Why Most Businesses Struggle To Turn Marketing Plans Into Daily Action

All businesses have a marketing plan somewhere. It could be a long document created during hours of strategic thinking. Perhaps a slide deck that resulted from a planning session. Or maybe a list of goals that were created at the beginning of the quarter. 

It’s not the plan that’s the issue. The challenge is the regular, daily implementation. In most cases, there is a gap between a marketing strategy and its day-to-day implementation. This is where most businesses lose ground.

The strategy and the execution are not in the same place

You find that the marketing strategy is in a document. But the real work is done through a series of individual tools. It could be:

• Social media scheduler
• A content creation tool
• An analytics dashboard
• An email tool, etc.

Whenever someone in the team produces something, they are obliged to make the conscious effort to link it back to the initial strategy. It’s not automatic. This repetitive manual realignment is tiring and inconsistent. 

This AI marketing software helps to integrate each piece of content and every campaign decision with a single centralized strategy document. Meaning strategy and execution occur in the same place, informed by the same foundation.

They rely on too many tools 

The typical marketing team relies on six to twelve distinct tools to implement its strategy. They alternate between:

• A content tool
• A scheduler
• An analytics platform
• An advertising interface.

This leads to cognitive fatigue that makes marketing a daily challenge much more difficult than it should be. 

When there is friction in doing the tasks, they get postponed. Missed tasks turn into missed weeks of content. When weeks of content are lost, they become an inconsistent presence, compromising the entire scheme of consistency the original strategy was aiming for.

Content creation takes longer than it should

It takes a lot longer for most businesses to create a single piece of content, whether it’s:

• A social post
• Blog article
• Email.

This means that the process is not well-supported. The problem could be:

• There is no clear brief directly from the strategy
• No framework for what that content needs to achieve
• No tools to enable production to be faster or more efficient without compromising on quality.

In such cases, content creation is continually deprioritized in the face of other demands. The outcome is an inconsistent marketing calendar.

They don’t use analytics 

Most companies regularly collect marketing data. But they hardly ever use it. Analytics dashboards produce reports that are opened, skimmed, and then closed without even modifying the marketing strategy in the slightest. 

The gap between data and interpretation and between interpretation and action is the issue. Not a lack of data. In most cases, the problem is that the data is: 

• Hard to read
• Takes a long time to analyze
• Is unrelated to the content development process.

As a result, performance data never becomes the feedback loop it was intended to be.

The takeaway

AI is significantly transforming marketing execution. Marketers can fix these problems by adopting a platform specifically designed to connect marketing strategy, creation, publishing, and analysis.