Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Growth Activated is a podcast for B2B marketing leaders who want to elevate their marketing strategies, lead confidently, and drive real business results. Each episode offers actionable insights and proven frameworks to help you activate growth for your team, your company, and your career.
Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
6 Steps to Building a Winning Marketing Plan that Drives Results
#2: Feel like your marketing plan is more of a wish list than a roadmap? Or worse, do you find yourself ditching your plan within weeks—or not having one at all? You’re not alone. Many B2B marketing leaders struggle to create strategic plans that align with business goals, secure executive buy-in, and drive measurable results.
In this episode of Growth Activated, we dive into the 6 essential steps to building a winning marketing plan. You’ll learn how to conduct a comprehensive landscape review, set achievable marketing goals, strategize effectively, and build a flexible execution blueprint that balances focus with adaptability. Plus, I’ll share tips on getting leadership buy-in and ensuring operational readiness to bring your plan to life.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketing leader or building your first strategic plan, this episode is packed with actionable insights to transform your planning process and deliver results that matter.
Ready to take your marketing plan—and your leadership—to the next level? Grab a notebook and hit play!
Highlights:
[00:02] - Introduction to Growth Activated and the importance of strategic marketing planning
[02:15] - Step 1: Conducting a Marketing Landscape Review
[06:36] - Step 2: Vision and Marketing Goal Setting
[10:00] - Step 3: Marketing Strategy Ideation and Planning
[15:15] - Step 4: Building a Marketing Execution Blueprint and Roadmap
[20:55] - Step 5: Securing Executive Buy-in and Approval for your marketing plan
[25:00] - Step 6: Implementation and Operational Readiness
[28:50] - Conclusion: Recap of the six-step marketing planning process
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Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Walker, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Introduction to Strategic Marketing Planning
Hey everyone, welcome back to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Walker. And today we'll be diving into one of the most critical tasks you'll tackle each year as a marketing leader. And that's 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 that you believe in at the start of the year only to change it within 30 to 60 days and never look back at your plan again? Or worse, you don't actually have a marketing plan? If that's you, I wanna tell 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 that year. So today, I'm gonna share with you how to fix that.
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. So whether this is your first time building a strategic marketing plan, or you've been building plans for years that you know you have room for improvement,
You'll leave this episode today with actionable insights to transform your marketing planning process. Let's get started.
Step 1: Conduct a Marketing Landscape Review
Okay, so step one out of your six step marketing planning process is to conduct a marketing landscape review. So your marketing landscape review should be a combination of internal and external research and findings.
What I really am aiming for when I do this step in the process is a full system view of everything that's happening in the external marketplace and internally within my business and within my marketing team and bringing all of that information together in order to have a clear view of my current day marketing landscape and identify sort of the gaps and opportunities that I can be focused on in the new year to make a difference. So the first thing I do when I'm building my marketing landscape review, is conduct some external market research. And for me, this includes everything from industry research that are trends that are happening within my industry. It involves competitive research. It involves a SWOT analysis. And even sometimes depending on your business, it involves a PESL analysis, which is the political, economic, sociological, technological, legal and environmental analysis.
