Why most marketing plans are useless
Most marketing plans are theatre. They look impressive, with long slide decks, detailed documents and neat diagrams. They often spend pages on “vision”, “mission” and “purpose”, then list channels and activities until everyone is exhausted.
Then they disappear into a shared drive while people carry on doing what they were doing before. Time and money are wasted.
Recent figures show this is common:
- 67% of SMEs have no marketing action plan
- 54% do not have a documented business plan
- In the USA, around half of small businesses have no marketing plan
Decades of work on marketing planning point to the same problems. There is confusion between tactics and strategy, marketing is isolated from the rest of the business, analysis is weak and there is a lack of real planning skills.
Many senior marketers admit their plans are driven by “getting things done” rather than by strategy.
The problem is not a lack of plans. The problem is that most plans are not doing the job they are meant to do.
Where most marketing plans go wrong
1. Confusing tactics with strategy
This is the biggest issue.
If a plan jumps straight into channels, campaigns and content without a serious look at the market, the customer and the competition, it is tactics pretending to be strategy.
Good planning follows three simple phases:
- Diagnose the situation with data.
- Decide the strategy.
- Plan the tactics that will deliver it.
If you skip diagnosis, you are guessing. If you skip strategy, you are just filling channels. If you skip tactics, nothing happens.
2. Drowning in data, starving for insight
Many plans collapse under the weight of “situation analysis”. You see:
- Screenshots from analytics and CRM tools.
- Pages of market data.
- Long SWOT and PEST lists.
What you rarely see is a clear point of view on:
- Where growth can realistically come from.
- Where money is being lost.
- What you can safely stop doing.
Many experts make the same point. Most plans contain plenty of data but no clear strategic choices.
If the “analysis” section is twenty pages and the “so what” is half a page, the plan is upside down.
3. Worshipping vision, mission and purpose
You do not need nine pages on vision, mission and purpose.
One honest sentence on each is enough:
- Vision, where you want to get to.
- Mission, how you make money.
- Purpose, why the business should exist beyond this quarter.
Everything beyond that is often displacement activity, used to avoid harder questions such as:
- Who do we really want more of.
- What are we willing to stop doing.
- Where will we not compete.
Real strategy is about making choices, including what you will not do. A serious marketing plan spends far more time on segmentation, targeting and positioning than on polishing purpose statements.
4. Treating marketing as a side project
Another recurring problem is treating the marketing plan as something that only concerns the marketing team.
You see plans where:
- Objectives do not tie back to revenue or margin.
- Lead targets were never agreed with sales.
- Campaigns depend on operations delivering things they were never asked to support.
If sales, operations and finance cannot see themselves in the plan, it will not survive contact with day to day business pressures.
5. Skipping control and cadence
Many plans end with a vague line such as “we will monitor performance and optimise”. That is not control.
Planning frameworks that include “control” exist for a reason. They force you to define not only the situation, objectives, strategy and tactics, but also:
- Who will do what and when.
- How you will measure progress.
- How often you will review and adjust.
Good planning systems build in:
- Which metrics matter.
- Where those metrics live, for example in which dashboard or report.
- When you will look at them.
- What decisions you will make in those reviews.
Without this, you end up with “marketing tactic hopping”, constant switching between activities with no clear direction and a lot of wasted budget.
What a marketing plan is really for
Strip away the clutter and a B2B marketing plan should be:
A clear, evidence based set of choices about where to focus, how to win and what you will do, tied directly to revenue and margin.
Traditional planning work describes this as a logical sequence of activities that leads to clear marketing objectives and practical plans to achieve them.
A simple structure that helps
Many businesses use a simple planning model, often described as:
- Situation, where are we now.
- Objectives, where do we want to be.
- Strategy, how will we get there.
- Tactics, what exactly will we do.
- Action, who will do what and when.
- Control, how will we measure and manage.
This gives a useful checklist and stops you jumping straight into activity without a direction.
The Webstudio approach, built for real businesses
At Webstudio, we blend this structure with our own work with clients. We focus on four main stages and one extra section that most templates ignore.
- Diagnose, understand where you are today, where growth can come from and where money is being lost.
- Decide, make clear choices about segments, positioning and priorities.
- Do, plan the campaigns, content and sales support that will bring the strategy to life.
- Measure, agree the key numbers, review rhythm and decisions you will make from the data.
We then add one more crucial element, often missing from standard templates:
- Key challenges to overcome, the real barriers that could stop the plan working, for example limited capacity, skills gaps, data quality or internal politics.
What this gives your business
A plan built this way is not a document to be filed. It becomes a practical tool that helps you:
- Link marketing activity directly to revenue and margin.
- Stop wasting money on channels and tactics that do not support the strategy.
- Align leadership, sales, marketing and operations behind the same choices.
- Make better decisions each month because you know what to measure and how to respond.
The result is a marketing plan that drives growth, instead of a piece of theatre that gathers dust.
