The Develop phase of a tactical marketing plan: decide what gets built, and show your reasoning (part 3 of 5)
- What a tactical marketing plan is, and why strategy decks fail
- Design: the audit and the assessment
- Develop: the decisions and the calendar (this article)
- Deliver: the specifications and the handoff
- Execution: the first 13 weeks
The complete method, plus the downloadable eight-section plan template, lives at How to Create a Tactical Marketing Plan.
The assessment is done. You know what the business wants, who it needs to reach, and what the evidence says is broken. The Develop phase is where judgment enters: deciding what actually gets built, and writing down why.
This is the second of the three phases in our method for creating a tactical marketing plan. Design was about looking. Develop is about choosing. The failure modes differ too: most assessments go wrong by forming opinions too early, while most plans go wrong by never explaining their own reasoning.
A platform recommendation without a reason is a preference
Every tool selection in the plan gets three things in writing: why it was included, what it was weighed against, and why the alternatives lost.
This feels like bureaucracy until eighteen months later. Someone new asks why the company uses this platform instead of the one from their last job. If the reasoning is documented, that conversation takes five minutes. If it is not, the decision gets argued all over again, and sometimes reversed for no better reason than familiarity.
The selection criteria matter more than the logos. What we weight:
- Integration with the system of record
- Native campaign attribution
- Reporting output
- Whether the tool introduces a competing database that someone will spend years reconciling
Build the content around a pillar
For considered purchases, one content model has proven itself again and again. Build a single substantial pillar asset per quarter. Make it educational rather than promotional. Make it valuable enough that a buyer will trade contact details and marketing consent to get it.
Around the pillar, everything points back to one landing page. The pillar collects the leads; everything else exists to send readers there.
One substantive educational guide per quarter, valuable enough to be worth a form fill and marketing consent.
Three to five blog articles that answer adjacent questions and route readers to the pillar landing page.
Two to five emails and a steady social cadence carrying every asset more than once.
The word educational is doing real work there. A product brochure behind a form is not a pillar asset, and buyers know the difference instantly. The pillar answers questions the buyer is already researching, in their words, at their stage of the decision. Writing to the stage is its own discipline, covered in the Strategic Copywriting Guide.
Start narrower than feels comfortable
Cross your audiences against the stages of the buying decision and you get a matrix with twenty or thirty cells. Every one of them is a place you could begin.
of a matrix that can hold thirty cells is what the first quarter targets: one audience, two or three adjacent stages. The plan builds the first quarter for them alone.
In one engagement, the matrix covered six audiences, each across as many as six lifecycle stages. The first quarter targeted exactly one slice: prospective members who did not yet hold the product, in the three earliest stages of awareness. That meant one pillar guide written for that reader, three supporting articles, and the email and social cadence to carry them. Everything else waited its turn.
Breadth is the enemy of a first campaign. The matrix exists so you can expand deliberately, quarter by quarter, not so you can address everyone at once.
Put it on a calendar
A plan without dates is a wish.
— The rule the Develop phase ends onThe Develop phase ends with a 13-week calendar: which asset publishes when, which email sends on which day, who owns each item. Ours puts emails on the days engagement data says people actually open. It leaves one weekday deliberately quiet. It reserves week 13 for review and next-quarter planning.
The third phase turns this plan into something a team can build without guessing: specifications, data feeds, and reports. That is the Deliver phase, next in this series. The full method and the gated eight-section template are at How to Create a Tactical Marketing Plan.
Put the method on paper: the Tactical Marketing Workbook.
The full methodology converted into working sessions - eight phases of fill-in worksheets, exit checklists, and one-week action steps. Print it, work one vertical at a time, and turn the framework into decisions your team has actually made.
Philip Easley-Bosley is the founder of Tactical Marketing and a thirty-year expert marketing consultant. His path to founding the firm ran through sales and marketing leadership, years inside Act-On Software consulting with thousands of clients as Lead Marketing Automation Strategist, and a consistent priority on training and team building that a linear career could not have produced. He sets strategy, owns the architectural calls on every engagement, and writes about marketing operations, automation, and the discipline of building systems that hold up on Monday morning.
This piece was produced with AI assistance, and we'd rather tell you than have you wonder. Phil set the argument, made the judgment calls, and owns every word under his byline; AI helped structure the draft and tighten the prose. It's the same human-plus-AI workflow we build for clients.