I also really enjoy looking up what's happening within marketing specifically, how are consumers in the larger marketplace interacting with different marketing channels and marketing programs? What's highly saturated? What's not? What's breaking through the noise? What isn't? Right? And once I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on my external market research, I'll move to conducting internal performance research. And so when I'm taking an internal look... I'm almost doing an internal marketing SWOT analysis, if you will. I am looking at sort of a full system marketing reporting review. So everything from the performance of my campaigns to my different programs, to how different channels are performing. I'm looking at my customer funnel and how customers and prospects are converting throughout between sales and marketing and customer success. I'm looking at customer feedback. I'm taking into account business feedback and our business performance overall. And then I'm also looking at my internal marketing organization in terms of team members. How are my different team members performing? Where are some of the functional gaps that I'm experiencing? Really the outcome of conducting a marketing landscape review for me is to identify and synthesize some major key findings. What have I learned? What do I need to be aware of? Where do the opportunities sit externally and internally? Where are my weaknesses externally and internally? And it starts getting the juices flowing in terms of how I'm going to respond and build a plan that aligns with what's happening in the external marketplace, as well as within my own organization. And so for this section, I typically like to take anywhere from two to four weeks to do it. I want to make sure that I'm thorough enough that I don't want to get lost in the data on the other hand. Um, and so, you know, if you're looking at four weeks, it's probably because you have an incredibly robust computing function and you're running a lot of different programs and campaigns that you want to analyze the performance of. If you're on the shorter end of that, maybe you have a smaller function or you don't have a huge list of competitors. Or frankly, maybe you already know this information pretty well, and it's just about bringing it together and updating it based on what you've seen over the past year. I also find this is a great step to get my own marketing team involved. So typically I will ask each team member who leads a certain function or a program within my department to do their own mini SWOT analysis on their particular area. I like for them to be able to self-reflect and do their own program assessment to understand what's happening in the marketplace, how can they functionally get better, and where do the opportunities lie with our customers and our prospects. This is a critical first step. In order for us to move forward in terms of identifying where we wanna go, I think it's really important to recognize what's happening in surrounding us and what got us to where we're at in order to.
Step 2: Business Vision and Marketing Goal Setting
Second step in building a winning marketing plan for the next year is your vision and goal setting stage. And so after you've completed step one and you've started to identify what's working, what's not, and what's happening in the marketplace, you can leverage all of that information to really set some clear, realistic goals and a marketing vision for the next year. In order to build a winning marketing plan that is strategically aligned to your business goals, before we can set marketing goals, we have to identify what the business goals and KPIs are for the next year. And so that's really where I'd start as your first step within this vision and goal setting process. Meet with your CEO and your C-suite to identify the top level business goals. What are we looking to achieve over the next year? Whether it's in terms of revenue growth or gross margin or operational goals and efficiency, really begin to understand what your CEO and frankly your CFO are looking to achieve within the business. From there, the second thing I really like to do to make sure that my marketing vision and goals is representative of the entire business is to meet with the individual department leaders on their specific goals. I really find that it's critical to understand. What does sales have planned? Are they gonna be changing anything within their sales strategy? From a product perspective, is product planning to launch any new or major product lines or features that we need to be aware of? From an HR perspective, do we have a big effort on talent acquisition and therefore need to enhance our employer brand? You know, from a tech and engineering perspective, are they making any major data changes or tech stack changes that would impact or influence our martech tools and technologies. Not only is it critical that we understand the business goals at a high level, but I believe in order for us to have a full view and be able to set up a proactive marketing plan that addresses the needs of the entire business, we really need to meet with our different stakeholders and understand what their vision is. Once we have a really good handle on those two items, then the target outcome of this section is to really formalize some clear marketing goals and KPIs that should be in direct alignment with what the business is looking to achieve. You know, personally, I like to choose goals that make me squirm a little bit, but they don't make me feel like they're completely out of reach or that failure isn't given. I like to create aggressive, but attainable goals. And the last tip I'll leave you with this section is try to stay within the sweet spot of three to five goals for the year. I've personally found that if you're going to set more than five marketing goals, your goals are either too small or you're going to spread yourself and your team too thin. I really believe in order to make a strong impact, we've got to go deep as opposed to wide. And so I know sometimes it's not possible to keep within three goals. I totally understand that but I would strongly advise not to build more than five marketing goals a year. Okay.
