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How to Make a Marketing Plan (2026 Playbook)

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Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Watch fully
  • Core thesis: Modern marketing planning requires simultaneously optimizing the traditional funnel (awareness → consideration → conversion), mapping content pillars to funnel stages, balancing 'normie' measurable channels with 'fringe' awareness bets, and calendar-driven campaign execution—with most mid-market brands ($30–50M) hitting growth ceilings because they refuse to invest in unmeasurable top-of-funnel awareness.
  • Why it matters: Provides a complete, workshop-tested framework for 2026 marketing planning that reconciles the tension between CFO-friendly performance marketing and the awareness leap required to break $30–50M revenue caps; directly addresses approval politics, team capacity (max 2 new initiatives per 6 months), and the shift from pure sales focus to holistic funnel thinking.
  • Best use: Use as an annual/quarterly planning system: run the five exercises (marketing funnel audit, Normie-to-Fringe options matrix, content funnel mapping, calendar matrix, asset repurposing workflow) with your team; download the worksheets and grade your current state vs. desired state at each funnel stage; especially valuable for brands stuck at growth plateaus or marketers needing exec buy-in for awareness spend.

Executive Summary

This is a practitioner's playbook distilled from live workshops with 40+ brands (small independents to major airlines/activewear/software firms) across New York, Miami, and Toronto. The speaker—a marketing creator/strategist—ran five structured exercises to help brands navigate the 2026 marketing landscape. The core insight: most brands are either over-indexing on measurable bottom-funnel tactics and hitting growth ceilings, or under-executing on conversion despite decent top-of-funnel attention. The framework forces brands to audit what they do well today, identify gaps, and choose 1–2 new initiatives maximum per six months (more kills execution quality).

Three recurring pain points emerged on tour: (1) How to structure modern marketing teams, (2) How to get risky initiatives approved by risk-averse leadership, and (3) How to choose among the explosion of channel options. The solution is a 2x2 matrix ('Normie to Fringe' vs. 'Sales to Awareness') that maps every tactic—from wholesale and email (normie/sales) to streaming and multi-account social strategies (fringe/awareness). Critically, brands hitting $30–50M revenue face a 'plunge of faith' moment: performance marketing (Meta/Google ads, email, measurable ROI) got them there, but scaling further requires unmeasurable awareness investment. The speaker argues CFOs and CEOs must accept that awareness spend won't show immediate ROAS but unlocks the next growth tier by increasing efficacy of existing channels.

The content funnel exercise applies the same logic to social: map your 3–5 content pillars (format + topic combinations you repeat monthly) to top/middle/bottom funnel stages, grade each A–F, and identify whether you need more viral top-funnel content, more educational middle-funnel nurturing, or better bottom-funnel conversion mechanics (Stories CTAs, ManyChat comment-to-email flows, retargeting). The speaker's own example: product reviews = top of funnel (millions of views, attracts marketing-interested audience), educational breakdowns = middle (nurtures), brand deals/email list drives = bottom. Most brands are decent at middle of funnel but fail to ask for the sale aggressively enough—a problem especially common among enterprise attendees.

The calendar matrix and campaign planning exercises close the loop: map cultural moments (Super Bowl, Olympics, back-to-school), industry events (NAB, CES, Coachella if relevant), past sales heat maps (Shopify data: which months exceeded/missed goal and why), planned product launches, and 'missed opportunities' from last year's Slack threads. Each campaign needs 50/50 internal (email, content team, owned channels) and external (creator collabs, seeding, media outreach) promotion. Asset repurposing is a forcing function for under-resourced teams: systematically track and reuse creator/influencer/UGC assets across PDPs, emails, ads. The speaker provides downloadable worksheets for all exercises and offers a Creative Strategy Program for marketers seeking deeper training.

