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Posted by:
Highland Group
Posted on:
10/14/2026
Every year, as organizations begin planning their marketing for the year ahead, conversations tend to move quickly toward tactics.
Those are all reasonable questions, but they’re rarely the best place to start. After all, a full marketing calendar doesn’t necessarily mean you have a marketing strategy.
When annual planning begins with tactics, it’s easy for the marketing plan to become a collection of activities rather than a strategy connected to where the organization wants to go. Successful initiatives get carried over, familiar programs return out of habit and new ideas find their way onto the calendar because they’re gaining traction in the industry or catching leadership’s attention.
Before long, the calendar is full and the budget is allocated, but a more important question may still be unanswered: What does the business actually need marketing to accomplish?
A strong 2027 marketing plan starts with understanding where the business is trying to go and how marketing can help move it forward. These six steps can help you look beyond the usual planning exercise and focus your investment where it has the greatest potential to make a difference.
There’s an important difference between setting marketing goals and determining what the business needs marketing to solve. And confusing the two can send even a well-funded marketing plan in the wrong direction.
Say your organization wants to grow a particular service line in 2027. “Generate more leads” might seem like the obvious marketing objective, but what if lead generation isn’t actually the problem?
Prospective customers may not know the service exists, or they may know about it without understanding why it’s different from competing options (positioning challenge). Maybe interest is already there, but the experience isn’t doing enough to turn that interest into serious consideration (conversion challenge).
Each scenario calls for a different marketing strategy. The same thinking applies whether the organization wants to enter a new market, grow enrollment or donor support, reach a different customer or strengthen its position against competitors. There’s no shortage of ways marketing can contribute to growth, but that doesn’t mean every organization needs the same approach.
The business goal tells you where the organization wants to go. Marketing’s job is to understand what needs to change to help make that future possible.
It’s a shift in perspective that can change the entire planning conversation. Instead of starting with what marketing wants to produce, you’re starting with the opportunity it has the potential to unlock.
Marketing teams spend a lot of time defining audiences by industry, role, demographics and other characteristics. Those details matter, of course, but knowing who you’re trying to reach is only half the equation. The more revealing question is what you actually need those people to do.
Some organizations need prospective customers to discover them earlier in their research, while others need existing customers to see more of what they can offer. A school, for example, could need more families to schedule a visit, while a nonprofit may be looking to deepen relationships with occasional donors.
In B2B, the desired behavior may happen much earlier in the buying process, as buyers now do much of their research and comparison before they’re ready to speak with sales. By the time someone fills out a contact form, they may have already made up their mind about which organizations are worth considering.
If growth depends on earning a place on more shortlists, the objective shouldn’t simply be to generate more leads. You need to give the right buyers a reason to put you on that shortlist in the first place. That means understanding what would make them more likely to find you and see enough value to keep you in consideration. And conveying that information in an easy-to-understand format on your website (for both people and AI agents!).
The clearer you are about the behavior you’re trying to influence, the easier it becomes to see what needs to change to create it.
If you know what you want an audience to do but they aren’t doing it, there’s a reason. Finding that reason is some of the most important work in annual marketing planning — and one of the easiest steps to skip when everyone is eager to jump right into building the calendar.
If you’re struggling to grow in a particular market, awareness may be the challenge. The right people simply aren’t encountering your organization often enough.
But perhaps awareness is relatively strong and people still can’t articulate why they’d choose you instead of another credible option. That’s a differentiation challenge, and putting the same message in front of more people probably isn’t going to make it any more convincing.
In other cases, the brand and offering may be compelling, but the digital experience gets in the way once someone tries to learn more. You’ve managed to earn their interest, only to make it harder than necessary for them to take the next step. That’s a conversion challenge.
Organizations with longer decision cycles face a different challenge: staying relevant between moments of active consideration. If you only show up when you have something to promote or ask for, you’re giving audiences very little reason to stay connected in the meantime. And when they’re finally ready to act, there’s no guarantee you’ll be the organization they remember.