Step 3: Marketing Strategy Ideation and Planning
Step number three. Now we get into the strategy ideation and planning stage. So now that your marketing goals are defined, it's time to strategize how we're going to achieve them. This is the fun part, right? Within this section, I, the very first thing is to determine your growth strategy. First and foremost, how are we going to achieve the growth that we're looking for? And I don't necessarily mean which programs or which campaigns. I mean, where are we anticipating the growth to come from? Will it come from new customers and customer acquisition? Will it come from existing customers and upselling or cross-selling within that audience segment? Will it come from launching a new product or going into a new market? You know, so many marketing leaders and frankly, go to market leaders, skip over this step and oftentimes we'll just say, well, we just need growth.
We just need new revenue. But I really like to hone in on my growth strategy in terms of where are my biggest bets on where that's gonna come from? Where do the biggest opportunities lie? And what are the biggest challenges that are gonna stand in my way from those goals? And so I like to solve the growth strategy as a part of my strategy ideation and planning step first. From there, the second strategy I like to figure out is my campaign strategy.
Now that I know where we're anticipating growth to come from, which campaigns do I need to run to achieve growth within those segments? As an example, if part of our growth strategy is launching into a new market, I'm going to need to do a new market launch campaign. If it's launching a new product, we're going to need to do a product launch campaign. Perhaps if it's just upselling and cross-selling existing customers, I'm just going to have an ongoing campaign throughout the year targeting our existing customers overall, and working on activities within that overarching campaign to expand my customer revenue. So it could be a broad campaign where you're going to target an audience segment in an ongoing way, or it could be a campaign with a very clear start date and end date, such as a product launch. But figure out which campaigns you're going to need to launch in order to hit your growth goals. From there, the next strategy that I really dive into is my content strategy.
Content, especially long form content, is still queen in my opinion. And frankly, the campaigns that we've just decided we need to run, we're going to need content to fuel those. So now that you've figured out your growth strategy, the campaign strategy that's gonna support those growth segments, you now need to figure out which content will you need for those specific audiences within those specific campaigns. Which leads me to the fourth step within the strategy ideation and planning section.
And that's identifying which promotional programs and channels you're going to leverage. How are you going to get your content out there? Which promotional channels are gonna be critical to your campaigns? You know, it could be CEO, paid advertising, social media, email marketing, events, PR, right? The list goes on. But oftentimes I see marketing leaders start with the promotional channel and building strategies by channel as opposed to figuring out which campaigns and content will support the growth, and then which promotional channels are gonna best drive campaign results. Certainly, you may also want to have your own channel strategies associated to them, but oftentimes I find that marketing leaders prioritize their channel strategies over the campaign strategies. And really the campaigns are gonna be what's driving ongoing growth in the audience segments you're most interested in. And so I believe that your channel strategies should be the supportive factor, not the leading factor. So as you can see, your strategy ideation and planning step between your growth strategies, your campaign strategies, your content strategies, your promotional programs and channel strategies, there's a lot in this section. And one of the tips I like to share with this step in the process is, let loose a little bit.
You know, don't necessarily worry about how realistic each of these ideas are. Think big, think out of the box. This is like more of a whiteboarding session than it is your roadmap planning session. This is really where I like to start big and then over the next few steps, I will rein it in. And honestly, I'd love to bring my whole team in to this step. At this point, you know your goals, you know your vision, you can set the stage with your team and say, let's have fun.
Let's whiteboard the heck out of this. Give me all your ideas, whether they feel crazy or attainable or not. Let's just have fun with this. Let's really get to the bottom of all of the different ways that we can attack our goals. And so I tend to give this particular step about three days. And then from there, I give myself about a week or so to really ruminate on everything that was shared. It's almost like a big puzzle that I'm sort of putting together in my brain and really figuring out
What is gonna make the biggest impact? How do I pull this together? What kind of resources would I need? What's gonna be the most critical part of this ideation and strategy to take forward in order to accomplish goals?
