How to Build a Marketing Action Plan You Can Actually Execute

Your marketing plan says you need to increase visibility. Great. What exactly are you supposed to do when you sit down at your desk tomorrow morning?

Maybe you need to be more active on social media. Does that mean posting something? Commenting on other people's posts? Reaching out to potential clients? And if you're going to post something, what are you going to say?

Before you know it, you've spent half your marketing time trying to decide what your marketing time was supposed to be used for.

I work with entrepreneurs who are smart, experienced, and perfectly capable of running their businesses. They tell me they know what they're supposed to be doing, but they're having trouble following through. Then we start looking at what they're actually supposed to do that week, and things sometimes get pretty interesting.

Their strategy might be perfectly reasonable. The problem is that somewhere between deciding on that strategy and sitting down to execute it, an important piece got skipped.

They never finished the plan.

A usable marketing action plan takes the strategy you've chosen and turns it into specific tasks with a clear starting point, a realistic place on your calendar, and a way to know when you've finished. Without those pieces, you may still have several decisions to make before you can take the first action.

Before we decide someone is procrastinating, inconsistent, or needs more accountability, I want to know whether the work has actually been defined well enough to do it. Because if you're still making half a dozen decisions every time you sit down to start something, we have a much simpler problem to solve first.

Key Points

• A marketing strategy gives your business direction. A marketing action plan tells you what you're actually going to do.
• Start with the business result you want, then identify specific actions that support your chosen strategy.
• Give those actions realistic places on your calendar and decide what completion looks like before you start.
• Completing your planned activities and getting the business results you want are two different measurements.
• Once the plan is workable, what happens when you attempt it helps you determine whether the problem is Strategy, Clarity, Alignment, or something that needs further investigation.

Knowing Where You're Going Isn't the Same as Knowing How to Get There

Imagine I give you directions to my house and tell you to head north. That's useful information. You definitely need to know which direction you're going, but it's not particularly helpful when you're sitting in your driveway trying to figure out which road to take.

Business strategies work the same way.

You can decide that networking is how you're going to find new clients, that blogging is how you're going to improve your visibility, or that you need to build a stronger referral network. All of those can be reasonable strategies, depending on your business. But none of them tells you what you should be doing at 9:00 on Tuesday morning.

This is where I see people confuse having a strategy with having a plan. They write things on their to-do lists like "launch my course," "update my website," or "improve my marketing," and then wonder why they're having trouble getting those things done. Those aren't single actions. They're collections of decisions, tasks, and sometimes entire projects.

That distinction matters because you can't accurately evaluate your follow-through when the work hasn't been defined well enough to execute. You might genuinely need to address an execution problem, but you might also be spending your work sessions doing planning that should have happened beforehand.

I've written more about the importance of separating those issues in Strategy vs. Execution: How to Tell What's Actually Wrong With Your Marketing.

For now, let's assume you've selected a reasonable strategy. The question is how to turn it into something you can actually do.

What a Finished Marketing Plan Needs

Result What you're trying to accomplish

Actions What you're actually going to do

Schedule When the work will happen

Done How you'll recognize completion

Start With the Business Result, Not the Activity

Let's say you're a business coach, and your goal is to sign two new clients over the next 60 days. You've looked at your options and decided that building referral relationships is going to be your primary marketing strategy.

So far, so good. We have a business objective and an approach for pursuing it.

But if your entire marketing plan says "network more," that's not a plan. That's something you can write on a sticky note and feel guilty about for the next three months.

We need to get more specific about the people you actually want to meet and where you're going to find them. Are you looking for other coaches, consultants, or service providers whose clients could also benefit from your work? Are you going to attend local networking events, join a business group, ask existing contacts for introductions, or reconnect with people you already know?

Any of those might be worth considering, but each requires a different set of actions. You need to choose what you're actually going to do instead of leaving all those possibilities open until it's time to work.

For this example, let's say you decide to begin with your existing LinkedIn connections. You're going to identify people who serve a similar audience and could become relevant referral partners.

