5 steps for planning marketing success in 2026

Laura Toy is a Freelance Marketing Consultant with over eight years experience across a variety of industries. If you’re ready to grow and explore your potential, contact laura@lauratoy.com for a direct quote for 1:1 consultancy support.

Well hasn’t 2025 been a bit of fever dream?! 

If marketing hasn’t been on your radar lately, fear not. Between chasing opportunities, balancing plates to keep systems running. All while trying to keep up with getting your 7-9 hours sleep. It’s no wonder you feel like there’s no time to do it. We aren’t here to judge.  

We're to tell you that this new year is your reset.

Yes, an opportunity to make a fresh start with marketing better by 1% every day. In spite of what your network may say, you don’t have to have be doing everything right to be successful at marketing. And this is what this week’s topic is about… getting the right things right. 

This week's blog is all about giving you 5 critical steps for planning marketing success in 2026. To keep it bitesize and manageable, this blog focuses on going behind the scenes in your business first.

Why do I need to do in my marketing planning for 2026 to be successful?

Don't skip through this section or try to find shortcuts. Without doing the work, you're the one losing out. And your plan won’t tailored to your business. Plus if the plan is a diluted version of one taken from someone else that did well, guess what? Your customers will wise up when they navigate their way through the pipeline. 

This is your opportunity to get to know what’s going on under the bonnet. Some of it may not be easy to see but it’s important to approach it with as little bias as possible. No one is grading you here.

To be successful in any execution, its important to understand the diagnostics. They’re your golden nuggets of information that may turn it all around. 

In this process, I will be taking you through five critical steps into 'Research and Planning'. If you’re time poor, I would commit a week to your research and a couple of hours a day to each sub-topic. Let's get some clarity for 2026...

Your 5 success steps for marketing planning in 2026

Ok, no more rambling. Here are your 5 steps to planning your marketing for 2026.

Step 1. Understanding your business & market position

Step 2. Defining your objectives / goals

Step 3. Define your ideal customer

Step 4. Understand how and why your customer would reach you

Step 5. Make a plan to 'do the plan'. Block out time to do the work. I promise its worth it.

Step 1. Understanding your business & market position

This is your opportunity to understand the current position. The key areas I want you to be looking into are:

Business performance

• What is your current revenue

• Where is the revenue coming from, which online/offline channels?

• What is your ROAS (return on actual spend)? Think about the costs to bring in each customer. This could be advertising such as printing, website hosting, labour. Is how much they’re spending outweighing the money you send?

Customers

• What are their demographics? - age, gender, location, 

• How much are they spending with you?

• Are they coming back again? Are they referring you / leaving reviews?

• How are they reaching you and buying from you?

Competitors and market position

• Who are your key competitors?

• How are they selling their services?

• What messages are they using and where? 

• What are their ratings and reviews like online? What are people saying about them? 

The insight

What is this telling you about your current position?

Look at each area you’ve examined and understand where your challenges and gaps in:

• Business performance 

• Customers 

• Competitors

Dig deep and think about where the gaps are in your current performance. Crucially, identify which gaps can be solved with marketing.

Step 2. Defining your objectives / goals

Based on the insight identified in your research, you need to consider where your business is now. Before even thinking about your marketing objectives, it's critical that you identify your business goals for the year ahead. Once you have business goals set, it's about understanding how marketing can support and help these goals to happen.

What is the focus and objectives of your journey to addressing some of these areas of insight? What can you achieve in 12 months?

Let's say you’ve noticed it’s costing you more than you want to bring in each customer. Additionally, you aren’t meeting them in those places with solutions to their pain points. Thus you may shape your 12-month goal to:

"To raise awareness of my product/service to target customers, with 40% of those reached making a sale."

This can immediately shift your ‘North Star’ and help shape your plan for 2026. You now have a clear focus with opportunities to measure how the dial moves through your efforts. 

Note: Make sure your objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, accurate, relevant, time-bound). This actually means you get the satisfaction of meeting these objectives by the end of the year. Download our FREE Setting SMART goals worksheet to help you stick to your 2026 plan.

Step 3. Define your ideal customer

Your audience is centre stage here. By this point, you may already have a picture of who your target customer is. There may be many. I would suggest to try to keep your focus on one or two customer groups. Otherwise you risk being everything to everyone and becoming nothing to no one. 

So who is your priority customer in 2026?

I want you to be obsessive about them. Understand their every move and when they’re likely to interact with you. You only need a starting point and you can always build on this the more you learn about them in next year’s plan. 

Rather than jump to conclusions, consult back to your research. Consider taking surveys, speaking to your current customers, look at your reviews. There should be ways to engage your customers on this.

This may be something you do with your Objectives Setting exercise as they likely linked to your objectives. 

Here are some prompts:

• Who are they? Are they who you currently had in mind?

• What are their characteristics? 

• What is their biggest pain? i.e. look at reviews, find out what problem you’ve solved for past customers

• How did you make their lives easier, better, more fulfilling? 

• How would they describe you to a friend when you’re ‘not in the room’? 

• What are they consuming, where do they spend most of their time? e.g. watching TV, listening to radio, browsing on LinkedIn, listening to podcasts. 

Step 4. Understand how and why your customer would reach you

Finally in part 1, I want you to think about how your target customer travels to you. 

A customer journey funnel is simply how your customer gets from A to B to solve their biggest problem. The stages in each order are:

Awareness

Awareness is the top of the funnel. It's when a customer first realises they have a problem or need. They may not be actively searching for a solution, but you can make sure your product is positioned and targeted to solve their solution.

Consideration / Interest

The customer is now in the research stage and knows at this point what they want or need. Your customer will be visiting websites, reading reviews, watching demo's, browsing blog posts and guides.

Conversion/Decision

It's crucial you care for your customer at this stage. This is all about a seamless experience, such as an easy-to-use checkout, smooth onboarding process or accessible customer support. You are demonstrating the type of service they will get if they trust you.

Loyalty/Advocacy

When a customer has good experiences with your brand, they're more likely to advocate for you. This could include repeat purchases, referrals to their network and positive reviews and testimonials. Your job at this stage is to make advocacy easy for your happy customers to do.

Map your own customer journey

Now take your identified target customer through this journey with your business in mind. Consider what they're thinking, feeling and doing to take action at each stage. This will inform your marketing strategy and the tactics you plan in Part 2.

Step 5. Make a plan to 'do the plan'. Block out time to do the work. I promise its worth it.

This isn’t a rushed job, and to warn you it may be quite confronting. Dedicate time for a sub-topic each day to do this well.

Don’t underestimate your efforts in the past year. You will know or have access to a lot of information already. But if you put it off, fine - just know your competitors will be doing the work. It will cost more money to not do it than the time it takes to have a steady plan. In plain terms, it's the difference between your target customer choosing you or your competitor.

If you have followed the steps - congratulations 🙌 . 2026 is about to be a year of less talking and more walking.

Look out for part 2 next week where I will show you how to put all of these parts into an actionable plan for 2026.

If you’re ready to grow and explore your potential, work with me 1:1 for tailored guidance. Contact laura@lauratoy.com for a direct quote.