Most marketing plans are written for service companies. Personas, a funnel, channels, a content calendar. When what you sell physically exists, three constraints change everything, and none of them appears in those plans: stock, margin that varies from one product to the next, and the fact that you sell through several different paths at the same time. Here is how to plan with those constraints rather than beside them.
Start from the product line, not from the channels
List your products and put three columns next to each: units sold, gross margin per unit, total margin.
Almost always, the same thing shows up. One or two products carry most of the margin. Several sell well but return little. And there is one everybody loves that does not pay for its shelf space.
That list decides your plan before anything else does. Advertising points at what carries the margin, not at what sells the most, and certainly not at what the team is proudest of.
It is the most uncomfortable conversation in the exercise, and it is the only one that changes the numbers.
Stock is a marketing constraint, not a logistics detail
This is the point agencies miss most often, because they have no access to it.
A stockout on your best seller does not just break one sale. It breaks every campaign pointing at it. Traffic keeps arriving, cost keeps running, and purchases stop. On an advertising dashboard that looks like a campaign running out of steam. In reality the advertising is working perfectly and the shelf is empty.
The reading rule is simple and it saves a lot of money: when click-through rate climbs and purchases die, the problem is not in the advertising. It is on the site, in the price, or in the stock. Look there before changing a creative.
In practice, the production calendar and the advertising calendar have to be the same document. Not two documents maintained by two different people.
Build the calendar backwards from the peak
A product company has seasons. A gift, a back to school, a cold snap, a year end.
Take the date of the peak, then work backwards. When does stock need to be in the warehouse. When do creatives need to be ready. When does audience building need to start, knowing a cold audience costs less three months before the peak than it does a week before. When does the email list need warming.
Most companies start preparing their peak at the moment they should already be selling. They then pay top price in a market where everyone is bidding at once.
Every sales path has its own cost
You probably sell online, and also elsewhere. In store, at markets, through a retailer, or B2B to corporate buyers.
These paths do not share a cost to serve, a cycle, or a margin. A market booth is expensive in presence but converts in person. Corporate B2B has a long cycle and large orders. A retailer buys volume and costs you a share of margin.
Two consequences for the plan.
First, a single blended budget is impossible to judge. At minimum, separate online from the rest, otherwise you are comparing a $40 order with a $4,000 corporate contract in the same column.
Second, some channels do not sell, they feed another path. A presence that does not convert directly may be what makes the sale possible elsewhere. That does not excuse you from measuring it, it forces you to measure it differently.
The plan fits on one page
Per quarter: one objective, two channels, one number to watch.
One objective, because two simultaneous objectives in an SMB means neither gets held. Two channels, because that is what a small team can run properly. One number, because that is the one you look at on Monday morning and that triggers a decision.
Anything that does not fit on that page is not a plan, it is a wish list.
The test that separates a plan from a list of activities
Reread your plan and count the decisions.
"Publish three times a week" is an activity. "We stop channel X if cost per customer goes above Y by November 30" is a decision. A plan made only of activities can neither succeed nor fail, it can only be executed.
We hold that role
Part-time marketing leadership for companies that sell a product: the plan, the budget arbitration and the reading of the numbers, by someone who has seen the situation elsewhere. See our marketing leadership offer
Frequently asked questions
We have hundreds of SKUs, where do we start? With the 10 that carry the margin. The rest waits. A plan that tries to cover the whole catalogue covers nothing.
Should we advertise products that are out of stock? No, and it is one of the most profitable cuts we make when arriving in an account. Cut the spend, keep the audience, prepare the restock like a launch.
Our season is December, when do we plan? Audience work starts at the end of summer. By November you are no longer building, you are harvesting what was built, at a price set by every other advertiser.