no more than two weeks, including any back and forth. It’s not always fun, but it’s one of the most critical steps for securing C-suite backing and building your personal brand as a strategic, business-minded leader.

Mandy Hornaday:  Step six is implementation and operational readiness. Now that your plan is approved, before you dive into execution, do the foundational work to ensure your plan will actually be executed successfully. What needs to be in place? How will you know when it’s working? The first thing to address is measurement and reporting. Back to your three to five goals: how will you know you’ve achieved them or are trending toward them? Do you have clear KPIs? Do you need to set up new reports? Start collecting new data? Determine an attribution strategy? Even goals that feel difficult to measure — like positioning your brand as a thought leader — have measurable proxies: readership of thought leadership content, media mentions, speaking invitations. There’s always something you can track. Do the work to set that up. Your ability to show your exec team progress toward goals depends on it.

Mandy Hornaday:  The second piece is looking at your team and their individual roles and responsibilities. Sometimes based on the plan you’ve created, roles and responsibilities need to change. Other times they stay the same, but each person needs to clearly understand what their individual goals are and how their work contributes to the team goal. You want everyone rowing in the same direction with a very clear understanding of how they specifically contribute. Make sure new structures, new responsibilities, or new goals are clearly communicated.

Mandy Hornaday:  The third piece is your operational systems, processes, and tools. What does your team meeting schedule look like? How are you tracking your budget? How often will you review and update your plan? How are you planning for agility on an ongoing basis? This step is what ensures your strategic marketing plan doesn’t collect dust in a PDF nobody opens again. This is how you make sure you’re consistently working the plan, adjusting it as needed, and achieving your goals. This step can take two to four weeks depending on how many new reports you need to set up or how much new data you need to start collecting. Don’t skip it. For those of us excited to just start executing — I get it. But this step is one of the most critical to your long-term success with the plan.

Mandy Hornaday:  That brings us to the end of the six steps. To quickly recap: step one, conduct a full marketing landscape review using both internal and external research and identify your key findings. Step two, set your vision and goals — three to five high-impact marketing goals directly tied to business goals. Step three, strategy ideation and planning — have fun with it, think big, and work through your growth strategy, campaign strategy, content strategy, and promotional channel strategy. Step four, build your execution blueprint: a quarterly roadmap with quarterly goals and campaigns, a resourcing plan, and a budget tied to your goals. Step five, secure executive buy-in and approval from your peers, CEO, and CFO. Step six, get your implementation and operational readiness in order — clear measurement and reporting, clear team roles and goals, and the right systems and processes in place to execute.

Mandy Hornaday:  I hope you found today’s episode helpful. These are the same six steps I use to build strategic marketing plans for every client I work with. I’ve built and iterated on this process many times to get it to where it is today. Head to the show notes and click the marketing planning checklist download — it’s a free resource outlining all of these steps and more, and should be a solid blueprint for completing your own winning marketing plan. If you have peers or fellow marketing leaders who would benefit from this episode, please share it with them. Thanks for tuning in, and until next time — keep activating growth for you and your business.