Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail

Most marketing is little more than expensive guesswork.

During any thirty-day period, I reckon I speak with around fifty business owners who are looking for help with their marketing. As you can imagine, it’s not long into the conversation before I get the question, “How much will this cost?”

However, I’m more interested in their answer to a different question: “Why does your business deserve to exist?”

As noted in the 3 Rules that govern our client acceptance process, if we’re working on your project we need to excited about your business. Because if we’re not, then neither will your customers. I view accepting any new client as the beginning of a relationship – which works in both directions. I need to be convinced that your business, and the key people within it, have what it takes to succeed. And if you can’t convince me that your business has genuine potential for growth, then we’re probably not going to accept you as a client.

But what what interests me about these conversations is how ill-prepared many business owners are for implementing a marketing and lead-generation plan for their organization. Just in the past few weeks, seven potential clients have admitted something that would horrify their accountants: they have never had a marketing budget.

Not an approximate one. Not even a number scribbled on a napkin. Absolutely nothing. Zip. Nada, Rien.

Instead of a marketing budget, these people make marketing decisions as if they’re some Roman emperor at the Colosseum. Someone pitches them on Google Ads, they give it a thumbs up or thumbs down based on how they feel that day. A sales rep calls about a trade show, they check the company coffers and decide on the spot.

It’s marketing decisions made by mood ring.

These are the same people who would never (for example) hire staff this way. They wouldn’t buy equipment this way. They certainly wouldn’t pay taxes this way. But marketing? That gets the Julius Caesar treatment.

The Real Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

If a business owner tells me they think marketing is important, only to then admit they’ve never budgeted for it, they’re revealing something they may not consciously realize. It’s that, deep down, they think marketing is an expense rather than a critical component of the value chain. They think marketing is something you do when you have leftover money, like buying office plants or upgrading the coffee machine.

Such thinking is so blatantly incorrect, outdated, and expensive, I often cut short my conversation and make my exit. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s futile to change the minds of someone so clearly deluded and out of touch with today’s business practices. The pain from banging one’s head against a wall only subsides when we stop banging. Marketing isn’t what you do after you’ve sorted out the “real” business stuff. Marketing is how you turn prospects into customers, customers into repeat buyers, and repeat buyers into advocates. It’s not separate from your business. It is your business. It’s as vital a component to you organization as having electricity or plumbing in your office.

Given its importance, you’d think business owners or CEOs would consider marketing decisions with somewhat more rigor than they’d apply to choosing a new supplier, or deciding on what color to paint the front entrance. They’ll spend weeks negotiating a delivery contract but decide on a $10,000 ad campaign during a coffee break.

Random Marketing Is Expensive Noise

Much of the tactical, visible, tangible parts of marketing work through repetition and consistency. Customers need to encounter consistent positioning that builds recognition and trust over time. Buyers need to be reminded of your message multiple times, often across different channels, before it sinks in to the point that your brand joins the list of other brands they’re considering when they’re in the buying phase. Random, seemingly haphazard marketing decisions won’t create such consistency. You might run a brilliant campaign in January, but if your March messaging contradicts your January positioning, you’ve wasted both efforts. Your customers receive mixed signals about what you do and why they should care.

Think about the brands you remember and trust. They didn’t achieve that position through sporadic, disconnected campaigns. They built recognition through sustained, coordinated effort over years. Every touchpoint reinforced their core message. Every campaign built on previous campaigns. This compounds over time. Early investments in brand building and customer education create momentum that makes future marketing more effective. But you can only capture this compound effect through consistent, planned effort.

Random campaigns, no matter how creative, cannot create sustained momentum.

Gut Instinct Mythology

Many business owners defend their ad hoc approach by claiming they trust their instincts. They’ve been successful so far, they reason, so their gut must be reliable. But this confuses two different skills. I’d admit that gut instinct may help identify opportunities. But evaluating those opportunities requires systematic thinking based in planning, rigor, and process. You need frameworks for measuring potential return, assessing strategic fit, and understanding resource requirements.

The armed forces understand this distinction. Military Generals develop detailed operational plans not because they don’t have the required intuition, but because plans create the foundation for intelligent tactical decisions. When circumstances change rapidly, they can modify existing plans rather than improvising from scratch.

