How to Write a Marketing Plan with 5 Questions

Ask 20 marketers how to write a marketing plan, and you'll get 20 different answers. Some will be more strategy than tactics, and some will get tactical immediately without a strategic foundation.

Some marketing plans attempt to predict what will happen three years from now, while others assume next year doesn't exist (and doesn't matter).

But the biggest problem most marketing plans have is that they're company-centric. They're written from your point of view, based on what you want from the market, and they fail to reflect or take into account your clients' perspective.

It's fine that the marketing plan focuses on your objectives and what success looks like for you and your company. But if it doesn't take into account the voice, needs, and motivations of the client, it's doomed to fail—no matter what the format, length, or scope.

Think about how bad this would look (and how badly it would fail) if you did it for your sales process. It's easy to define the process you'd like your sales team to go through in finding, cultivating, and converting leads into closed business. But unless you understand your clients well enough, the process you define may have nothing to do with the way your clients wants to buy.