The Marketing Plan That Died in a Doc Somewhere
Somewhere in your shared drive, there's probably…maybe.. a marketing plan. Perhaps it came out of a board retreat, a strategic planning process, or a burst of new-year ambition. It has goals, target audiences, even a content calendar. And at some point, maybe a few months after it was finished, it quietly stopped being opened.
The real issue usually has less to do with discipline and more to do with its design. Most marketing plans are built as documents, not as implemented systems. They may tell you what to do, but they don't always tell you who's doing it next Tuesday when three other priorities are also on fire. Without an owner, a strategy is just a really well-organized list of good intentions.
The gap almost always shows up at the handoff. A consultant or committee builds the plan, presents it, everyone nods, and then it lands on the desk of someone who is already at capacity. (I’ve been there!) Without a person or partner responsible for keeping the plan alive week to week, prioritizing what's next, adjusting when it doesn't fit reality, the most polished strategy will lose to whatever email is currently pressing.
This is exactly why we think about marketing and communications support as an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time deliverable. A plan is like a blueprint; the execution is a practice. The organizations that actually see traction aren't the ones with the fanciest strategy document, they're the ones with someone consistently asking, "did we do the thing we said we'd do this month?" and adjusting course when the answer is no.
If there's a plan sitting in your shared drive that hasn't been opened in a while, take it as a sign you got the strategy right and the structure wrong, not as a failure. Let's talk about what it would take to actually run it!
