5 Questions to Answer Before You Finalize Your 2027 Marketing Plan

Hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween! Kaitlyn and I dressed up as Double Dare contestants. We thought we were pretty creative until we realized only people between the ages of 33 and 45 knew what we were. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Photo below.

Now it's November, and for a lot of companies that means annual planning season. We're getting ready for ours at IMPACT right now.

Building your 2027 marketing plan doesn't have to become a weeks-long ordeal. Spend 30 minutes getting your leadership and marketing teams aligned on these five questions, plus one gut check at the end. Some answers will come easily. Others will reveal decisions you still need to make, and that's useful work to do before you commit next year's budget.

1. What are we marketing in 2027?

You may already have a clear product or service you're focused on. If you don't, this deserves attention. For many businesses we work with, trying to be too many things to too many people makes their marketing ineffective, and it often creates problems in operations too.

The businesses with the best marketing usually have the most focus.

They do fewer things really well.

So, what is the one thing (or small handful of things) you want to be known for? Who are you the perfect fit for, and who are you not? What are the top two or three attributes those buyers care about most, and are those what you'll put your energy into strengthening?

Say one of the attributes that matters to your customers is choosing a company with the best reputation. Earning and maintaining that is a strategic decision you'll need to go all in on. You'll need to set your staff up to deliver work worthy of great reviews, and you need to put those customer stories at the center of your marketing.

The Check: You've answered this well when leadership and marketing can each describe, in a few sentences, the products or services you're focused on, who your buyer is (and isn't), and the core attributes you're committed to delivering. Both teams' answers should match perfectly.

2. How is our market discovering, vetting, and choosing companies like ours?

Your buyers have questions to answer and decisions to make long before they ever reach out to you. They’re figuring out their problem, exploring possible solutions, comparing options, and deciding whom to trust. After they contact you, there’s usually more work to do before they’re comfortable making a purchase.

You need to understand what that journey actually looks like for your buyers.

Start by reviewing sales calls and transcripts and talking to recent customers. What prompted them to start looking? Where did they go for information? Which companies did they consider? What almost stopped them from buying, and what ultimately gave them confidence?

Then lay out the journey, including the questions, decisions, and sources of information that matter at each step. Include what happens before they contact you and everything between that first conversation and the purchase.

And as you do this, remember to skate to where the puck is going. AI tools can already help buyers research and compare options, and agentic buying lets them delegate parts of the shopping process to an AI assistant. These capabilities are already appearing in retail. Consider where they could change your buyers’ behavior next.

That also means checking whether your website makes your offerings, pricing, and supporting evidence easy for people and AI tools to find and understand. Google’s guidance reinforces the importance of accessible, clearly presented information.

The Check: You’ve answered this question well when your team can explain how buyers move from recognizing a need to choosing a company, what they need at each step, and where that journey is changing. Those answers should come from customer evidence, with your assumptions clearly identified.

3. What are the top five areas we need to strengthen so more of those buyers choose us?

There's rarely a shortage of ideas for what a company could do with its marketing.

The harder part is narrowing them to a small handful of things to do really well. Picking three to five priorities gives your team clear direction for where to put its energy.

The journey you just mapped should drive this. Where are buyers getting stuck, losing confidence, or choosing someone else? Maybe you're not showing up where they're researching. Maybe they find you but can't tell why you're the right fit. Maybe they reach out, have a good conversation, and go quiet.

Before choosing your priorities, review won, lost, and stalled opportunities. Where you have reliable numbers, compare how many qualified buyers enter each stage with how many move forward.

Perfect information is rare, so write a clear hypothesis for each priority: "We believe buyers are getting stuck here because ____. If we strengthen ____, we expect more of them to ____." Then rank by how often the problem comes up, how much it influences the decision, and how confident you are that you can improve it.

The Check: You've answered this well when your team agrees on the top 5 priorities, which part of the journey each one strengthens, and the metrics you'll watch to see if buyers are actually moving forward.

4. What do we need to invest to strengthen these areas?

There's no shortage of reports on how much a company should spend on marketing. For small and mid-sized businesses looking to grow, I recommend starting with 5-10% of revenue. Start in that range, then work out what your plan actually requires.

The real question is whether that investment puts the right resources in place to accomplish the priorities you just set. That budget needs to cover:

• People (in-house or outside support)
• Training and coaching
• Software and tools
• Advertising and events

Much of this work will involve creating content, improving your website, and getting useful resources into your sales team's hands. Even with AI, someone still needs to bring your team's unique experience and personality into the content, check its accuracy, and ensure it actually helps buyers move forward.

The Check: You've answered this well when leadership and marketing agree: "These are our priorities, these are the resources we need, and this is the budget we are willing to invest."

5. What outcomes do we need from that investment?

One of the most common questions we get is, "What's the return on our investment?" The answer starts with an agreement between leadership and marketing: this is the budget we're committing, and these are the outcomes that make it worthwhile.

For some businesses that's a number of qualified opportunities. For others it's sales, especially when marketing handles most of the buying process. You'll have to decide what outcome is right for your business and warrants your investment in marketing.

Write it down: the outcome, the number, the timeline, and how you'll measure it. Marketing should believe it's realistic with the resources available, and leadership should agree that hitting it justifies the spend. That clarity gives marketing room to experiment and reallocate within the budget while staying accountable to the outcome.

The Check: You've answered this well when both teams can say: "We agree on the investment, we agree on what marketing needs to achieve, and we understand exactly why it's worth it."

Before you call the plan finished, ask: if we execute these priorities really well, do we believe we'll hit the outcomes we agreed on? Talk through why. If someone isn't confident, find out what's missing. You may need to revisit a priority, rethink the resources, or test an assumption about how your buyers decide.

You don't have to resolve everything in 30 minutes. Write down your answers, note where you need more clarity, and give someone responsibility for finding what's missing.

If you're already working with an Endless Customers coach, bring these questions to your next session. If you'd like help building a plan your team believes in, one of our coaches would be happy to talk.

And now, the Double Dare picture: