Why Do Marketing Plans Fail?

Marketing plans often fail because they’re built solely on tactics that were chosen before your brand positioning was in place.

Your plan may include social media, SEO, email, advertising, and content marketing, but if you’re unclear about whom you want to reach, what you want your brand to be known for, and why someone should choose it, then those activities can easily become disconnected.

But if you’ve got clear brand positioning, it gives your marketing plan direction, as it helps shape your message, guides which channels you should focus on, and creates consistency across all of your marketing efforts.

Key Takeaways:

• Marketing plans are more likely to struggle when tactics are chosen before positioning is clear.
• Weak positioning can make your content, websites, SEO, advertising, and social media less effective.
• Changing tactics repeatedly probably won’t solve the problem if your brand positioning remains unclear.
• A stronger marketing plan starts with positioning, then builds the message and marketing activities around it.
• Brand positioning helps define whom it is you want to reach and what you want your business to be known for.

There’s something satisfying about finally putting a marketing plan together and feeling like you know exactly what needs to happen next.

Among other things, you’ve decided which social media platforms to focus on, chosen what you’re going to be writing about on your blog, and looked at whether you should invest in some advertising.

You may have even created a detailed calendar, so you know exactly what needs to happen and when.

And on paper, it probably looks pretty organized.

But a few months later, you start asking the same questions you asked before you started the planning process. At this point, you might be wondering:

• Why am I not getting better leads?
• Why does my content feel so repetitive?
• Why am I spending so much on marketing without seeing a return?

When that happens, it’s easy to assume that your plan needs more tactics, or that the tactics you’ve chosen aren’t the right ones.

But one of the biggest reasons why marketing plans fail is that you haven’t spent the time that’s required to define your brand first.

And this can doom your marketing plan to failure before you even begin because you’re trying to plan your marketing without being clear on what that marketing is supposed to reinforce.

Why Marketing Plans Fail Even When They Look Well Organized

A marketing plan can include your goals, channels, budgets, schedules, and campaigns and still lack the strategic direction that’s needed to make all those pieces work together.

And that’s because a plan tells you what you’re going to do.

But before you can make those decisions well, you need clarity around what you want your business to be known for and why the people you want to reach should care.

You need to understand whom you most want to work with, what matters to them, what they’re trying to solve, and what makes your business a strong choice for them.

You also need to know what you want people to remember about you after they’ve seen your website, read a post, opened an email, or had a conversation with you.

Those are all positioning decisions. And they affect almost every marketing decision that follows.

If those decisions are unclear, it becomes much harder to know whether your marketing activities are actually moving your business in the right direction.

And that’s when marketing starts becoming a collection of tasks instead of a coordinated strategy.

The Problem Usually Starts Before the Marketing Plan Does

Most business owners are not consciously skipping their brand positioning.

Typically, they just don’t realize how much it affects their marketing in the first place.

I see this often with established service-based businesses. The owner knows their industry, they know their services, and they have clients and years of experience behind them.

So, when it’s time to create a marketing plan, it feels reasonable to move straight into questions like, “Should we focus more on LinkedIn this year?” or “Do we need to do more SEO?”

Those are valid questions. But they’re just not the first questions you should be asking.

To be fair, part of the confusion comes from how marketing is usually presented to business owners.

There’s always another tactic being recommended, and when you’re exposed to all of that, it’s easy to start treating marketing like a menu.

You choose a few things that sound promising, put them on a calendar, and call it a plan.

But the missing piece is deciding whether those choices actually support the position you want your business to hold in the mind of your ideal client.

What Happens When Positioning Is Missing From the Plan

Weak brand positioning tends to show up across marketing in ways that can look like separate problems.

Content is a good example.

You may have a content calendar filled for the next three months but still struggle every week with what to say.

Topics start getting chosen because they’re timely, easy to write about, or popular in your industry, rather than because they reinforce what you want to be known for.

Social media, on the other hand, offers another example of this sort of thing.

You may be posting consistently, but the posts don’t build a strong enough pattern in the reader’s mind.

As a result, someone may see your content regularly, but still be unclear about why it’s relevant to them.

The same thing happens on websites.

Your website can explain your services accurately and look professional, while still failing to communicate a strong reason to choose your business over another credible option.

And this is where business owners can end up spending more time and money while becoming increasingly frustrated with their marketing.

Each tactic gets blamed separately, even though the same weak brand positioning is following your marketing from one channel to the next.

Why Business Owners Often Change the Wrong Thing

When something isn’t working, we naturally look at what we can see.

If your social media engagement is low, you change the content.

If your website isn’t converting, you rewrite your home page.

And if email results are disappointing, you try changing the subject lines and preview text.

Sometimes those changes absolutely need to happen.

But if your brand positioning is unclear, you can keep adjusting the visible pieces without ever addressing the reasons why those pieces are underperforming.

I’ve seen businesses go through multiple website redesigns and still feel dissatisfied with the result because the real issue was never the design.

The business itself had changed, its services had evolved, the owner had more experience, or the kinds of clients they wanted to attract had changed.

But nobody had stopped to clarify how the business should now be positioned before redesigning the website around it.

The same thing happens with marketing plans.

A disappointing result can trigger another round of tactical changes when the more useful question would be, “Are we clear enough about what all of this marketing is supposed to communicate?”

Start Your Marketing Plan With Positioning Decisions

Before choosing channels, setting up a posting schedule, or planning campaigns, you should spend some time developing the brand positioning that will guide everything.

Start by getting clear on whom you most want your marketing to reach.

But that doesn’t mean creating a vague customer profile based only on age, income, or location.

You need to understand what that person is dealing with, what they value, what affects their buying decisions, and what they need to believe before they will feel confident choosing you.

Then look at what you want your business to become known for, and ask yourself:

• What problem do I solve particularly well?
• What perspective, approach, or experience shapes the way I solve it?
• What makes my work relevant to the clients whom I most want to attract?

From there, you can determine what message your marketing needs to reinforce.

Because while your website, content, email marketing, and social presence don’t need to say the same thing in the same words, they do need to support the same overall understanding of your business.

Once all those decisions are made clear, planning your marketing becomes much more practical.

And that’s because you have a filter for deciding which ideas belong in your marketing plan and which ones are simply distractions.

A Better Question to Ask Before You Finalize Your Marketing Plan

The next time you sit down to plan your marketing, you should resist the urge to start with tactics.

Before asking, “What should I do this year?” you should try asking a more useful question:

“Am I clear enough on how I want my business to be positioned so I can make good marketing decisions?”

All things considered, you don’t need every detail of your business figured out before you can start marketing it.

But what you do need is enough clarity to make deliberate choices.

Otherwise, even a detailed marketing plan can send you in several directions at once.

When your positioning is clear, though, your marketing plan has something solid to build on. Your message becomes easier to maintain, your channels have a clearer purpose, and your content has a stronger direction.

And most importantly, the time, energy, and money you put into your marketing finally have a better chance to do the job you intended them to do.

Not sure if your marketing plan has a strong enough foundation?

Book a free consultation and let’s look at whether your positioning, messaging, and marketing strategy are working together the way they should.

To your business success,
Susan Friesen

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About the Author, Susan Friesen

Located in the lower mainland of B.C., Susan Friesen is a visionary brand strategist, entrepreneur, and founder of British Columbia’s premiere boutique web development and digital marketing agency, eVision Media.

With over 20 years of experience in the industry, she is an expert in helping businesses establish their online presence and create a strong brand identity.

Her passion for empowering entrepreneurs and small business owners to succeed in the digital world has earned her a reputation as a leading authority in the branding and marketing industry.

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