The same applies to marketing strategy. Having predetermined budgets and strategic priorities doesn’t eliminate flexibility. It does the precise opposite, creating the context necessary for smart, quick decisions when opportunities arise. Without this context, what feels like intuitive decision-making is actually random guessing. You have no way to evaluate whether an opportunity fits your broader strategy because…you haven’t defined your broader strategy.

The Hidden Costs of Winging It

Unplanned marketing creates several expensive problems that most business owners don’t recognize.

• You systematically underinvest in activities that generate long-term returns. Brand building, customer education, and market positioning require sustained effort over months or years. Without long-term planning, these activities get sacrificed for whatever seems urgent today.
• You overreact to competitive pressures. When competitors launch promotions, you feel compelled to respond immediately. Without strategic context, these responses often damage your positioning and margins while providing no lasting competitive advantage.
• You cannot learn from your efforts. Without clear objectives and measurement frameworks, you have no way to distinguish successful campaigns from expensive failures. You repeat mistakes while abandoning strategies that might have worked with better execution or more time.
• You create internal confusion. Your sales team receives mixed messages about your value proposition. Your customer service team cannot provide consistent answers about your positioning. Your entire organization lacks clear direction about what you’re trying to achieve in the market.

What Proper Marketing Planning Actually Looks Like

Effective marketing planning is not complicated, but it requires discipline. You need three elements: a budget, a strategy, and a measurement framework.

The budget doesn’t need to be precise, but it does needs to exist. Allocate a percentage of revenue to marketing activities and stick to it. This forces you to make strategic choices about priorities rather than reactive decisions about individual opportunities.

The strategy doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it needs to be clearly defined, and explicit. Define your objective, your target customers, your value proposition, differentiation, distinctiveness, and key messages. Identify the channels where your customers pay attention and the metrics that indicate progress toward your objectives.

There needs to be some kind of measurement framework. That doesn’t mean spending a ton on some martech online dashboard that does 279 things that you’re paying for but never need. At the beginning, most businesses can get this done with a simple Excel sheet. Track a small number of relevant metrics – stuff that actually matter to the business. Review performance regularly and adjust tactics based on evidence rather than emotion.

These three elements create the infrastructure for intelligent marketing decisions. When opportunities arise, you can evaluate them against your strategy, consider them within your budget constraints, and measure their effectiveness against your established metrics and overall objective.

The Compound Effect of Consistency

When you plan your marketing properly, your messaging framework and execution starts reinforcing itself instead of channels cannibalizing themselves for attention. Brand recognition improves because customers encounter consistent positioning across multiple touchpoints. Conversion rates increase because prospects receive coordinated information that builds trust and addresses objections systematically. Marketing becomes more efficient because you’re not constantly starting from zero. Each campaign builds on previous efforts instead of reinventing your market position and reinventing the wheel each time. You develop institutional knowledge about what works and why, allowing you to improve performance over time.

Most importantly, you gain control over your business development. Instead of hoping that random marketing efforts will generate leads, you create predictable systems for customer acquisition. You can forecast growth, plan capacity, and make strategic decisions based on reliable pipelines rather than wishful thinking.

Planning Isn’t The Opposite Of Flexibility

Senior management often resist marketing planning because they falsely believe it to reduce flexibility. Business owners or CEOs want to capitalize on unexpected opportunities and respond quickly to market changes. But such thinking misunderstands the deliverables that planning actually provides. Plans are not rigid scripts that eliminate adaptation. They are frameworks that enable intelligent adaptation. When circumstances change, you modify your approach based on strategic priorities instead of panic or optimism.

The opposite of planning is not flexibility. It’s chaos disguised as business leadership. Real flexibility requires strategic context. Without clear objectives and resource constraints, you can’t distinguish good opportunities from expensive distractions.

You can’t assume the competition are making marketing decisions based on how they feel on a Tuesday afternoon, after a dodgy seafood salad. They’re developing systematic approaches to customer acquisition and retention. They’re building consistent market positions through coordinated campaigns. Most of all, they’re learning from their efforts and improving their performance over time.

You can continue treating marketing like a slot machine, feeding it random amounts of money and hoping for favorable outcomes. Or you can treat it like what it actually is: the systematic application of proven principles to the predictable challenge of turning prospects into profitable customers.

The choice is yours. But make it deliberately, not by default.