Marketing Plan Readiness & Confidence Checklist

Quick gut-check on your marketing plan! This walks through the core pieces a solid plan should have and where yours stands today. About 5 minutes, and there's no wrong answer — the goal is an honest snapshot.

Which of the following does your current marketing plan document actually include?

• Written goals & KPIs
• Defined target audience or personas
• Budget & resource allocation
• Channel & campaign strategy
• Messaging & positioning guidelines
• Competitive analysis
• Timeline with milestones
• Measurement/reporting plan

For each part of your marketing plan, how far along is it?

How confident are you that this plan, as it stands, will hit its stated goals over the next 12 months?

What is the primary objective of your current marketing plan?

• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Customer retention/loyalty
• Product launch
• Revenue/sales growth
• Other

If you had 100 points to allocate across your planned marketing investment this year, how would you split them across these channels? (Template note: swap in your own channel list if this doesn't match your mix.)

• Paid advertising
• SEO & organic content
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Events & partnerships
• Other channels

Rank these plan components from most urgent to least urgent need for improvement.

1. Goals & KPIs
2. Target audience/personas
3. Budget & resource allocation
4. Channel & campaign strategy
5. Messaging & positioning
6. Competitive analysis
7. Timeline & milestones

What's the single biggest obstacle keeping your team from executing this plan as written?

Focus on whichever plan component the respondent ranked as most urgent to fix and the obstacle they named in their own words. Ask for a concrete, recent example of where that gap caused a real problem — a missed deadline, a campaign launched without clear targets, budget spent with no channel strategy — and what they've already tried. Push to find who or what would actually need to change for it to get fixed. If they said the plan has no real gaps or ranked everything as solid, stress-test that by asking what evidence or result would prove the plan is actually working as written.

Which best describes your role?

• Marketing leader / CMO
• Marketing manager or individual contributor
• Founder / business owner
• Agency or freelance consultant
• Other
• Prefer not to say

How many people work on marketing at your organization?

• Just me
• 2-5
• 6-20
• 21-50
• More than 50
• Prefer not to say

That's the full checklist — thank you! Your answers feed into a readiness snapshot showing which parts of your marketing plan are solid and which need attention first.