Step 4: Building the Marketing Execution Blueprint and Marketing Roadmap
Which leads me into step four, building an execution blueprint. So this is the stage where type A people, like myself, we love this stage. This is really where we bring all of that ideation down to earth a bit and really start to figure out, okay, what are we gonna commit to and what are we not gonna commit to? How do we bring this plan to life? Through a combination of prioritization and execution. So the first thing I do when I'm building my execution blueprint is I build a roadmap. Based on my annual goals and marketing vision for the year, how do those goals break down quarterly? Now, you don't have to take the goal and just divide it by four.
In fact, a lot of times that's not the way I will do it, especially if there's particularly new programs or initiatives or team members that I'm gonna need in order to impact that goal that I won't have at the very start of the year. So sometimes I ramp up to the goals and then sometimes I do just divide it by four and say I need to be able to trend towards this goal equally throughout the year. So depending on your goals, figure out how do those break down quarterly and from there, what is your roadmap?
Which campaigns will fall when? Which major programs or initiatives or major new hires do you need to make by when? I like to build my roadmap on a quarterly basis. I feel like it just gives you a little bit more room for error or for the unknown or for agility to work its way into the plan, but you do it however you feel. Once you've got a roadmap set with your quarterly goals, your quarterly campaigns, some of the major programs and initiatives that you're planning to launch throughout the year.
The second piece is to identify your resourcing plan. How are you going to achieve this roadmap? Which resources do you need? Who do you have in-house that can contribute? Where might you have to go outsourced? What types of tools and technologies do you need in order to make this plan come to life? Which leads really nicely into the last big piece of your execution blueprint, which is your marketing budget.
Now, extra points, if you can get your marketing budget to really clearly directly tie to the goals. Sometimes I like to actually structure my budget out to the three to five goals I have and say, this is how much spend I need to accomplish this goal. This is how much spend I need to accomplish this goal. And then I'll have a separate line item for sort of marketing infrastructure. Like here's the set amount I need to run my department, regardless of the goals. Could be tools and technologies, it could be headcount.
Right? But really, if you can roll your budget up to a specific goal, I find that that really helps with the next step that we'll talk about, which is executive approval. I find that really helps with showing your CFO, hey, if you're going to cut my budget, which goal are we cutting here? So it's great if you can look at your budget that way. If not, no worries. That's something you can work towards in a later date. So for the execution blueprint phase,
I find this tends to take anywhere from one to four weeks, depending on how much data and reporting or process you have to get. Estimates are totally fine, but try and make sure that it's rooted in real historical data. So two final tips that I'd like to share for the Execution Blueprint. Tip number one, if you had such a great ideation session and you've got all of these different ideas and you're really struggling to figure out which ones you should run with and which ones you shouldn't.
One of the things I love to do in this section is an impact versus effort chart. Right? So, so low impact to high impact, low effort to high effort, almost as a grid. And take your team through this exercise. Have the experts on your team help you figure out what's the level of effort and what's the level of impact we think we may see right out of the gates. We know we should be prioritizing high impact, low effort, everything in that quadrant, get it on your roadmap, somehow, some way.
From there, you can think about the high impact, high effort items. Maybe you can't do all of them, but which ones do we think will have the higher impact with the least amount of effort within that quadrant? I've personally found that this is such a great exercise to bring team members through to really position their thinking for the future as well. It sets us up to be looking for high impact, low effort quick wins that we could be doing on an ongoing basis to move the needle forward within our department.
I would highly recommend you give it a shot. And the last tip I'll share for this section specifically is to plan for agility. Leave some breathing room in your marketing budget, whether it's room for new opportunities that you wanna take advantage of or because something didn't go the way that you planned and ended up being a costly mistake, leave some room in your budget. And similarly, leave some room in your calendar and your team's bandwidth so that you can take advantage of new opportunities.
This is also part of why I like doing quarterly planning as opposed to monthly planning, because I find that when we do monthly planning, we pack our calendars a little bit more than when we're looking at things on a quarterly basis. So however you decide to approach your roadmap and your quarterly goals and your resourcing and your budget, just make sure to leave some room for agility. I personally like to aim to leave at least a minimum of 10% of time and spend in my plan specifically earmarked for agility. I think it's really important and I believe you'll thank me later.
