“It simply so occurs that your pal right here is barely largely useless.”
That well-known line (uttered by Miracle Max in The Princess Bride) could be the proper metaphor for strategic planning in advertising and marketing at this time.
As a result of whereas many advertising and marketing groups (particularly in midsized and growth-oriented firms) speak as if long-term planning is over, they’re improper. It’s nonetheless alive — barely respiration, maybe, however revivable.
Why trouble? Properly, to not belabor the instance (you realize I’m going to), nevertheless it’s for a similar cause Westley gave for eager to return to life: real love. On this case, it’s not love for Buttercup, it’s for a well-aligned, customer-centric advertising and marketing technique. (Actually, I’m unsure Westley — had he been a marketer — wouldn’t have chosen a clear attribution mannequin over Buttercup.)
This may occasionally sound old style to some youthful entrepreneurs, however as soon as upon a time (not so way back), groups would collect yearly to map out long-term advertising and marketing plans.
They’d debate enterprise targets, analyze buyer wants, sharpen positioning, and map campaigns. They made plans. Actual ones.
In the present day, these conferences nonetheless occur. However the course of has misplaced its tooth.
Welcome to the planning theater
Rather than deep strategic debate, we regularly get strategic planning theater: offsites that includes a former sports activities star speaker, a go to to a formidable brewpub, and nice decks accompanied by obscure “north star” statements.
These planning rituals are extra carefully related to price range cuts, headcount revisions, and expertise shifts than with the realities of an optimal plan. Enterprise leaders now obsess over channels, martech stacks, and automation instruments on the expense of core strategic fundamentals.
And right here’s an irony value calling out: Many of those trendy planning rituals nonetheless relaxation on the idea that inside capabilities — particularly individuals — are the supply of aggressive benefit.
However now, on the principle stage of Strategic Playhouse Theater, the very leaders who declare individuals are their differentiator are casting generative AI and automation to interchange those self same capabilities, together with strategic planning itself.
It’s as if producers constructed the stage round human style and judgment after which handed the lead function to the scenery-chewing algorithm.
However that’s a subject for one more put up (and presumably a distinct set of drinks).
From planning to efficiency: The operational vacuum
Tutorial researchers have famous that within the age of Agile advertising and marketing and progress hacking, conventional planning is usually seen as anachronistic.
Roger Martin, one of many world’s main enterprise strategists, puts it even more starkly: “Technique is turning into a misplaced artwork.”
What’s misplaced isn’t simply the documentation (a plan). It’s the operational worth of planning.
Strategic planning isn’t a ceremonial kickoff. It’s a approach to align actions to targets, handle trade-offs, and construct coherence throughout complicated advertising and marketing techniques. It’s the working system that allows advertising and marketing groups to work, prioritize, and ship worth.
Few advertising and marketing groups at this time are outfitted with a correct planning infrastructure. As an alternative, they construct quicker consumption techniques, work on speeding the production of artistic property, and arrange agile workflows.
However, too usually, they skip the crucial considering layer that connects exercise to affect.
Even massive advertising and marketing groups don’t know the right way to act massive
Right here’s the sample I see: A advertising and marketing crew types round a brand new company restructuring aimed toward supporting new progress.
Then the channels multiply. So do the requests.
The crew grows — generally with freelancers, generally with companies, generally with new hires.
However, because the crew expands, the mindset stays small.
Most advertising and marketing groups preserve operating like an internal agency: extremely responsive, fast-moving, and largely reactive to one thing (or somebody) else.
Each request will get equal weight. Each undertaking and marketing campaign is a precedence. Each asset is crucial.
Then comes the tipping level. About two quarters in, management begins asking questions:
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“Why are we producing a lot content material that no person sees?”
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“Why is it so arduous to get visibility into what’s being labored on?”
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“Why does our model story really feel fragmented?”
Strategic planning isn’t pink tape — it’s a blueprint for bigness
Just a few months in the past, I labored with a midsized B2B advertising and marketing crew that had doubled content material output, launched a number of thought management platforms, and immediately contributed to pipeline progress.
By all exterior metrics, they had been profitable. However internally? Not a lot.
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Content material high quality was slipping.
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Departmental belief was fraying.
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Groups operated in silos so distinct that the gross sales crew used Google to go looking the corporate web site for content material (no matter turned up first was assumed to be accredited).
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Executives had began questioning the strategic worth of selling.
That they had rolled out a brand new consumption type and request portal. They’d set service-level agreements for artistic requests (a pattern that also baffles me). Briefly, they’d constructed quicker drive-thru home windows.
However they by no means bought the kitchen so as.