Different barriers create different opportunities. Yet they can all lead to the same conclusion during planning season: “We need more marketing.”
But more of the wrong marketing won’t get you any closer to your goals. The barrier should determine the strategy.
Annual marketing plans have a way of inheriting the previous year’s structure. Familiar programs and campaigns carry over, often with just enough adjustment to make the plan feel new even when the strategy behind it hasn’t meaningfully changed.
Continuity isn’t inherently the problem here — effective marketing does depend on consistency, after all. And investments such as brand building, organic search and thought leadership can become more valuable over time.
But what worked before shouldn’t continue by default just because it “worked” before.
So before carrying an investment into another year, ask what job it’s doing for the business now:
Then, consider whether the context around that investment has changed. Shifts in business priorities or audience behavior can change the role a tactic needs to play, meaning something that once earned its place in the strategy may no longer be solving the challenge in front of you.
A tactic can still produce respectable metrics and no longer be the best use of your next marketing dollar. That doesn’t mean every investment needs to demonstrate immediate, attributable ROI. It means every investment should have a clear purpose — and enough potential to earn its place in the plan.
Once you understand what the business is trying to accomplish and what’s standing between your audience and the desired outcome, investment decisions become much more purposeful.
If the right audiences simply aren’t finding you, greater investment in SEO and AEO, thought leadership or targeted campaigns may make sense. You can have the strongest story in your category, but it can’t do much for you if the right people never encounter it. The opportunity is to expand your presence in the places your audiences are already looking and create more paths for them to discover you.
If prospective customers are finding you but struggling to understand why you’re different, more promotion could simply amplify an unclear message — and spending more to say something louder doesn’t necessarily make it more compelling. Positioning and messaging may need to come first to give audiences a stronger reason to see your organization differently and keep it in consideration.
If interest exists but your website makes it difficult for people to evaluate the organization or take the next step, improving that experience may create more value than driving additional traffic to it. After all, getting more people through the door only goes so far if the experience on the other side isn’t working. Website strategy and UX can turn that point of friction into an experience that helps people keep moving.
If you’re losing people during a longer consideration cycle, the opportunity may be to create a stronger reason to stay connected. Not every prospect is ready to act when you want them to be — unfortunately, their timeline gets a say, too. Useful content and thoughtful nurture strategies can keep the relationship moving until the timing is right.
Brand, content, digital experience and campaigns aren’t boxes every annual marketing plan needs to check. They’re tools that can create very different kinds of change.
And because few organizations have the resources to pursue every opportunity at once, focus matters. The strongest plans concentrate investment where it has the greatest potential to move the business forward and give everything else permission to wait.
Even a well-designed marketing strategy can struggle when the people responsible for moving it forward have different definitions of success. Leadership may be focused on growth in a new market while marketing is still optimizing against last year’s priorities. Sales, meanwhile, may be expecting immediate demand from investments designed to create longer-term awareness.
Everyone may be working hard, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re working toward the same outcome.
Those differences become much harder to address once campaigns are underway and budgets are committed. Annual planning creates an opportunity to get everyone on the same page about what the business needs from marketing and where resources can have the greatest impact. After all, it’s much easier to recognize progress when everyone agrees on what progress should look like.
That doesn’t mean locking the organization into a rigid 12-month plan. Priorities will change and new possibilities will emerge — and a good strategy should leave room for both. When everyone shares a clear understanding of where you’re trying to go as an organization, you have more freedom to adjust your approach without losing sight of the bigger picture.
There will always be another channel to test, campaign to launch, platform to join or idea to add to the calendar. The harder and more valuable work is deciding which opportunities actually deserve your organization’s attention — and resources.
A strong 2027 marketing plan isn’t defined by how much it contains. It’s defined by how clearly its investments connect to what the organization is trying to accomplish.
If you’re planning for 2027 and aren’t sure where your marketing investment can make the greatest impact, Highland Group can help. We work with organizations to turn business priorities into focused strategies across brand, content, digital experiences and campaigns — then help bring those strategies to life. Let’s build a marketing plan that puts your 2027 goals within reach.
