Marketing plans: Something to be cheered, not feared

A flexible, focused marketing plan improves budgeting, targeting, and adaptability, with ongoing analysis ensuring effective growth.

The holiday season and 2025 will be here before you know it! Just like holiday preparations, budget planning and marketing strategies can sneak up on you, leaving little time to get them right if you wait until the last minute.

With year-end around the corner, it’s the perfect time to start shaping a solid marketing plan that you’ll be ready to present confidently to your CFO and CMO.

Many companies—whether fintech start-ups or established businesses—consider creating a marketing plan impossible. Without a clear marketing plan, your business risks wasting money, time, and energy on misguided efforts, ultimately missing out on valuable opportunities.

Instead of viewing it as a dreaded task, consider your marketing plan a roadmap to success. It is there to guide you, not constrain you. With a well-thought-out plan, you’ll know where to invest your resources best and have the confidence to say ‘no’ to distractions that could lead you off course.

How can a marketing plan help?

Budget

A marketing plan allows you to explain to fellow members of your senior leadership team how and why funds are allocated to marketing efforts. This ensures that a sufficient budget is received to execute successful campaigns.

Your marketing plan should carefully detail the budget and resources you request from the leadership team to meet the outlined marketing objectives.

Offering in-depth insight into how the budget will be used to meet marketing goals helps the leadership better understand the potential return on investment from these campaigns.

Align goals and timeframes

To effectively determine the objectives of your marketing plan, you must review the organisation’s and sales team’s overarching goals. This ensures that all decisions are aligned and support the company’s objectives.

For example, if the company aims to become an industry thought leader, your marketing goals should be to create valuable and informative content, like blogs or white papers, that educate your target audience.

Target the correct audience

Marketing plans are a fantastic tool for helping define your chosen target audience and for determining how best to target your marketing efforts towards this demographic.

When outlining your plan, conduct thorough research into your target market to determine any geographic, community, cultural, and social factors that could impact their buying decisions.

Detailing your ideal buyer persona ensures that your business uses its marketing and sales efforts, resources, and budgets wisely to sell to audiences most likely to purchase.

If you want to go above and beyond, you can further segment your audience by dividing them into groups based on similar needs, interests, and behaviours. Audience segmentation allows you, as marketers, to customise your messaging so it’s more relatable to the customer.

Removes distractions

A marketing plan helps remove distractions from opportunistic ventures by establishing clear objectives, prioritising high-impact activities, and maintaining a focus on long-term goals.

The plan creates a framework for evaluating opportunities by clearly defining specific, measurable targets aligned with the company’s strategy. An initiative that doesn’t support the core objectives is a distraction.

Having a structured roadmap with timelines and milestones keeps your marketing team on track, preventing deviation into opportunistic but less impactful endeavours.

The best approach

Relax

You do not need to create a regimented 12-month marketing plan. In the fast-paced fintech industry, locking in specific activities a year in advance isn’t realistic.

Technology evolves, new opportunities arise, and customers’ needs continuously change—all of which can render long-term plans irrelevant. Instead, focus on building flexibility into your marketing plan, especially if you’re a start-up.

While having clear goals is essential, you don’t need to stress over every tactical detail. Your marketing plan is a steady reference point, guiding your decisions without restricting adaptability.

A marketing plan is a helpful tool to leverage; it shouldn’t be a burden. It allows you to define specific business goals and measure success, but it is also helpful in determining what shouldn’t be pursued. This clarity helps protect your resources by empowering you to say ‘no’ to distractions that could take you off course.

In today’s dynamic environment, planning should be continuous. Focus on creating plans that fit your business’s current needs, embracing shorter increments to provide better flexibility and learning.

Listen and learn

Understanding your customers is crucial to shaping a successful marketing strategy.

Take time to learn how they perceive your brand and product. Engage with your sales team; they have valuable first-hand insights into customer interactions. Visit clients and observe how they experience your offering and spend time with customer service teams to gain a deeper insight into the customer journey.

Review the emails your sales team uses to introduce your business. Do the language and messaging align with your brand’s mission and vision? If not, it’s essential to integrate a review of your marketing communications into your plan. Creating a marketing toolkit, including elements like a well-crafted elevator pitch, can ensure consistency across your messaging.

Additionally, use simple social media monitoring to track what your customers and competitors say about your business.

For an even broader perspective, conduct surveys or in-person meetings with other departments and team members to gather insights into your organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, mission, and vision. A collaborative approach can strengthen internal alignment and inform a more comprehensive marketing strategy.

Create consensus

A big reason marketing plans can fail is the lack of support from other senior leadership team members.

If financial targets are unmet, the marketing team can often be blamed. To prevent this, engage with senior executives, allowing them to voice concerns and approve the plan before it moves forward.

Start by having an open conversation with your CEO, followed by other key stakeholders. Since your marketing plan closely aligns with their objectives, their input is essential for mutual success. Involving your wider marketing team is equally important, as they bring valuable insights and are responsible for executing the marketing plan.

Gaining support and creating consensus from all business stakeholders ensures alignment across departments, minimises any roadblocks, and strengthens your marketing strategy’s chance of success.

Analyse! Analyse!

Analysing your marketing success is crucial to measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, optimising your resources, and driving continuous improvement.

Evaluating key KPIs and ROI can provide insights into what works and doesn’t. This allows you to adjust your approach, allocate budgets more efficiently, and ensure your efforts are aligned with business objectives.

Without this analysis, you could risk wasting resources on ineffective campaigns or missing growth opportunities.

Performance marketing, particularly, depends on this analytical approach as it focuses on measurable outcomes. It provides real-time insights, enabling you to make quick and easy adjustments to boost campaign effectiveness.

By regularly analysing your data, performance marketing ensures that your marketing efforts are spent on driving tangible business outcomes, leading to efficient and scalable growth.