The Design phase of a tactical marketing plan: audit before you recommend (part 2 of 5)

The most common failure in marketing planning is recommending before examining. A new leader arrives, or an agency gets hired. Two weeks later there is a plan: new platform, new campaigns, new brand voice. It is built on what worked at the last company, not on what is happening in this one.

The Design phase exists to prevent that. It is the first of the three phases in our method for creating a tactical marketing plan. Its output is deliberately not a plan. It is an assessment: what the business wants, who it needs to reach, what already exists, and where the evidence says the problems are.

Start with discovery, not the stated request

The stated request is almost never the whole story. Interview everyone who touches the marketing system. That means leadership, the marketers running the day to day, the technical people who manage the tools and the database, and any subcontractors running their own projects.

Discovery is where the real objectives surface. It is also where you find the buried assets. In one engagement we found a professionally produced video library nobody was promoting. We found a customer database in far better shape than anyone inside believed. We found a finished content matrix sitting unused in a folder. Every one of those changed the plan. None of them appeared in the original request.

Discovery also forces the audience question. Most organizations name one target: the customer. A working assessment names every audience the system touches. In a considered purchase there are usually five or six. The buyer. The people who influence the buyer. The channel partners who carry the message. The administrators who live with the product after the sale. The end users whose experience decides whether the relationship renews. Each needs different messaging at different stages of the buying decision.

The nine audit lenses

The heart of the assessment is a systematic audit through nine lenses:

• Web content
• Lead collection
• Data management
• Email performance
• Analytics
• Search visibility
• Paid media
• Competitors
• Social channels

Every lens gets the same three-part structure, and the structure is the discipline:

Keeping the three separate matters more than it sounds.

What the evidence turns up

A few patterns appear in nearly every audit we run.

The website is built for one conversion action, usually a quote request or a demo. It offers nothing to everyone who is not ready for that.

The budget and the results do not line up. In one assessment, nobody had seen the paid search numbers side by side until the audit put them in a single table:

And the analytics cannot separate customers from prospects, which quietly inflates every engagement number the team reports.

Name the obstacles before they name themselves

Every assessment should end with the section most consultants leave out: what will get in the way. Three obstacles show up in nearly every engagement:

Name each one in writing, with a fix and an owner. That is what separates a plan that survives contact with the organization from one that dies in a shared drive.

With the assessment done, the next phase is deciding what actually gets built. That is the Develop phase, covered in the next article in this series. The full method, including the eight-section template we structure every assessment around, is at How to Create a Tactical Marketing Plan.