Step 5: Gaining Executive Buy-in and Approval
Okay, step number five, plan buy-in and approval. So hopefully if you've done your due diligence up till now and back in step two when you were doing vision and goal setting and you were aligning with your peers, you were capturing goals that are really gonna resonate with each of your business partners. Now I know sometimes it's easier just to get CEO approval and call it a day, but personally I have found that when I involve my peers and I make them feel a part of the plan, they're gonna be bought in and be really great business partners to me along the way. So I'm talking to my CRO, my head of product, my head of engineering, probably my CHRO, my head of HR, and I'm sharing the high level aspects of my plan. What are my goals? How do those map up to the business goals that we all have to achieve? And what are the major initiatives that I believe are gonna help us achieve those goals? Depending on the peer, I'll also pull in some of the specific campaigns or the specific content that may directly speak to their particular departmental goals that they've shared with me, it always makes them feel seen and heard, um, and excited, frankly. And so get their feedback, get their buy-in. You don't have to take their feedback. You don't have to work it into the plan. At the end of the day, we're marketing executives for a reason, but I do think that this is an important step, especially in terms of building collaboration and having the business-minded mindset that we actually talked about in our very first episode of what it takes to be a successful marketing executive these days. From there, I'll then go secure CEO and frankly, CFO approval. So a lot of times my CEO will want me to run my budget by my CFO and they're sort of the budget approver and that's a big part of why the more you can map your initiatives and your campaigns into the budget up to specific goals, I've personally found that you'll have a higher likelihood of getting your plan approved. One of the tips that you can do to navigate this section if needed that I've used before is putting together conservative, moderate, and aggressive options particularly when it comes to the budget and this associated goals. So if you're thinking that your CFO or your CEO is not going to prove your plan the way it is, and you wanna be able to give them options, be proactive about that. Think through what those options are ahead of time so that you're not on the defense, but rather the offense. And you can do that by putting together a conservative plan, a moderate plan, and an aggressive plan. Now, I'm not saying... go change your entire roadmap for each of those three things, but perhaps just within the goals themselves, say, okay, well, maybe within the conservative plan, we can only achieve these three goals really well, and this is how much it's gonna cost. In the moderate plan, we can achieve an extra goal, right? We've got four goals we're gonna achieve really well, and this is the cost, and maybe in the aggressive, we're gonna do these five goals, and this is the cost. So in terms of timing for this step, depending on how much due diligence you've done, I find that this step typically doesn't take longer than two weeks. And that for me includes the back and forth you might have with your execs and any edits to the plan you need to make in order to get them on board and get their approval secured. It's not always the most fun step, but honestly it's one of the most critical steps to ensuring that you're gonna have the backing and the support from your C-suite team in the new year and it also can do wonders for your own personal brand with them and them feeling like you are a business leader first and you've really been thoughtful and strategic about what their vision is and what the long-term vision is. And you've got a solid plan in place and you're equipped to help team hit those goals.
