The Five-Minute Marketing Plan

It’s new financial year planning season. Which means marketing teams everywhere have spent six weeks building decks they’ll never use again.

You know the one. 50-100 slides. A market overview. A SWOT analysis that took two people three days to write. A channel strategy section that somehow spans 18 pages. A budget breakdown that’s precise to the dollar even though everyone knows it’ll change by November. The CEO sits through the presentation, nods, asks two questions, and says “great work.” The deck goes into a shared folder. Nobody opens it again until someone needs to update the title slide for next year.

The plan that actually runs the year lives in someone’s head, a Slack channel, and a spreadsheet that keeps getting passed around and infrequently updated. The fifty-page deck was never the plan. It was the planning performance (take a bow).

This is the alternative. A marketing plan readable in under five minutes, usable by the team doing the work and the leadership who care about the numbers. Not a one-pager for the sake of it, a five-minute test for every element that makes it into the plan. If it takes longer than that to understand, it hasn’t been thought through clearly enough.

The strategy or focus

This goes first. Not because it’s the most detailed section (it’s actually the shortest) but because everything else in the plan should be traceable back to it and let’s face it, the execs won’t get past the first page.

The strategy layer answers three questions: what is the business trying to achieve this year, what is marketing’s job in that, and what does success look like? If you can answer those three questions in plain language, in a paragraph or two, you have a strategy layer. If you can’t, you don’t have a strategy yet, you have a list of activities looking for a purpose.

Write it the way you’d explain it to someone smart who doesn’t work in your business. No jargon, no acronyms, no references to frameworks that need explaining. If you said this to your CFO in a lift and they understood it, it’s clear enough.

The strategy layer is what leadership reads to understand the whole plan. It’s also what the team reads when they’re a few months in and a new request lands on their desk and they need to decide whether it fits. A good strategy layer answers that question without a meeting. “Does this serve what we’re trying to do this year?” If yes, consider it. If not, deprioritise it.

One thing the strategy layer is not: a vision statement. “To be the most customer-centric brand in our category” is not a strategy. “We’re growing the customer base by 20% this year, and marketing’s job is to drive awareness in the 25-40 segment while reducing cost-per-acquisition by 15%” is a strategy. Specific, measurable, connected to what the business is actually trying to do.

Always-on

Always-on is everything that runs continuously regardless of the campaign calendar. Performance marketing. Organic social. Ongoing agency retainers. Committed media buys and sponsorships. Any partnership that has an active agreement. The tools and platforms that underpin the whole operation.

It goes in the plan because if it’s not documented, it becomes invisible. And invisible spend is spend that gets cut when the CFO asks for a 10% reduction and nobody can articulate what it returns. Always-on should be listed, owned, and tied to at least one metric, not in exhaustive detail, but enough that everyone knows what’s running and why.

The discipline here is reviewing it honestly rather than just copying it from last year’s plan. Most always-on lists accumulate over time so this is a great time to review those things. You may have a sponsorship that made sense two years ago that continues because ending it feels awkward or a performance channel that hasn’t been optimised in months that keeps drawing budget because it’s in the plan. The always-on review is where you ask: if we were starting from scratch today, would we choose this?

The ones that pass that question stay. The ones that don’t go into the stop-doing list.

Always-on also sets the floor for the budget. Before you plan anything new, you know what’s already committed. That number is often higher than people expect, and seeing it clearly is useful before anyone starts arguing about the budget for the big bets.

Big bets

Big bets are the things you’re doing this year that are meaningfully different from last year. Not incremental improvements to existing activity, these are genuine commitments of time, budget, or focus that wouldn’t be in the plan if you were just repeating the previous year.

There should be one to three of them. If you have more than three, you don’t have big bets, you have a wish list. The discipline is choosing, which means having the debate about what doesn’t make it and why.

A big bet might be entering a new channel for the first time. It might be a brand campaign after years of performance-only spend. It might be a content strategy built around owned media rather than paid reach. It might be a partnership or collab that changes how you reach your audience. What makes it a big bet is that it requires a meaningful commitment and carries real uncertainty. You’re not certain it will work, but you’ve decided the potential return justifies the investment.

For each big bet, the plan should answer: what are we doing, why this year, what does success look like at the 90-day mark and the 12-month mark, who owns it, and what’s our exit condition if it’s not working? That last one is important. If you don’t decide in advance what “not working” looks like, you’ll always keep running things past their use-by date because nobody wants to be the person who calls it.

What we’re stopping

This is the most important section most marketing plans don’t have.

Every year, teams add things. A new channel. A new content format. A new reporting cadence. A new agency relationship. A new internal review process. Rarely does anything get removed. The result, over time, is a team that’s running a growing list of commitments on a headcount that hasn’t grown with them. Everyone is busy. Nothing is getting the attention it deserves and there’s no capacity for when the CEO throws a spanner in the works in October.

