Build your 2027 marketing plan around customer decisions

Start with the decision you need customers to make

A planning meeting can quickly become a contest between channels. Search wants more articles. Social wants more video. Sales wants better leads. Start one level earlier: who are you helping, what are they trying to decide, and what makes your offer a credible choice?

For a fictional home-services company, the goal might be more completed estimates for a specific service in a defined area. The customer needs to understand the work, likely cost factors, qualifications, availability and what happens after requesting a quote. Those questions give marketing a job that is more useful than increasing sessions.

Build a baseline that includes the buying journey

Review the last 90 days of qualified enquiries, booked conversations, completed sales, revenue and delivery capacity. Add website visits, channel costs and the questions prospects asked. Record missing data explicitly. A blank field should never become a fabricated zero.

Ask recent customers where they first heard about you and what helped them decide. Their answers may include a colleague, an AI response, a review, a video and a later search. Keep those influences separate from the tracked source of the final visit. A direct visit does not prove that earlier marketing had no effect.

1. Name the business outcome and its owner.
2. Record the baseline, time window and source for every number.
3. List five recurring buyer questions from actual conversations.
4. Match each question to the proof and next action your customer needs.

Choose three investments you can actually deliver

Pick one improvement to discovery, one to the buying experience and one to follow-up. For example: answer a recurring pricing question, clarify the estimate request page, and make the first reply useful. A small team can execute this connected set and learn from it.

Use a budget that includes people, production, software, agency fees and media. An illustrative $3,000 monthly envelope could allocate $1,250 to focused discovery work, $750 to distribution, $500 to creative help and $500 to testing. This is arithmetic for discussion, not a recommended media budget or a forecast. Your margins and capacity must support the actual allocation.

Write a 30 / 60 / 90-day decision plan

Days 1–30: fix measurement gaps, interview customers and ship one useful page improvement. Days 31–60: distribute the asset through a channel customers already use and improve the follow-up. Days 61–90: review qualified demand, customer feedback and cost. Keep, revise or stop the investment based on the evidence.

Decide the review rules before launch. A small sample may justify another month of observation rather than a budget increase. Keep a dated change log so seasonality, promotions, pricing changes and sales capacity do not disappear from the explanation. Plan 2027 as four opportunities to learn, with the first quarter specified in enough detail to start.

Try it with your business

1. Write: “By [date], we want [outcome] for [audience], from a baseline of [number/source].”
2. Choose three actions; give each an owner, spend cap and success signal.
3. List what would make you stop or change each action.
4. Book the first monthly review and bring the same scorecard each time.

Use the planning worksheet and save it as a PDF →

Use AI to help organize the work

Provide only material you are allowed to use. This prompt helps structure your evidence; it does not give the tool access to your analytics or verify facts on its own.

Using only the business evidence below, draft a 90-day marketing plan for one audience. Separate observed facts from assumptions. Propose three priorities with owner, cost categories, dependency, metric and stop/change rule. Do not invent traffic, competitors, revenue or forecasts. Identify what we must verify first.

Measure: Qualified opportunities and acquired customers, reviewed alongside total marketing cost and delivery capacity.