A strategic planning checklist for a new marketing account covers seven areas: business goals, data access, audience definition, channel roles, budget allocation, measurement and review rhythm. Working through them in that order prevents the most expensive early mistake, which is launching campaigns before anyone agrees on what success means or how it will be measured.
This is the list we work through with every new client before a single ad goes live. It is not a template to fill in once and forget. It is a set of questions that should be answered in writing and revisited each quarter.
Strategy decks often skip the dull parts: who owns the analytics account, what the margin is per product, how long the sales cycle really takes. Those details decide whether a plan works. A checklist forces them onto the table early.
It also exposes gaps. If nobody can answer what a lead is worth, you know the first piece of work is to calculate it, not to buy more leads.
What business goal is the marketing plan serving?
Write down one primary goal and at most two secondary goals, each with a number and a date. Revenue, qualified leads, new customers, market entry or retention are all valid. Brand awareness is valid too, if it is defined in measurable terms such as branded search volume or survey recall.
- Primary goal, with target and deadline.
- Unit economics: average order value or deal size, gross margin, lifetime value if known.
- Constraints: stock levels, sales team capacity, seasonal peaks, legal limits.
- What would make leadership call the plan a failure in six months.
That last question is uncomfortable and useful. It surfaces expectations that nobody wrote into the brief.
Do we have access to every account and data source?
Missing access delays more launches than any creative problem. Make a list and confirm admin or appropriate access for each item before the kickoff ends.
- Google Analytics 4 property and Google Tag Manager container.
- Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Ad accounts: Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, others in use.
- CMS or ecommerce platform admin.
- CRM, such as HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, with at least read access to deal stages.
- Email platform and social media accounts.
Confirm that the client, not a former agency, owns each account. Accounts held in a previous agency’s name can take weeks to recover.
Who exactly are we trying to reach?
Define audiences by situation and need rather than demographics alone. A useful audience statement names the problem, the trigger that makes someone start looking, and the objection that stops them buying.
Talk to sales and support before writing these. They hear the real questions every day. Review call recordings or support tickets if available, and pull the top search queries from Search Console that lead to conversions.
Audience checklist
- Two or three primary segments, each with problem, trigger and main objection.
- Where each segment looks for information: search, social platforms, peers, events.
- The words customers use for the problem, taken from their own messages.
- Existing customer lists that can seed lookalike or similar audiences.
What role does each channel play?
Give every channel one job. Paid search captures existing demand. Paid social creates demand and retargets. SEO builds long-term capture of demand at lower marginal cost. Email nurtures and retains. When channels have no defined job, they all get judged on last-click sales and the upper-funnel ones get cut.
Write the job, the main metric and the expected timeline for each channel. SEO might be judged on non-branded clicks at six months; paid search on cost per acquisition from week two.
How should the budget be split at the start?
Allocate budget by channel role and by test versus scale. Early in an account, a portion of spend should be reserved for testing new audiences, creative and channels, because you do not yet know where the best returns sit.
For example, a company with a monthly budget of 15,000 dollars might start with 60 percent in proven channels such as paid search, 25 percent in paid social prospecting and retargeting, and 15 percent held for tests. After the first quarter, the test share moves into whatever proved itself. The percentages are an illustration of the method, not a recommendation for your account.
Note the minimum spend each platform needs to learn. Spreading a small budget across six platforms usually means none of them gather enough data.
How will we measure progress, and who checks it?
Agree on the conversion definitions, attribution model and source of truth before launch. If the CRM says 40 leads and Meta says 70, everyone should already know which number counts and why the other differs.
- Conversion events set up and tested in GA4 and each ad platform.
- Offline conversions or CRM integration for lead-based businesses.
- UTM naming convention written and shared.
- A dashboard in Looker Studio or similar, with goals shown against actuals.
- A named person who reviews data quality each month.
What is the review rhythm?
Set the meetings now. Weekly check-ins cover spend, pacing and anything broken. Monthly reviews cover performance against goals and next month’s tests. Quarterly reviews revisit this checklist: are the goals, audiences and channel roles still right?
Document decisions after each review. Six months in, nobody remembers why a channel was paused, and the same experiment gets repeated.