Now we have a defined starting point. We're not trying to "do networking" in every possible way. We're working with a particular group of people, through a particular channel, for a particular business purpose.

We haven't completed the plan yet, but we're getting somewhere.

Turn Your Strategy Into Actions You Can Actually Finish

The next question is what you're going to do with those LinkedIn connections.

"Reach out to people on LinkedIn" sounds like a task until you sit down and realize you haven't decided who, how many, what you'll say, or why you're contacting them.

Compare that with: Review my existing LinkedIn connections and identify five people whose businesses serve an audience similar to mine.

That's something you can start and finish. You know where to go, what you're looking for, and what you're supposed to have accomplished when you stop working.

Your next action might be sending those five people personalized invitations to have a conversation. After that, you'll review the responses, follow up where appropriate, and schedule conversations with the people who are interested.

Notice what we haven't done. We haven't changed the networking strategy or added another marketing channel. We haven't decided you also need to be doing Facebook, YouTube, and three other things just in case. And we certainly haven't built a fourteen-step system complete with a color-coded dashboard.

We've taken the strategy we already chose and identified the actions necessary to carry it out.

There's a difference between detailed planning and complicated planning. Sometimes a perfectly good marketing action plan only needs three or four steps. Adding more doesn't automatically make it better. What matters is whether you can sit down and begin the next action without having to figure out what the action is supposed to be.

In my coaching work, this is one of the first things I check when someone says they have plenty of time but still aren't following through. I want to see the actual tasks, not just the goals they've written down. Sometimes that changes the conversation considerably.

Watch: Your Marketing Plan Isn't Finished

In this video, I walk through the four parts of building an executable marketing plan.

Give the Work a Realistic Place on Your Calendar

Even when the actions are clear, there's another place where a reasonable plan can fall apart. You know what you're going to do, but you haven't decided when you're going to do it.

Your plan is to get to your networking sometime this week, probably when you have a moment.

I've got some bad news about that. For most entrepreneurs, "when I get a moment" is a scheduling strategy with a remarkably poor success rate.

Clients need things. Meetings run long. Your inbox fills up. Something breaks, somebody gets sick, or a project takes longer than expected. Suddenly it's Friday afternoon, and the networking you intended to do hasn't happened. That doesn't automatically mean you've been avoiding it. It might mean you never made room for it.

I worked with a client who had 20 hours each week specifically set aside for her business. She was using those hours, too. Emails got answered, research got done, and files got organized. But her networking wasn't happening, her blogs weren't getting finished, and the work most likely to grow her business kept getting pushed into the following week.

From the outside, it would have been easy to call that procrastination. But the fact that she had time available didn't tell us whether she had clear instructions for using it. That's an important distinction. A calendar can reserve time for an action, but it can't tell you what that action is supposed to be.

For our LinkedIn example, we could put three short work sessions on the calendar:

Example: Weekly LinkedIn Networking Plan

Scheduled Time	Planned Action
Monday, 9:00 AM 20 minutes	Review LinkedIn connections and identify five potential referral partners.
Tuesday, 9:30 AM 20 minutes	Send five personalized invitations.
Friday, 1:00 PM 20 minutes	Review responses, follow up, and schedule conversations where appropriate.

Now the work has a place to happen. More importantly, when Monday morning comes around, you don't have to decide what you meant by networking. You can open LinkedIn, review your connections, and start identifying people.

Of course, those particular times may not work for you. The schedule needs to fit the business you're actually running. If Monday mornings are consistently consumed by client issues, scheduling networking at that time and repeatedly missing it isn't evidence that you need to become more disciplined. It's evidence that Monday morning may be a lousy choice.

I also want you to be realistic about how much work you're assigning yourself. If you have four hours available for marketing and your plan requires fifteen, you've created a scheduling nightmare and a guilt factory. There's nothing mysterious to diagnose there. You need to adjust the workload or change how you're executing the strategy.

A workable plan takes your actual schedule, responsibilities, and way of working into account. The goal isn't to build an impressive calendar. It's to create one you can use.

Decide What Done Looks Like Before You Start

This may be the most overlooked part of building an actionable marketing plan.