Okay, step six. This is your plan implementation and operational readiness step. So now that your plan is approved, before you just dive in and start executing your plan, do a little bit of foundational work to figure out what will ensure your plan is going to be executed successfully. What do you need in place? What needs to happen to make sure that your plan will be executed successfully over the next year? And also, how will you know when it's executed successfully? And so one of the very first things within the operational readiness category is, do you have clear measurement and reporting for all of your goals? So back to those three to five goals that you've selected, how will you know that you've achieved those goals or that you're trending to those goals? Do you have clear KPIs? Do you need to set up new reports? Do you need to start collecting new data? Do you need to determine an attribution strategy? We need to be able to measure our performance towards these goals. And even if it's a goal that doesn't seem like it has a measurable outcome, like position our brand as a thought leader. Think about all the different ways that you would know, okay, people are seeing us as a thought leader. Maybe it's how many times they've read your thought leadership pieces. Maybe it's how many times you get featured in the media. Right? But there's always something you can measure, whether it's a direct correlation or perhaps an indirect correlation or an influence on the goal, but measurement will be critical to you being able to show your executive team the progress your team is making towards those goals. So do the work that's needed here. The second piece that is really important around making sure that you're operationally ready to successfully execute your plan is looking at your team and their individual roles and responsibilities. Sometimes based on the plan you've created, the roles, your team's roles need to change. Their responsibilities need to change, or sometimes it's not that they need to change, they're still doing the same thing, but they need to be clearly communicated what their individual goals are in order to achieve the team goal that we've set. You want your entire team rowing in the same direction with a very clear understanding of how they specifically will contribute to the goals. So make sure that this new structure, these new roles and responsibilities, or perhaps it's just these new goals are very clear for your team. And the last piece to make sure that you are operationally ready to execute your winning marketing plan is to look at your operational systems and processes and tools. What does your team meeting schedule look like? What does your budget tracking look like? How often will you be reviewing your plan and updating your plan and planning for agility? This step in general is critical to making sure that your beautiful strategic winning marketing plan doesn't collect dust in a PDF document that you never open again. This is the stage where you figure out, how do I make sure that I'm consistently and successfully updating my plan, working on the plan, adjusting it as needed, and achieving my goals? I find that this step specifically can take anywhere from two to four weeks. Honestly, it depends on how many new reports you have to set up or how much new data you have to start collecting. But make sure that you plan enough time for this step before you just dive right into the plan. For those of us that are really excited about just executing the plan, I totally get it. This is a painful step, but this step will be one of the most critical ones to make sure that you are successful with your plan over the next year. So don't skip it.
Conclusion: Recap of the six steps to building a winning marketing plan
Okay, so that brings us to the end of the six steps to building your winning marketing plan. Just to quickly recap, the six steps are...
Number one, conduct a full marketing landscape review, leveraging both internal and external research, and figure out what your key findings are. Number two, set your vision and goals. Make sure that you're only choosing three to five high impact marketing goals that are directly related to the business goals and take into the account the other business lines as well. Step three, strategy and ideation. Have fun with this one. Think big, pull together all of the ideas, figure out your growth strategy, your campaign strategy, your content strategy, and your promotional strategy that's going to help you win and achieve your marketing goals that you set. Step number four, build your execution blueprint. Identify your roadmap, ideally on a quarterly basis with quarterly goals, quarterly campaigns, major programs and initiatives. Figure out the resourcing plan that you're going to need and figure out the marketing budget you're gonna need to achieve your execution roadmap. Step five, secure executive buy-in and approval for your plan. Make sure both your peers and your CEO and your CFO are all bought into your plan, aligned with it, and they're gonna back you in the new year throughout the duration of achieving your plan. And step six, get your implementation and operational readiness plan pulled together. Make sure you have clear measurement and reporting to report on whether you're achieving your plan. Make sure your team has very clear goals and responsibilities within their individual roles. And make sure you have the right systems and structures and processes and tools in place to achieve your plan. I hope that you found today's episode to be helpful. These are the same six steps I take to personally build strategic marketing plans for every new client I've worked with. I've built and have iterated upon this process so many times until I really figured out what will.
I know we covered a lot today, so if it's easier for you, head to the show notes and click the marketing planning checklist download. It's a free download I've put together outlining all of these steps and more and should be a solid blueprint to helping you complete a winning marketing plan. And if you have any peers or fellow marketing leaders that you think would benefit from this episode, will you just do me a huge favor and share it with them? I'd love to help as many marketing leaders as I can with marketing planning.
As I know, this is one of the most important parts of our role that often so many people don't prioritize or know how to prioritize. And so thanks again for tuning into today's episode and until next time, keep on activating growth for you and your business. See you later.