After I requested what their strategic planning workflow seemed like (i.e., how they aligned their proactive roadmap with reactive demand), the reply was clear: They didn’t have one.
What does performing massive appear like?
Strategic planning creates the connective tissue between advertising and marketing technique and day by day operations. It permits groups to orchestrate, not simply fulfill.
Strategic planning unlocks:
Intentional content material decisions (not simply reactive quantity). A content material and advertising and marketing calendar shouldn’t be a repository of deadlines for property (they’re in all probability already late). It’s a choice framework created months earlier than the property are due. Strategic planning helps groups say sure to the work that issues and no to the noise. It aligns content material creation with enterprise affect, not simply inside demand.
Outlined capabilities and accountabilities. Years in the past, a pal at a big B2B firm provided essentially the most correct take I’ve heard on advertising and marketing success: “It’s not what you do — it’s what they assume you do.”
In different phrases, your precise actions matter far lower than how the remainder of the enterprise perceives your worth. That’s not factor. You need individuals to know the worth of the work advertising and marketing groups do.
But, whether or not they imply to or not, most advertising and marketing groups find yourself optimizing for notion relatively than efficiency.
Strategic planning clarifies what the varied advertising and marketing groups really personal, how they actually assist the enterprise, and the way they ought to prioritize their work. It transforms the crew from a black field the place advertising and marketing stuff occurs right into a strategic functionality with clear, seen worth.
A seat on the change desk. When advertising and marketing is deliberate, not simply produced, it turns into adaptive. Leaders achieve the visibility and credibility to shift priorities as enterprise targets evolve relatively than reacting from behind. Planning embeds advertising and marketing actions in strategic conversations earlier than the selections are made.
One in every of my favourite inquiries to ask a CEO or CMO is that this: “When was the final time you made a non-marketing enterprise resolution — new R&D, a brand new product, a market growth, a key rent — primarily based on an perception from advertising and marketing?”
If the reply is “I’m unsure” or “not just lately,” then I do know strategic planning isn’t taking place (no less than, not the sort that connects advertising and marketing to the way forward for the enterprise).
Scaling advertising and marketing with out planning is pricey guesswork
Right here’s the paradox: The second a advertising and marketing crew turns into profitable sufficient to warrant extra funding is the second it begins to undergo with out strategic planning.
You don’t outgrow the necessity for planning — you outgrow the power to function with out it.
Large doesn’t imply bureaucratic. It means accountable. It means resourceful. It means constructed for affect. You’re not including pink tape. You’re including construction.
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Construction provides you governance.
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Governance provides you readability.
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Readability provides you time to create issues that matter.
Act like your advertising and marketing crew is sufficiently big
When does a once-small advertising and marketing crew grow to be strategic about planning? Often, lengthy after it ought to have.
Groups delay as a result of they fear it would introduce paperwork to what was as soon as an agile and responsive group.
However don’t resist the change.
Large means you possibly can afford issues. Large means you’re forward of the sport and in a position to take good dangers. Large means utilizing phrases like course of, possession, governance, and requirements not as burdens however as devices of scale.
Large means conferences that focus not on the work itself however on how groups work collectively. Large means taking duty for not performing massive and for every little thing that comes with being massive.
Getting massive adjustments the character of your work. Strategic planning might take away you from among the stuff you love doing. But it surely additionally opens the door to new, extra significant work that shapes, steers, and sustains. It could power you to go away behind the consolation of collaboration for the readability of course.
However clinging to the acquainted (flatness, flexibility, hearth drills) can preserve your advertising and marketing crew from ever rising into its subsequent chapter.
Advertising and marketing groups that deny their bigness find yourself retrofitting technique onto chaos. It’s not swish. It’s not efficient. And it’s why advertising and marketing reorgs occur so usually.
Reorgs occur not as a result of a crew failed however as a result of it by no means realized it had outgrown its previous method of working.
Prepare for bigness
Don’t worry strategic planning. Don’t gown it up as one thing else. Slowing all the way down to plan is the way you go quicker — and additional.
Your strategic planning course of might not be useless. But when it’s solely partly alive, you’re in harmful territory.
That’s the place unhealthy choices creep in, the place priorities get murky, and the place your once-nimble crew begins working in circles, powered by nothing however espresso and cortisol.
That’s once you want your Miracle Max second.
You want a strategic plan — not a magic bean, not a elaborate dashboard, not the most recent AI plugin. The type of plan that cuts by means of the fog, aligns your groups, and says, “Right here’s what issues. And right here’s what we’re not doing.”
It’s your chocolate-coated revival tablet. (Simply don’t go swimming for half hour.)
It’s your story. Take the time to plan it. Then inform it effectively.
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