If your to-do list says "work on marketing," when are you finished?

Technically, you could spend three hours researching hashtags, tweaking your social media bio, reading articles, and watching tutorials. You've certainly been busy, but have you completed anything you intended to complete?

And really, you're never going to finish "working on marketing" as long as you have a business.

The solution is to define what done means for the specific action, not the entire marketing strategy.

For our LinkedIn example, Monday's work is complete when you've identified and saved five potential referral partners. Tuesday's work is complete when you've sent five invitations. Friday's work is complete when you've checked for responses, followed up appropriately, and provided scheduling information to anyone who wants to talk.

You can look at those actions and determine whether you did what you planned to do. But there's another distinction I want you to understand, because it can completely change how you evaluate your marketing.

Completing an action and getting the business result you wanted are not the same measurement.

You can control whether you identify five people. You can control whether you send the invitations and follow up. You cannot control whether someone responds, agrees to a meeting, sends you a referral, or eventually becomes a client.

That doesn't mean the business results aren't important. The entire reason we're doing this is to generate business, and eventually we need to know whether the strategy is contributing to that goal. But if you define a completed networking task as "get someone to agree to a conversation," you can execute your plan exactly as intended and still decide you failed because the other person didn't respond.

Instead, we need to pay attention to both sides of the equation. Did you complete the actions you committed to? And what results did those actions produce?

Let's say you sent all five invitations but nobody responded. You completed the action. The result tells you something about the response to those invitations, although five attempts alone may not be enough to judge the entire strategy.

Now imagine you never sent the invitations at all. That tells us almost nothing about whether LinkedIn networking works for your business. We haven't tested it yet.

When you separate those measurements, you can finally tell whether the work isn't happening or whether the work is happening but isn't producing the results you expected. Those are different problems, and they require different solutions.

What You Can Learn Once the Plan Is Complete

Think about where our networking example started. The original plan was simply, "I need to network to get more clients." Or one of my personal favorites, "Jennie said I have to network." There wasn't anything necessarily wrong with the strategy, but there also wasn't enough information to do much with it. Now we have a business objective, a defined audience, a specific approach to building referral relationships, and actions that have been given time on the calendar. We also know what completing those actions looks like.

Does that mean our business coach will sign two new clients in the next 60 days? Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know, and neither does anyone else until we actually test the approach. The important difference is that we'll have something useful to evaluate. If the invitations go out but nobody responds, we can examine who we're approaching and how we're starting those conversations. We wouldn't necessarily abandon the entire strategy after five invitations, but we would have some initial information to work with.

What happens when the invitations never get sent tells us something different. Maybe the time allocated for networking wasn't realistic, or the person is still unsure who belongs on the list. Those are practical issues we can address without assuming the networking strategy is wrong. But suppose we've worked through those questions, the actions are clear, the schedule is reasonable, and the person still repeatedly stops at the moment they're supposed to make contact. Now there's a specific pattern worth investigating rather than a general complaint about not being consistent.

In my work as the Execution Block Specialist, I use the term execution block to describe anything that repeatedly prevents intended action from becoming consistent execution. That doesn't automatically mean an Underlying Block is responsible. My SCAN approach helps me distinguish whether the problem is with Strategy, Clarity, Alignment, or what happens when the person actually attempts the work. If the practical issues have been addressed and the same specific interruption continues, we can investigate that possibility without confusing it with a plan that was never executable in the first place.

This is why I'm particular about how the work is defined. Without a clear plan, we can spend an enormous amount of time trying to solve the wrong problem. Someone may believe they're procrastinating when they're actually missing a decision, or they may continue changing strategies when the real interruption occurs at the same point every time they try to execute one. Until we can see where things stop, we're mostly working with assumptions.

A Finished Plan Gives You a Place to Start

There's a point where planning has done its job and you need to see what happens when you use what you've created. You don't have to account for every possible interruption or know exactly how the next two months will unfold. You do need enough information to begin, complete the next action, and recognize when something isn't working.

