The strategic marketing planning process

Most marketing plans have flawed foundations: last year’s data, vanity metrics, and siloed teams. And when the time comes, marketing leaders have to take the heat because success is measured by sales numbers, not by the number of clicks an ad gets.

The fix: A strategic marketing planning process that aligns cross-functional teams to business outcomes like sales and profit, while keeping space for flexibility. 

Below, we outline the nine essential steps to build that kind of plan so you can drive results and defend your budget.

Definition of the marketing planning process

The marketing planning process is the sequence of steps a marketing team follows to create and structure its annual marketing plan. The purpose of this process is to align the marketing activities to business outcomes like sales, profit, and long-term growth.

Marketing strategy vs planning process vs a plan: How they differ

Your marketing strategy, planning process, and the plan work together, but are entirely different from each other. Here are the differences so you can maintain your focus:

Difference	Marketing strategy	Marketing planning process	Marketing plan
What it is	The overall approach to achieve marketing goals	The sequence of steps used to create the marketing plan	The documented actions, campaigns, channels, and budget
Focus	Big-picture direction, such as positioning, value proposition, and audience	Structure, alignment, and adaptation of the plan to business goals	Execution framework that turns strategy into activities and investments
Outcome	Guidance for high-level decisions across the business	A framework that dictates alignment to strategy and business outcomes	A set of actions and investments that deliver the strategy

Why marketers need a defined planning process (and not just a plan)

Without a defined annual marketing planning process, most plans are built by copying last year’s plan and adjusting the budget or channels based on past ROI or mROI. A planning process gives you a structure to:

• Focus on business goals: The plan is built around sales, profit, and growth targets, not past media costs.
• Align all teams: According to a Forrester’s report for Opal, 77% of marketers say organizational silos make aligning on strategy difficult. A defined process helps break down those silos so marketing, finance, sales teams work toward shared objectives.
• Plan for uncertainty: Scenario planning lets you prepare for different market conditions and focus your plan on what will drive growth. According to the ROI Genome Intelligence Report, brands that plan with data-driven simulations see an average of 25–70% higher return for the same investment.
• Connect strategy to marketing efforts: All the marketing initiatives, campaigns, and channels serve the defined business outcome.
• Enable flexibility: Having a planning process in place will help you adjust as conditions change. The flexibility comes from the strong foundation of having team members aligned. 

9 steps in the marketing planning process

Marketing leaders are accountable for delivering results, not just running campaigns. The following steps in your annual marketing planning process help build a plan that ties directly to business outcomes, keeps teams aligned, and stays flexible enough to adjust as conditions change.

Step 1: Conduct a situation analysis 

The first step of the marketing planning process involves situation analysis, which gives you the data you need to build a plan that reflects current market realities, not just internal views or last year’s performance. Situation analysis and marketing audit will set the foundation for the entire marketing plan.

• Purpose: Build a clear, objective view of your market, customers, competitors, and internal performance.
• Who’s involved: CMO, VP marketing, director of consumer insights, sales director or VP sales, finance director or VP finance
• When: 6–9 months before the fiscal year starts, typically early Q2
• Best practice: Combine internal performance data with external trends and competitor benchmarks. Don’t focus only on last year’s marketing ROI. Complete a SWOT analysis to understand where you stand.

Pro tip: To get started, analyze category trends, market share, household penetration, and customer behavior.

Step 2: Run scenario plans

Static plans fail when market conditions change. Scenario-based marketing planning helps you account for uncertainty, so the plan reflects possible future conditions, not just what worked before.

• Purpose: Build base, best-case, and worst-case scenarios to guide budget, channel, and timing decisions. Understand if you could reach the target sales with the current marketing budget allocation.
• Who’s involved: CMO, VP marketing, VP finance, head of sales, marketing operations manager, media agency lead (if an advertising agency is involved)
• When: Early in the planning phase of the strategic marketing process, after situation analysis but before locking budgets
• Best practice: Use simulations to map how different drivers, like shifts in ad costs, category demand, or competitor moves, could affect results. Keen’s demand planning solution will help you tighten revenue forecasts in this step.

Reliable forecasting lets you focus your plan on what matters most: profit and business outcomes, not indicators like awareness or reach. As Mike Chiasson, senior solutions engineer at Keen, puts it:

“If you have a reliable means of projecting long-term profit, why not cut to the chase and focus on that rather than chasing indirect indicators?”

Alt text: Keen’s MMM platform showing revenue curve for marketing planning.

Read more: How to make a sales forecast with marketing plans

Step 3: Align on business and marketing objectives

The third step in a strategic marketing planning process is setting your objectives and bridging the gap among teams. 

A good marketing planning process example has all the teams on the same page.

