Five Questions to Pressure Test Your 2027 Marketing Plan

It’s officially that time of year when so many of our conversations are about 2027 planning that we start to forget that we’re actually still in 2026. At least I hope that’s not just me.

You may be deep in a “bottoms-up” planning process, responding to a “top-down” mandate or staring at a blank slide labeled “2027 Strategic Priorities.” While every organization approaches planning a little differently, it’s always a heavy lift.

You are trying to set your team’s course for the year while still handling the daily pressures that did not conveniently disappear during planning season. At some point, it can start to feel like less of a strategic exercise and more like a set of slides due by EOD Wednesday for the all-important pre-read.

Before you call those slides done, it’s important to take a step back and remember that a strong marketing and communications plan has two jobs: deliver business results and give leadership confidence that you are investing resources in the right places.

These five questions will help ensure your plan does both.

1. Are you working from a shared source of truth?

Every organization should have a shared fact base that includes the best available data about your business, customers, competitors, market conditions and the forces that will likely shape the year ahead.

Marketing may have one view of the customer, sales another and senior leadership a third. This means you could spend more time debating the premise than discussing the plan.

A good situational analysis takes work. If you’ve already done this work, share it and align early. Agreeing on these facts before presenting strategy will dramatically improve the quality of the conversation.

Pressure test: Tie every major choice in your plan directly to a key market insight. If a choice can’t be traced back to your shared fact base, revisit it before it goes into the pre-read.

2. Can you draw a clear line from the plan to business performance?

In most organizations, marketing and communications expenses fall in the P&L as operating expenses. Your job is to clearly demonstrate how those expenses are an investment in creating and protecting business value.

Creating value can look like increased demand, customer acquisition, product adoption or greater share of wallet. Protecting value happens by strengthening customer loyalty, reducing reputation risk, improving employee engagement or protecting pricing power.

You don’t have to force a revenue calculation out of every communications tactic, but you should be able to draw a credible connection between the marketing or communication outcome you’re driving and the business results that matter most to your leadership.

Pressure test: For every major line item in your plan, be ready to explain in one sentence what the business gets for the investment. If you can’t, treat that as a signal to rethink the line item.

3. Does your message match what your customer actually cares about?

Some assumptions are more dangerous than others. Assuming you know what your customers think may be one of the most expensive.

The world is changing quickly and so is your customer. Their priorities, pressures, expectations and alternatives all may look different than when you built last year’s plan.

Research doesn’t have to be costly. The right three questions asked of your top ten customers can reveal a gap between what your organization is saying and what your customer actually needs to hear.

Pressure test: Ground the value proposition at the center of your messaging in current customer insights, not internal assumptions, and be prepared to show leadership the evidence behind it.

4. Have you planned for change?

No matter how solid your data, your plan is still based on assumptions about the forces shaping your industry and the path they will take. How would your plan have to change if those assumptions did not hold true?

Demand could soften. Regulation could change. The organization’s priorities and budget may need to change with it. Know in advance which parts of your plan you would cut if your budget were reduced, and where you would plus-up if an opportunity to capitalize emerges.

Identify what assumptions matter most and decide in advance what would cause you to change course. Defining these pivots at the planning stage puts you in control of the potential direction your plan takes and could save you from making high-stakes decisions under pressure.

Pressure test: Build into your plan both the triggers that would cause you to change direction and the choices you would make if they occur, so you’re ready to adjust before you’re forced to.

5. Is this plan building toward something bigger than 2027?

Even if your plan is called a “three-year plan”, the reality is that you’re planning for a budget cycle. You have outlined and budgeted the work that needs to be done in the next 12 months to achieve the stated business outcomes.

But some of the most important marketing and communications assets cannot be built in one budget cycle. Reputation. Customer preference. Brand equity. Employee trust.

Ask whether the work done in 2027 will get you closer to where you need to be in 2029 or 2030. What future business initiatives will be difficult to achieve if you don’t start working on them in 2027? If you don’t know where you’re ultimately headed, you could be steering in the wrong direction.

Pressure test: Identify the short-term wins in your plan that are deliberately building toward a long-term goal, and make that connection explicit for leadership.

Asking these five questions will not only make your marketing and communications strategy stronger, it will also demonstrate that you understand where the business needs to go and how to help get it there. That’s a pressure test you’re ready to ace.