That's also why I'm not suggesting that you spend the next three weeks perfecting your marketing action plan. I've written before about how improving the plan can become productive procrastination, and the distinction applies here too. If you're missing important instructions, finish them. But once you know what you're doing, how you're doing it, and what completion looks like, further planning may not tell you nearly as much as actually trying it.

A finished plan won't guarantee that your marketing strategy produces the results you want. It will give you a much better way to find out whether the strategy is worth continuing, whether the work fits your business, and whether something is still preventing you from following through. That's information you can use to make your next decision instead of starting over every time a week doesn't go as expected.

The next time you sit down at your desk to work on marketing, you should already know what you're there to do. You shouldn't have to spend the first half of your work session figuring out what you meant when you put "marketing" on your calendar.

That decision belongs in the plan.

Suggested Reading

Strategy vs. Execution: How to Tell What's Actually Wrong With Your Marketing

How to determine whether your marketing strategy needs to change or whether the real problem is somewhere between the strategy and the work you're trying to do.

Why Do I Procrastinate Even When I Have Time?

A closer look at the real client example of having 20 hours available but still not completing the important business-building work, and how unresolved decisions can explain the difference.

When Improving the Plan Becomes Productive Procrastination

How to tell when revising your plan is necessary business work and when another round of improvements is keeping you from testing it.

Full Video Transcript

Read the complete video transcript

If you have to figure out what to work on every time you sit down at your desk, your strategy might actually be perfectly fine. Your plan just isn't finished. I'm going to show you how to turn a vague business strategy into specific actions you can put on your calendar, complete, and actually measure.

I work with entrepreneurs who are smart, experienced, and perfectly capable of running their business. They know what they're supposed to be doing. At least that's what they tell me. But when we start looking at what they're actually supposed to do that week, things sometimes get pretty interesting. Their plan says they're going to increase visibility.

How? Well, I just need to be more active on social media. Great. What does that mean? Well, I probably need to post more. Well, what are you gonna post? Well, I'll have to figure that out. And there's the problem. There's no actionable plan. They have a direction, and a direction can be quite useful. You need to know where you're going, but head north.

Isn't particularly helpful when you're sitting in your driveway wondering which road to take to get you where you're going. this is where a lot of business owners get stuck. You write things like, launch my course.

Update my website. Improve my marketing. But those things aren't single actions.

Then you walk away frustrated because you didn't accomplish anything. You assume you're procrastinating, inconsistent, need more accountability, and that could be true. But before we make that decision, I want to see your plan. Because if your plan isn't specific enough to execute, we have a much simpler problem to solve.

Step one, let's start with the result that we want, not the activity we're going to do. So let's say you're a business coach and your goal is to sign two new clients over the next 60 days. You've looked at the different possibilities and you decided networking is going to be your primary strategy that you're going to work with. Great.

We have a business objective and a strategy. But right now your plan just says network. That's not a plan. That's something you can write on a sticky note and feel guilty about for the next three months. Instead, I want to get specific. Who do you actually need to meet?

Maybe you want to build relationships with other coaches, consultants, service providers, people whose clients might benefit from your work. Where are you going to find them? Are you going to look through your existing LinkedIn connections? Are you looking in your community? Do you want to attend a particular networking group?

Ask current professional contacts for introductions. These are all different actions and you're going to need to decide which ones you're actually taking.

For our example, let's say you've chosen to start with your existing LinkedIn network. Now we have a defined starting point. We're not talking about networking in general anymore. We're talking about identifying people that you've already had some social connection to who could become relevant referral partners. That can be a good place to start. Step two, let's turn that strategy into observable action.

Here's what a vague version looks like, what we don't want. Reach out to people on LinkedIn. But here's what a usable version looks like. Review my LinkedIn connections, identify five people whose businesses serve a similar audience. That is an action. You know where you're going.

You know what you're looking for, and you know when you're finished. You're done when you identify five people. the next action might be send five personalized invitations to have a conversation. After that, follow up with the people who responded and schedule those conversations. Notice what we didn't do.

