Why Your 2027 Marketing Plan Should Start With Strategy

Why We Decide the Marketing Tactics Last

It’s easy to build a marketing plan around tactics.

We need social media. We should run some ads. The website could use an update. Maybe this is the year to finally produce that video.

Those may all be good ideas. But there is a more important question to answer first: What does the business need marketing to accomplish?

Before building a 2027 marketing plan, businesses should first define their priorities, growth goals, changing market conditions and what marketing actually needs to accomplish. Starting there keeps planning focused on business needs instead of jumping immediately to tactics.

At Kinetic, that question is at the center of our strategic marketing planning process.

For many of our long-term clients, planning for the year ahead isn’t something squeezed into a December status call or reduced to a list of projects they would like us to estimate. It’s an intentional process that brings business priorities, marketing performance, audience insights, industry changes and new opportunities together before we start determining which tactics make sense.

The strategy comes first.

Five Questions That Should Shape Your 2027 Marketing Plan

A strong annual marketing strategy starts with a few simple but important questions.

How is the business going and what are the priorities for 2027?
Growth goals, revenue priorities, new markets, service lines, recruitment needs and operational challenges can all influence what marketing needs to support.

What has changed since last year?
Customers, competitors, technology, media habits and market conditions continue to evolve. Annual marketing planning creates a natural opportunity to step back and evaluate what is different.

What is working and what is not?
Campaign performance, website analytics, lead generation, sales feedback and customer insights can help identify what is worth continuing, what needs improvement and where new opportunities may exist.

What does marketing need to accomplish?
Depending on the organization, marketing may need to build awareness, generate leads, support sales, recruit employees, improve retention, introduce a new service, enter a new market or change how customers perceive the brand.

What will it take to get there?
Once priorities and marketing goals are clear, the conversation can shift to budget, resources, timing, channels and the people needed to execute the work.

Those questions provide the foundation. The marketing planning process comes next.

Annual Marketing Planning Starts Before the Meeting

A productive annual planning session starts well before everyone sits down at the table.

Our team reviews what happened during the previous year: campaign performance, website and search data, completed projects, ongoing initiatives and lessons learned. Different departments contribute insights from their specialties, from paid media and SEO to PR, content, creative and technology.

We also look outward.

What’s changing in the client’s industry? How are audiences behaving? What are competitors doing? Are there emerging channels, technologies or market conditions the client should understand?

Just as important, we identify what we still need to learn from the client. Questions are gathered before the annual marketing planning session so the conversation can move beyond project updates and into what is actually happening inside the business.

Then We Get in a Room Together

Whenever possible, annual planning happens face to face.

That may mean a half-day or full-day session at Kinetic or at a client’s office. There’s real value in having leaders, marketers and agency partners sitting across the table from each other, asking follow-up questions, whiteboarding ideas and giving conversations enough room to go somewhere unexpected.

An agenda keeps the session productive, but it shouldn’t predetermine the answers.

For Interstate Companies, for example, planning conversations covered business projections, brand awareness, sales processes, recruiting, websites, industry events and other organizational priorities. Their annual planning agenda was built around questions such as what was changing within the business, where growth might come from and what could help increase sales.

One of the most valuable outcomes was not simply another advertising campaign. Discussions around Interstate’s sales process uncovered a larger opportunity to better connect marketing, sales and technology.

That’s exactly why the plan should not be finished before the planning meeting starts.

Strategic Marketing Planning Gives Every Tactic a Job

Annual planning also looks different because every organization is different.

For Recreational Adventures Co., Kinetic developed a user journey that maps how a target audience segment moves from the initial desire for a getaway through inspiration, destination selection, booking, the on-property experience and rebooking. The exercise also identifies where marketing has the greatest influence and which KPIs are most movable.

That framework then gives individual tactics a job to do. A billboard, email, Google Business Profile update, paid social campaign or piece of video content is not simply an isolated deliverable. It can be connected to a particular point in the customer journey and a specific business opportunity. RAC’s 2027 plan applies that thinking across traditional marketing, brand work, digital campaigns, email, PR and video.

For Performance Engineering, the starting point was different. Marketing recommendations were aligned directly with the company’s five-year strategic plan, including priorities around client relationships, expansion into new markets, visibility and talent growth.

With Sheridan Memorial Hospital, the strategy begins with business outcomes such as improving the contribution of priority service lines. From there, the plan identifies strategic levers and determines how digital and traditional channels should work together.

Different businesses. Different constraints. Different plans.

That is the point.

Sometimes the Best Recommendation Is More Research

Strategic planning does not always result in an immediate campaign.

Sometimes it reveals that there is an important question the organization needs to answer first.

Which market should we enter? What matters most to the customer we are trying to reach? How do buyers perceive us compared with competitors? Why are prospective employees choosing one workplace over another?

Primary research can help answer those questions before significant money is invested in execution. Kinetic uses research to understand audiences, markets and user experiences and then applies those findings to messaging and marketing decisions.

Other times, the planning process may point toward public relations, digital marketing, brand development, content strategy or another capability entirely. The important part is that the need drives the tactic, not the other way around.

A Plan Should Create Focus, Not Just More Marketing

One of the biggest benefits of annual strategic planning is that it creates a reason to say both yes and no.

Not every organization needs every marketing service. Not every new platform deserves investment. And the campaign that made sense last year may not be the right priority this year.

A thoughtful planning process provides a framework for making those decisions. It helps connect budgets to priorities. It clarifies what different tactics are supposed to accomplish. It gives internal teams and agency partners a common direction. 

Planning for next year should not be an afterthought.

When marketing is informed by business priorities, performance data, research and meaningful conversation, the question stops being, “What marketing should we do next year?”

It becomes, “Where does the business need to go next, and what role should marketing play in getting it there?”

That is a much better place to start.