If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
I know the above statement is overused, but it’s also true, and it’s worth taking some time to think about what it really means, especially when it comes to your marketing.
Because there are countless platforms you can be on and types of content you can create and topics you can cover, but you can’t possibly do everything everywhere all at once. Great movie. Terrible marketing advice.
It’s a recipe for a burned out marketing team and a confused audience who isn’t sure exactly what you do or whom you do it for, much less the value you provide to your clients. Confused audiences don’t buy, and they certainly don’t make referrals.
By contrast, creating a marketing strategy, then building a plan to support that strategy, is how you create marketing campaigns that get results. Your strategy points you towards the people you want to connect with and tells you what will make them sit up and pay attention. Your plan helps you get that content in front of them and lead them through the buyer journey so that, by the time they’re ready to buy, they’re already halfway convinced they want to buy from you.
But none of that happens by accident, so here’s what you can do right now to set your marketing up for success in 2026.
Table of Contents
- Look at What Worked and What Didn’t
- Review Your Marketing Personas
- Review Your Messaging
- Why This Matters
Look at What Worked and What Didn’t
Unless this is the very first time your company is doing anything to market itself, your first step in putting together a marketing plan needs to be to look back at the year we’re closing out and see what worked and what didn’t.
For example, I used to host a webinar on a monthly basis because I almost always got a new client when I hosted a webinar.
But last year I looked back and found that not a single webinar I hosted resulted in a client, so I stopped doing them.
That said, they were all recorded and put up on YouTube for all to see, so if you’d like to check out one or more of my webinars, you can do so here.
Other times I’ve been surprised by the things that did work. In addition to marketing, I always look at the networking I do, and there’s a group I love to hang out with, but it’s not exactly full of my ideal clients.
But when I looked back at the end of the year, I found I had gotten a significant amount of business from that group.
Don’t rely on feelings or hunches or assumptions or what worked in previous years. Look at the data to see where business is coming from and which platforms are a waste of time and energy.
Review Your Marketing Personas
Look at the clients you worked with this year and check them against your marketing personas/ideal client profiles (ICPs). Do they match?
If not and you’ve been struggling to work with some of your clients, that might indicate you agreed to work with people who aren’t a good fit, and that’s a different conversation you need to have with your business coach.
But if you love all (or even most) of your clients and they still don’t fit your ICP, then it’s time to adjust your ICP.
Look at the things your clients have in common, especially the things that make you love to work with them. Make sure all those things are included in your new ICP so you can create a marketing plan around people you want to work with and who want to work with you. If you tailor your messaging and marketing to the people you currently love to work with, you’ll attract more clients like them, making you not only more successful, but happier in 2026.
If you need a step-by-step guide to creating your marketing personas, this article is for you.
Review Your Messaging
If you’ve adjusted your ICP, you’ll also need to adjust your messaging to make sure it resonates with your new audience and clearly conveys the problem you solve for them. Once done, that will form the basis of your new brand voice guidelines.
If you need a step-by-step guide to creating your brand voice guidelines, this article is for you.
Once you’ve defined your new brand voice, make sure all your messaging is consistent with that new voice. This includes:
- Your website
- Your Google Business Profile
- All your social media profiles (including YouTube)
- Your email signatures
- Your bio for any websites where you publish content as a guest contributor, including sites like Matchmaker.fm and Podmatch if you’re using them to get booked on podcasts
- Your profile on all your networking websites
- Your elevator pitch
- Any and all printed materials you use to promote your business
- If you use a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Claude to help you create content, you’ll need to update them on your new brand voice just like you would update a human assistant
Why This Matters: AI Dominated 2025 and It’s Not Going Anywhere
With the rise of AI, branding and niches are going to be more important than ever, which is why it is imperative you have a very clear idea of your brand and your ideal client before you publish anything online about your business.
The more people use AI to “generate” content for them, the more generic white noise we’re going to see floating around the internet, and the easier it will be to get lost in all that noise.
To break through all that noise, you’ll need a very clearly defined brand. Only then will you be able to clearly communicate what sets you apart from all the other companies providing the same or similar services, whom you work with, and the problem you solve for them.
Once you have that messaging defined and you’re able to drill down on it across all platforms, you’ll not only attract more clients, you’ll attract more of the right clients. That will enable you to spend less time on sales calls explaining what you do and don’t do and why you charge the prices you charge.
When people get a sense of who you are and the value you provide before they even pick up the phone, they’re more likely to become clients because they’ve already gotten to know, like, and trust you. They just need to confirm it by talking to a real, live, human, and to get a sense of what it would be like to work with you.
Need help creating your marketing strategy for 2026?
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