We didn't change the strategy. We didn't add another marketing channel. We didn't throw Facebook or YouTube into it. We didn't build an elaborate system with 14 different steps and a color-coded dashboard. We simply turned the strategy into actions that you could actually complete.

Sometimes people confuse detailed planning with complicated planning, and they aren't the same thing. A clear plan could have three steps. It just needs to tell you what to do.

Step three. I want you to decide when and where you're going to do the work. Here's where

Perfectly reasonable plans crumble. We identify what you're doing, but the plan still says I'll get that done sometime this week. When? Well, when I get a moment, when I'm in the office. I've got some bad news about that. For most entrepreneurs, when I get a moment,

is a scheduling strategy with a remarkably poor success rate. Your clients are gonna need things, your inbox is gonna fill up, something's gonna break, a meeting's gonna run long, the family's gonna need you, the kids get sick, suddenly it's Friday afternoon, and the networking you intended to do hasn't happened. So let's give those actions somewhere to live.

Monday morning, 20 minutes 9 a.m. Review LinkedIn connections and identify five potential referral partners. Tuesday, twenty minutes at nine thirty,

Sending five personalized invitations on LinkedIn.

Friday one PM twenty minutes reviewing the LinkedIn responses, following up as appropriate, and scheduling any conversations. Now we have something completely different. We have specific actions and a place to start and a dedicated time allocated for the work. And because we kept the plan realistic,

There's actually a chance you'll fit it into your life. And that's not minor. if you create a plan that requires 15 hours of marketing work, but you have four hours available, you haven't really created a marketing plan. You created a scheduling nightmare and a guilt factory. And you don't need a reset session to fix the scheduling conflict.

Step four, define what done looks like. This is a piece that many people overlook. They all write, work on my marketing, but what does it mean to finish working on marketing? First of all, you will never finish working on marketing as long as you have a business.

You could spend three hours researching hashtags, tweaking your bio, reading industry articles, watching tutorials. You've been busy. But did you actually complete an action that you intended to complete? Maybe you worked on marketing, but probably not. So for every action you need to establish a clear definition of done.

For Monday, done means you have a list of five people. They're written down or saved somewhere. Tuesday, done means you have sent five DMs or emails, depending on how you're reaching out. Friday, done means you went into LinkedIn or your email you looked for responses.

You followed up as appropriate and sent scheduling information to anyone interested in talking. That's it. Notice what we aren't measuring here. You cannot control whether someone responds, whether they agree to the conversation, or whether they ever eventually refer someone to you. You control whether you complete the specific action you planned.

Because when you define completion based on entirely how others respond, you can execute a plan exactly as intended and still walk away feeling like you failed. separate the action you control from the business outcome you're tracking. Both are super important, but they're not the same measurement.

Now let's put all of this together. Let's compare where we were when we started and where we are now. We started with, I need to network to get more clients. Or my favorite, Jennie said I have to network. But here's the finished plan. Our objective is to sign two new clients in the next 60 days.

Our strategy is going to be building referral relationships through LinkedIn.

Each action has a dedicated time, a clear starting point, a very specific definition of done. Will that generate us two clients? Who knows? Business involves testing. I always say that marketing truly is like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. But the better the pasta maker you work with, the quicker it sticks.

And now it gives us a very clear starting point and something we can measure. Maybe we need to adjust who we're approaching.

Is the time you're setting aside realistic? Is there something missing from the plan? Did we skip something important? Are other priorities getting in the way? Or can you just not do it?

No matter how you try to set it up. Because that's when we may need to look at whether there's something deeper. And we can investigate these things because we finally have something to evaluate. The plan tells you what you're going to do when you sit down.

And if your plan still forces you to make a dozen decisions before you're able to do the very first thing, it's not finished. Finish your plan. And if you're still deciding if you have the right marketing strategy in the first place, I want you to go back and watch the video, "Should You Change Your Marketing Strategy or Give It More Time?" I'll link it here at the end.

And if you're trying to identify where your follow-through is breaking down, check out my SCAN videos next. They'll help you figure out what to investigate before you just assume you need another strategy or more discipline. And if you're still stuck, that's what I do. I get you unstuck.