Most marketing plans I have seen do not fail because the plan was bad. They fail because the person writing it was planning for a business they only half knew. That is not a criticism of anyone. It is what being inside the work every day does to you: you look at whatever is urgent, not at whatever decides the outcome.
So before any plan, there is a review. Not a market study, not a research project. Seven questions you answer yourself, each with a clear sign that you failed it. Answer all seven honestly and the plan more or less writes itself afterwards, because the problem becomes visible.
1. Your real numbers, not your estimates
Four numbers, no rounding: your margin on one sale after every cost, how many new customers arrived in the last ninety days, exactly where they came from, and what one sale actually cost you to win.
The sign you failed this check: you need to go and calculate. If you cannot say all four from memory, you are not ready to plan, you are ready to measure. A plan built on numbers you guessed at is organised guesswork.
If you are trying to work out who your actual buyer is from data rather than instinct, I set that out in how to identify your target market.
2. Your costs moved and you are still pricing on last year
This is the check almost everyone skips, and the one that eats the plan from the inside. If you are planning against a cost base you calculated last year, the plan is wrong before it starts.
The official figures tell the story plainly. On Central Bank of Egypt data, annual urban inflation slowed to 13.9% in September 2026 from 14.5% in August, core inflation eased to 14.1% from 14.9%, and the nationwide annual rate stood at 12.8%.
Notice what those numbers actually say. The rate is falling and it is still firmly positive. Prices are still rising, just more slowly. People read "inflation fell" as "prices fell", and those are not the same thing at all.
In practice: if your costs rose by anything close to that over the last year and you did not move your price, you are eating your own margin, and a plan that increases demand will increase the loss faster. This check is not a marketing question, but without it any marketing plan is just an accelerator pointed at a problem.
The right order for this is in plan your costs before marketing.
3. What you actually sell, not what you think you sell
One question: why did your last ten customers buy? Not why they should have. Why they did.
The sign you failed: you find yourself saying general things like quality and service. Those are not reasons, they are adjectives you already have on your website. The real reason is usually specific. You are closer. You answer quickly. You carry one thing nobody else nearby carries.
If the real reason is one clear thing, the plan becomes: get more people to know that one thing. If you do not know it, the plan becomes: go and ask. Asking ten customers is free, and faster than any study.
4. The free assets you already have, set up wrong
Before a pound of advertising, there are free things that affect your result, whose rules are written down and published, and which most businesses are quietly breaking.
Take your Google business listing. Google's guidelines for representing your business are specific. The name "should reflect your business's real-world name", and padding it with extra material "isn't permitted", so no keywords, no phone number, no opening hours in the name field. The address must be precise, and "P.O. boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations aren't acceptable". The description may not contain links at all: "No links of any type are allowed". Categories should be "as few categories as possible". And you should not create more than one page per location.
This review takes ten minutes and fixes problems that people are currently paying advertising money to work around. The sign you failed it: you have not opened the listing in over a year.
5. Your website: does it work, not does it look nice
In this review the website is not a design question. It is one question: do the people you paid to reach actually get to the offer, or do they leave halfway?
This is the part I am not the specialist in, and I would rather point at someone who is. The Rivl team wrote about it from the numbers rather than the aesthetics in a slow site is a revenue problem, not a design opinion. The idea worth taking from it: load time is a commercial decision rather than a developer preference, and it decides how much of the traffic you already paid for ever sees your offer.
The sign you failed: you have not opened your own site on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, in the last fortnight.
6. Are your goals marketing goals or business goals
Plenty of plans open with "increase sales by 30%". That is a business goal, not a marketing goal, and the difference decides whether the plan can be measured at all.
A marketing goal has to sit on something marketing actually controls. Qualified leads, cost per lead, conversion rate at a named stage. Sales is the result of those plus things you do not control, like what your sales team can close, your price, and your stock.
I separated the two in digital marketing goals are not always the same as business goals, and if your plan has exactly one goal and it is sales, start there.
7. Do you have the capacity for this plan
The most honest question on the list. Any marketing plan needs somebody to run it and review it weekly. Without that person, the plan becomes a wish list in a document.
The sign you failed: the plan has more than two channels in it and you are on your own. The right answer then is a one-channel plan that gets executed, not a five-channel plan done at half strength.
The review table, to score yourself against
| Check | The question | Sign you failed it |
|---|---|---|
| Numbers | Margin, new customers, cost per sale | You need to calculate |
| Costs | When was the price set | No increase in a year |
| Offer | Why the last ten bought | Your answer is an adjective |
| Free assets | Is the Google listing correct | Not opened in a year |
| Website | Does the visitor reach the offer | Never tested on mobile data |
| Goals | Marketing goal or business goal | The only goal is sales |
| Capacity | Who runs it and reviews it | More channels than people |
Once those seven are done, the plan itself has its own set of questions, and I went through them in go-to-market planning: what a full GTM strategy covers.
Limits worth stating
This review will not tell you which channel is right. It tells you whether you are in a position to choose at all. Those are two different things, and I do not want anyone finishing the review and waiting for an answer it does not contain.
The inflation figures above are Egyptian and they are updated monthly. If you are in another market the question still applies and the number does not. Even in Egypt, look up the latest published figure when you read this rather than the one written here.
And the last one, which annoys people: if the review shows your problem is the offer itself or the price, no marketing plan fixes that. Marketing takes an offer that works to more people. If the offer is not being bought by the people who already saw it, distribution multiplies the problem rather than repairing it. That is why I wrote earlier that an agency is not supposed to write your business plan.
The word growth carries a lot of meanings, and everyone in the meeting tends to have a different metric in mind. Part 2 of my book Growth Engine is about making that choice: one growth metric for the quarter, a constraint stated as a number, and a written goal with a name and a date on it. It is in Part 2, Goals: where are you going. The book is free, and it is in Arabic.