Most annual marketing plans are written across two weeks in December, presented to the board in January, and quietly abandoned by March. The reason isn't a lack of discipline. It's that the document is a list of activities rather than a set of decisions — and a list of activities offers no help at all when reality arrives and you have to choose.
Start from the revenue arithmetic, not the channels
Work backwards. What's the revenue number, what's the average deal size, what's the win rate, what's the sales cycle? That chain tells you how many opportunities you need and roughly when they need to exist. Only now does it make sense to discuss channels, because you know the size of the job. Skipping this step is why so many plans propose a podcast and a rebrand for a company that needs forty qualified conversations by June.
Write down what you're not doing
This is the section that makes a plan useful. Every plan has an implicit list of things that were considered and rejected, and it usually lives in someone's head. Write it down, with the reasoning. When someone asks in April why you aren't doing events, the answer is already documented and the conversation takes two minutes instead of a fortnight. A plan without an explicit 'not this year' list isn't a plan; it's a wish list waiting to be raided.
- Name the two or three channels that will carry the number
- Name what you've deliberately dropped, and why, in one line each
- Set the review cadence before you need it — monthly, with the numbers open
- Define what evidence would make you change your mind mid-year
Budget for the slow channels separately
The channels that pay back within the quarter and the channels that pay back within the year compete badly for the same budget line, and the slow ones always lose in a tight month. Split them. Ring-fence the compounding work — content, SEO, founder brand, community — as a separate commitment with its own review horizon. If it sits in the same pot as paid, it will be cut the first time a monthly number wobbles, which is precisely when abandoning it is most expensive.
Plan for the plan being wrong
It will be. Something will change in the funding market, or a competitor will do something unexpected, or a channel that worked all last year will stop. What separates a plan that survives from one that gets abandoned is whether it named its own assumptions. Write down the three things you're betting on. Check them quarterly. When one turns out to be false, you'll be updating a plan rather than discovering you no longer have one.
A good plan isn't a prediction. It's a set of decisions made calmly in December so you don't have to make them anxiously in March.
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