Marketing plans don’t usually fail because of algorithms, platforms or budgets.
They also don’t suddenly fall apart halfway through the year. More often than not, they’re broken from the very beginning.
If the results never quite match the effort, the problem usually isn’t execution. It’s planning without a clear understanding of the business, which turns marketing into guesswork.
In this episode of sessions, Aaron breaks down why most marketing plans fail on day one, and shares the simple framework we use to plan growth properly, starting with the business first, not the channels.
Marketing doesn’t exist on its own
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is treating marketing as if it is the business. It isn’t. Marketing serves the business. And if you don’t properly understand the business, marketing quickly turns into guesswork.
Before we talk about ads, email, content, or channels, we always start in the same place. The foundations.
The three questions every plan must answer
Before you write a single line of a marketing plan, you should be able to clearly answer three questions:
- One about the past
- One about the present
- One about the plan
We call them the three P’s: past, present, plan.
If you can’t answer these honestly, your marketing plan will lie to you.
The past isn’t there to admire
The past isn’t something to celebrate or gloss over. It’s there to warn you. You need to know where your revenue actually came from. Which channels worked. Which didn’t. What was seasonal. Where you were over-reliant.
This is where patterns live. And patterns don’t lie.
If last year’s growth came from one channel, one campaign, or one spike, that isn’t a strategy. It’s a risk. Then past tells you what not to blindly repeat.
The present is your reality check
This is the bit most businesses rush through or sugarcoat.
The present is your reality today. Your current revenue mix, your channel reliance, your team capacity. This matters because marketing can only scale as fast as your business can deliver.
There’s no point planning aggressive growth if your systems, team, or supply chain can’t support it. Ignore the present and your plan will break the moment it’s tested.
Only then does planning make sense
Once you understand the past and accept the present, planning becomes much easier.
This is where tactics finally belong. Budgets, channels, timelines and expectations. But here’s the key thing, a plan isn’t a document. A plan is a set of decisions.
Every good plan should clearly answer three things:
- What are you doubling down on?
- What are you stopping?
- What are you testing?
If your plan doesn’t force decisions, it isn’t a plan. It’s a wishlist.
Where most brands go wrong
We see the same mistakes again and again. Businesses plan growth without understanding constraints. They copy competitors without context. They let agencies plan in isolation from the business. They jump straight into ads.
Most brands don’t have a marketing problem. They have a planning problem. And no amount of ad spend will fix a plan that was wrong from the start.
Business before marketing, always
Get the past wrong, and the plan will lie to you. Ignore the present and the plan will break. Get those two right and marketing becomes much simpler.
That’s the framework. That’s how we plan growth. And that’s why it works.
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