It takes more courage to stop something than to start something. Starting something looks like initiative. Stopping something looks like giving up, even when it’s actually clarity.

The stop-doing list is the explicit decision to end things. Not to pause them, not to “deprioritise” them (which usually means they stay alive at low energy indefinitely), but to stop. This channel is no longer active. This content format is cancelled. This retainer is not being renewed. This internal process is eliminated.

It takes more courage to stop something than to start something. Starting something looks like initiative. Stopping something looks like giving up, even when it’s actually clarity. This is why most plans don’t have a stop list. It’s uncomfortable to write, because every item on it represents a previous decision that didn’t work out or has run its course.

The stop list is what creates the capacity for the big bets. If you’re not stopping anything, you’re asking your team to add the big bets on top of everything they’re already doing. That’s not strategy, that’s optimism about capacity that the team will pay for in a few months.

When you present the plan, present the stop list with the same weight as the big bets. “Here’s what we’re starting, and here’s what we’re ending.” Both deserve a decision and a rationale.

Ownership

Every item in the plan (every always-on channel, every big bet, every item on the stop list) has one owner. Not a team. Not “marketing.” One person whose name is next to it.

Ownership doesn’t mean that person does everything. It just means they’re accountable for it. They’re the one who raises the flag if it’s off track. They’re the one who comes to the monthly review with a view on what’s working and what isn’t. They’re the one who makes the call if a decision needs to be made mid-year.

Shared ownership is no ownership. When two people are both responsible for something, there’s always a moment where each assumes the other is handling it, and that’s when no one is handling it.

The ownership layer in the plan should be one line per item: the thing, the owner, and the review cadence. That’s it. If the plan has fifteen items without names next to them, review them again and assign or ditch them.

Assigning names also forces a resourcing conversation that most plans avoid. Once every item has an owner, look at the list and ask honestly: do these people have the capacity to deliver this, or are you setting them up to fail? If the same three names appear next to everything, that’s a bad sign. It’s also where you surface what agency support, freelance resource, or additional headcount the plan actually requires. This shouldn’t be presented as a wish list, but as a realistic assessment of what needs to exist for the plan to be executable and a direct ask for that resource. A plan that requires two more people to deliver but doesn’t stipulate that, is a gap waiting to become a problem in Q2.

KPIs

One metric per area of the plan. Not a full dashboard - a metric.

The CFO has one number for the business this year. The sales leader has one number. Marketing should too. The question is which metric, at the overall level, most directly connects marketing’s output to business performance. That’s your headline KPI and it should be in the Strategy piece at the top.

Below that, each always-on channel has one metric that tells you whether it’s doing its job. Each big bet has one metric at the 90-day checkpoint. These do not need to be the same metric. The point of paid media is different from the point of organic social is different from the point of a brand campaign. But there should be one per area, chosen in advance, and it should be something that changes how you act if it moves.

Vanity metrics are easy to improve and hard to connect to anything that matters. Impressions can go up while revenue goes down. Followers can grow while your conversion rate falls. The test for a KPI is whether you’d make a different decision if the number went the wrong way.

Agree on the KPIs before the year starts. Write them into the plan. When the monthly review happens, these are the numbers that you report on, not a custom selection chosen to look good that month.

The five-minute test

Put the plan in front of someone who wasn’t in the room when you built it (a peer, a new team member, someone from another part of the business). Give them five minutes. Then ask them: what is marketing trying to achieve this year, what are we betting on, what have we stopped, and who’s running it?

If they can answer those questions, the plan is working. If they can’t, it needs another pass.

The fifty-page deck still exists. Keep it. Some of the thinking in there is useful when you’re briefing an agency, onboarding someone new, or explaining a channel decision to a stakeholder who wants the detail. But it’s reference material, not a plan.

The plan is the thing the team looks at every month and says: are we doing what we said we’d do, and is it working? That needs to fit in five minutes. If it doesn’t, it’s already becoming the thing it was supposed to replace.

Go old school, print it out, stick it on the wall, or bring it to every team meeting. If you, as the leader, don’t believe it to be the marketing bible, then rip it up, and start again.

One thing to do before the FY starts

Before you finalise the plan, add the stop list. Whatever you’ve built (however long the document is) go back through it and ask: what are we doing right now that isn’t in this plan? Write those things down. Make an explicit decision about each one. Either it earns its way into the always-on or big bets sections, or it goes on the stop list.

If you can’t answer that question in the first week of the financial year, you’re carrying things you haven’t decided about. That’s not a budget problem or a resource problem. It’s a clarity problem. And the plan is the tool for fixing it and the time to fix it is NOW!

Good luck and Godspeed.