You don't need a marketing plan, you need a marketing hypothesis.

We've been talking about marketing plans lately in our client conversations, and there's a pattern we can't ignore. These plans are supposed to be all about action, but they rarely see the light of day. Beautiful 40-page documents with detailed roadmaps, buyer personas, and quarterly campaigns — sitting untouched in shared drives while teams scramble to figure out what to post on LinkedIn this week.

Why is that? Once you've worked through developing a brand strategy, why is it so hard to put things into action?

The real problem isn’t the plan.

In our experience, 9 out of 10 times it comes back to two things: a lack of prioritization and pure resource constraints. Marketing often gets treated as a "nice to have" instead of a "need to have."

Only when an organization starts feeling real pain does this shift. When sales teams are telling different stories to prospects. When market positioning is so unclear that sales can't articulate value. When marketing is spending time and budget on leads that sales immediately disqualifies. When there's zero recognition in the communities you're trying to serve. That's when marketing suddenly becomes urgent. But by then, you're in reactive mode, not strategic mode.

The hypothesis approach.

Here's what I've learned after years of watching marketing plans gather digital dust: you still need a marketing plan to start with, but it shouldn't end with a roadmap set in stone. It should end with a starting point, a hypothesis, and a system for refining, evaluating, and making impact.

Think like a scientist, not a fortune teller.

The three components of a marketing hypothesis

1. The Assumption: What do you believe about your market, customers, or the problem you solve?
2. The Test: What specific action will you take to validate or disprove this assumption?
3. The Measurement: How will you know if you're right or wrong, and what will you do with that information?

Why this works better

A hypothesis-driven approach forces you to:
•  Start small and build momentum
•  Focus on learning, not just executing
•  Make decisions based on data, not opinions
•  Pivot quickly when something isn't working
•  Celebrate small wins while building toward bigger goals

The system that makes it stick

The magic isn't just in the hypothesis—it's in the system you build around it:
•  Monthly reviews: What did we learn?
•  Quarterly and annual strategy adjustments: What do we test next?
•  Clear success metrics: How do we measure impact?
•  Resource allocation: What gets priority based on results?

From planning to testing.

Your marketing plan becomes your laboratory. Each quarter, you're running experiments, gathering data, and refining your approach. Some hypotheses will be wrong—and that's valuable information. Some will be right—and that's where you double down. The organizations we see succeeding aren't the ones with the most comprehensive plans. They're the ones with the most systematic approach to testing, learning, and adapting..

The question that changes everything.

Instead of asking "What's our marketing plan for next year?" try asking "What's our biggest assumption about our market right now, and how can we test it in the next 90 days?"

What's your experience? Are you sitting on a beautiful marketing plan that never quite gets executed? Or have you found ways to turn strategy into systematic action? Share your biggest marketing hypothesis in the comments—let's learn from each other's experiments.