• Purpose: According to McKinsey, 42% of marketing leaders say their biggest advantage is having a clear link between marketing activities and business outcomes. So, translate business objectives into clear marketing goals that support revenue, profit, and growth targets.
• Who’s involved: CMO, VP marketing, VP finance, VP sales, CEO (for final alignment at enterprise level)
• When: After scenario planning, before the budget is finalized
• Best practice: Set SMART goals that are reviewed and approved by all relevant departments. Make sure goals reflect both short-term targets (quarterly sales) and long-term priorities (brand equity growth). Tie goals to measurable outcomes, not vanity metrics.

Step 4: Define target audiences and segments

Marketing budgets deliver the best return when they focus on the target market segment that matters most to the business. So, use data to identify and prioritize those audiences.

• Purpose: Identify and prioritize customer segments based on business value, behavior, and needs, not just demographics.
• Who’s involved: VP marketing, director of consumer insights, head of product marketing, sales director, CRM or data science lead
• When: Early to mid planning process, after annual marketing goals and objectives are set
• Best practice: Use first-party data, customer loyalty, value analysis, and behavioral insights to define segments and align them to business goals.

Step 5: Develop positioning and messaging frameworks

Your positioning and messaging shape how customers see your brand and products. Plan for unified and consistent content across channels and connect every campaign to your business goals.

• Purpose: Define how you want customers to see your brand and offers, and follow unified marketing strategies to stay consistent.
• Who’s involved: VP marketing, head of brand, creative director, product marketing lead, agency creative lead (if used)
• When: After you’ve defined your target audiences, before you start creating the marketing plan 
• Best practice: Tie your messaging to business priorities. Make sure everyone, from internal teams to external partners, uses the same frameworks so nothing gets lost or diluted.

Step 6: Design the channel mix strategy

Your marketing channel mix decides where and how you reach your customers. Having this step in the planning process makes sure you’re thinking through all the possible options.

• Purpose: Choose the right marketing channel strategy to reach your target audiences and hit your business goals.
• Who’s involved: VP marketing, head of media, media agency lead (if used), finance director
• When: After your positioning and messaging frameworks are set
• Best practice: Balance brand and performance spend. Don’t put everything into bottom-funnel channels because they’re easier to measure. Use top-funnel channels to drive demand that makes bottom-funnel efforts more efficient.

The reason: spending on top-funnel activity builds the demand that makes lower-funnel efforts work harder. As Justin Jefferson, VP strategy and insights at Keen, explains:

“If you actually spend on the top, your bottom spend becomes more efficient because you have the demand being driven by the top of the funnel awareness.”

Step 7: Build your tactical campaign and execution plan

This is where your strategy turns into action. This step helps you plan what will run, when it will run, and what resources you’ll need to make it happen.

• Purpose: Set the timing, phasing, and resources for your campaigns so your plan is ready to execute.
• Who’s involved: VP marketing, marketing operations manager, media director, creative director, agency project manager (if used)
• When: After your channel mix is approved
• Best practice: Spread your investment over time. Don’t rely on a few big advertising flighting bursts. Make sure campaigns support a consistent brand and demand activity throughout the year.

Step 8: Set measurement frameworks and KPIs

You can’t prove value if you don’t measure what matters. Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) helps you track how well your plan is delivering on business goals, not just activity.

• Purpose: Choose the marketing KPIs that show how your plan supports sales, profit, and growth, not just impressions or clicks.
• Who’s involved: VP marketing, head of analytics, finance director, media director
• When: Before the plan is finalized and budgets are locked
• Best practice: Focus on KPIs that link to outcomes, like mROI or incremental ROAS. Make sure the same KPIs are used across teams so everyone measures success the same way.

Read more: The best marketing channel performance metrics

Step 9: Plan for spend optimization and adaptation

No marketing plan stays perfect all year. Put agile marketing principles in place so you can adjust as conditions change, without losing focus on your goals.

• Purpose: Build in points to review and adjust your plan so you can respond to market shifts, cost changes, or new opportunities.
• Who’s involved: VP marketing, marketing operations manager, finance director, media director, agency lead (if used)
• When: From the start of the plan, review at set points during the year (for example, quarterly)
• Best practice: Use scenario models like marketing mix modeling and what-if tools to guide changes. Don’t adjust spend or channels without checking the likely impact on your business outcomes.
  

Build your marketing plan with Keen

All the stages of the marketing planning process are built on clarity, alignment, and flexibility. When you follow a clear process, you give your team the structure they need to make smarter decisions, connect actions to business outcomes, and adjust with confidence as conditions change.

Keen’s MMM platform gives you the tools to support a strategic marketing planning process, from scenario models to what-if forecasts, so you can build a plan that delivers measurable results.

With Keen, you can:

• Simulate best, base, and worst-case scenarios so you can plan for uncertainty
• Measure your marketing performance
• Tie spend decisions to outcomes like mROI and incremental ROAS
• Adjust your plan as conditions change using what-if models and a media planning solution

Request a demo to see how you can use Keen to move beyond a static annual marketing planning process.