Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building a 2026 Marketing Plan
2026 is officially on the clock. As we close out 2025, now is the time to buy an expensive (and festive latte), bust out your dashboards, and plan the perfect marketing strategy for 2026.
Why is an annual marketing plan important? It sets clear priorities (remember- clarity is a kindness) and ensures your marketing dollars are being used in the most efficient manner possible. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a marketing plan that works.
What’s the first step to creating an annual marketing plan?
The first step to creating an annual marketing plan for 2026 is conducting a situation analysis. This is essentially taking stock of the good, the bad, and the ugly. There are three primary tasks for you in this stage:
SWOT Analysis: Review your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from the last year. Importantly, frame them with an eye on 2026. How will you leverage your strengths and address weaknesses?
Competitor Analysis: Our founder, Erica, created two TikTok videos about this a ways back and honestly, we stand by those videos to this day. Watch Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Market Research: There are a billion ways to do this part, but the only one that really worked for us was manually searching who we thought our target audience was on LinkedIn, setting up 1on1 interviews, and quickly realizing how wrong we were (lol).
How do you define your target audience?
After you’ve nailed the situational analysis, it’s time to get who your target audience is down, in writing. For both clarity and also because unfortunately in the future, your target audience will shift. And benchmarking who they are helps you identify and react to those shifts. You’ll want to take note of:
Demographics: Age, gender, income, location
Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle, attitudes
Behaviors: Buying habits, media consumption, motivations
Desires and Pain Points: What they want versus what challenges them
Having a well-defined audience ensures your campaigns are tailored, relevant, and effective.
How do you determine your 2026 marketing objectives?
What are your main priorities? Do you want to grow revenue? Enter a new market? Increase retention? We are big fans of the SMART framework because it’s simple and straight forward. Here’s a quick rundown on SMART goals and how to write them.
The 5 Ps
Your marketing professor just started grinning reading that subheading. Before you choose the channels and tactics, we want to iron out the 5 P’s.
Product: What are you offering, and how does it solve a problem?
Place: Where will your product be sold? Online, in-store, or both?
Price: Consider your pricing strategy (premium, penetration, or value-based pricing). Don’t forget to account for discounting or payment plans.
Promotion: Which channels matter most to your audience, and what core messages will resonate?
Positioning: How do you compare to competitors? Are you the low-cost option, a premium brand, or the underdog with a unique story?
How do I choose the best marketing tactics to support my marketing goals?
Based on your objectives, choose which activities support that goal and move you closer to it. For example:
If your goal is more revenue, maybe you’re focusing on lead nurturing campaigns to shorten the sales lifecycle. So your channels might be email and running paid ads to drive email newsletter signups.
If your goal is to increase retention, you might be focused on direct to consumer mailings, events, or partnerships.
If your goal is to enter a new market, maybe your marketing activities are PR campaigns, influencer marketing, content marketing, and paid ads.
How to plan your marketing budget for 2026?
The next step is to figure out how much money we can, and are willing, to spend to move these initiatives forward.
The simplest way to start is to look at your projected revenue for 2026. How much does marketing contribute to revenue YoY? That’s your quick answer, if you have the data.
95% of people won’t have this data. And don’t worry, The 128 has a plan for you.
If you have no idea your marketing ROI when it comes to revenue, you’re going to allocate 2-10% of your projected revenue to marketing. And we would highly recommend coming in on the lower end of that. There’s a few things you’ll want to make sure you’re factoring into your budget:
Subscriptions
Labor
Cost of new campaigns
You’ll also want to carve out some room for experimentation and testing. A lot of companies don’t have a line item for this in their marketing budget and it’s a big miss. This is a really important part of a marketers job - running strategic tests and experimentations.
With this in mind, maybe the breakdown comes down to 2-3% of annual revenue for your marketing budget and 1-2% of the budget for experimentation/testing.
Once you know the total sum of your marketing budget, create a budget allocation plan. The different categories might include:
Influencer Marketing
Paid Ads
Content creation & production
Marketing technology
Labor
Events, collateral, sponsorships
How much of your budget will be put into each area? Does that breakdown align with your objectives? For example, if you want revenue growth but 55% of your budget is being put into content creation & production, you might want to rethink that.
How to create a 2026 Marketing Calendar
This step often sounds fun to people and then they quickly become stressed at trying to map out a 365 day calendar of marketing activities.
Start by reviewing your marketing plan and highlight key dates. Whether you revolve around business quarters, marketing holidays, product launches, or something else - start with these milestones.
Then consider your workflow. Do you move through typical phases of planning, execution, review, launch, post launch? Build those in around your milestones and you’ll have a pretty decent timeline (that will probably get blown up by the third week of January, but such is life).
How do you evaluate 2026 marketing success?
This step often sounds fun to people and then they quickly become stressed at trying to map out a 365 day calendar of marketing activities.
Revisit your objectives. What metrics must you achieve for these to be considered done?
We’re going to start with leading and lagging indicators.
Leading indicators: these are predictive metrics like website traffic, number of MQLs from campaigns, SQLs from nurturing, paid media metrics, event attendance, marketing influenced pipeline value, etc.
Lagging indicators: outcome focused metrics like revenue by channel, average revenue per customer, sales cycle length, churn rate, etc.
Other things you’ll want to track are:
Market shifts: competitor performance, industry trend adoption
Team efficiency (justifies your labor costs): Project completion rate vs the original plan, tasks completed, campaigns launched, cycle time for tasks, marketing technology utilization, average time to launch or complete a task
Qualitative data: customer feedback and testimonials, social listening, team and stakeholder satisfaction with marketing support, lessons learned from campaigns or experiments
A comprehensive marketing plan is more than a document. This is your 2026 roadmap for growth, in whichever direction is your priority. We have to go slow to go fast. This involves us digging back into the past, understanding how we got to where we are today, and figuring out how to connect initiatives to our future state goals.
If you need help defining your 2026 strategy, drop us a line! We’re always happy to help.