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: Most brands hitting $30–50M revenue caps cannot scale further without shifting budget from purely measurable performance marketing (Meta/Google ads, email) to unmeasurable top-of-funnel awareness plays. | Evidence: Dozens of workshop attendees reported this exact threshold; the speaker has seen businesses 'fall apart' at this stage. CFOs/CEOs loved the math of performance marketing but resist awareness spend because ROI is not directly trackable. The solution is assigning a percentage (e.g., 9% of 14% total marketing budget) to awareness while maintaining performance channels—awareness then increases Meta ad efficacy and wholesale performance indirectly. | Caveat: The speaker does not provide a formula for the optimal awareness/performance split or case studies showing before/after revenue curves; the $30–50M threshold may vary by industry or business model (e.g., ultra-high-ticket B2B software vs. mass-market CPG). | Implication: If Ken's portfolio companies or clients are plateauing in this range, this is the diagnostic: they need exec buy-in to treat a portion of marketing budget as a 'plunge of faith' into awareness (organic YouTube, influencer, trade shows, streaming for Gen Alpha) and measure success holistically rather than via immediate ROAS; share this video with CFOs to de-risk the conversation. | Timestamp: 10:45
  • Claim: Teams can realistically execute only two new marketing initiatives well in a six-month period, even with large teams; trying more dilutes quality and kills results. | Evidence: The speaker repeatedly states '90% of businesses should just do existing things better' and 'two is the maximum' new initiatives per half-year, based on observations from workshop brands of all sizes (small independents to enterprise). | Caveat: No explanation of why two is the magic number (team bandwidth? coordination overhead? learning curve?), and no distinction between adding a new channel vs. optimizing an existing one; the rule may not apply to hyper-resourced or specialized teams. | Implication: Ken should apply this as a forcing function for prioritization: when evaluating agent system roadmaps, content calendars, or GTM plans, constrain to 1–2 net-new bets per quarter and improve existing workflows first; prevents 'shiny object syndrome' and ensures execution depth over breadth. | Timestamp: 18:30
  • Claim: The 'Normie to Fringe / Sales to Awareness' matrix solves the approval and choice paralysis problems by making risk/reward trade-offs explicit: normie tactics (wholesale, email, Meta/Google ads) get approved easily but may not unlock new growth; fringe tactics (TikTok Shop affiliate, SMS, streaming, multi-account social) are career bets that let you outpace slower competitors. | Evidence: The matrix maps ~30 tactics: normie/sales quadrant includes wholesale, email, Google/Meta/YouTube ads, cold outbound; fringe/sales includes creators-on-brand-accounts, TikTok ads, product seeding, affiliate programs, SMS (OneText mentioned by name), AppLovin, live selling (TikTok/Whatnot); normie/awareness includes LinkedIn, trade shows, Instagram/TikTok organic, influencer; fringe/awareness includes organic YouTube, X, social shows, Snap, streaming (example: deodorant/activewear brands terrified of losing Gen Alpha to Jake Paul's W because Gen Alpha only cares about Twitch/streaming culture, not legacy college sports sponsorships). | Caveat: The speaker admits the matrix is 'not perfect' and placements are subjective ('you may feel certain things would be in different places'); no data on success rates or ROI distributions for fringe vs. normie; the framework is a mental model, not a predictive tool. | Implication: Ken can use this to pressure-test AI/agent go-to-market and content strategies: are you stuck in the normie quadrant (safe but commoditized) or placing intelligent fringe bets (e.g., streaming for Gen Alpha, TikTok Shop for DTC)? For investing, ask founders where their marketing stack sits on this matrix and whether they have a thesis for when to jump to fringe; for operations, balance normie baseline (predictable) with 1–2 fringe experiments per cycle. | Timestamp: 14:20
  • Claim: Enterprise brands at the workshops had the opposite problem of small brands: they were doing lots of top-of-funnel (getting attention) but not asking for the sale aggressively or compellingly enough at bottom-of-funnel—leaving money on the table. | Evidence: The speaker observed this pattern across major airlines, activewear companies, and other large workshop attendees: 'they aren't selling hard enough… they aren't asking for money enough and they aren't aggressively doing it or doing it in a way that's compelling for the consumer to want to engage in.' Bottom-of-funnel tactics include SMS (texting to buy), email, sales rep enablement, Instagram Stories CTAs, broadcast channels, retargeting. | Caveat: No examples of what 'asking aggressively' looks like in practice beyond channel mentions; no discussion of brand safety concerns or whether enterprise hesitancy is due to compliance, legal, or tone-of-voice constraints. | Implication: If Ken works with enterprise or growth-stage companies with decent brand awareness, audit bottom-of-funnel rigor: are they using SMS (OneText recommended), ManyChat for comment-to-email conversion, Stories/broadcast for direct CTAs? Many large orgs treat social as pure awareness and leave conversion to separate teams/tools, creating a gap; fixing this is high-leverage and low-risk compared to top-of-funnel experiments. | Timestamp: 08:50
  • Claim: Content pillars (3–5 repeatable format+topic combinations per month) must be explicitly mapped to funnel stages and graded A–F; most brands already have pillars but haven't diagnosed which serve awareness, education, or conversion—leading to accidental imbalance. | Evidence: The speaker's own content funnel: product reviews (top/awareness, millions of views, attracts marketing-interested audience) → marketing education videos like 'why truffles changed' or 'influencer marketing in 2026' (middle/nurturing, builds affinity) → brand deals and email list CTAs (bottom/conversion). He grades each pillar's performance and maps it to the funnel, then assigns team members (e.g., 'Shelby's going to do it, Carl's going to do it'). | Caveat: Grading is subjective and comparative ('versus the field that you're at, comparative to other businesses in our niche'); no rubric provided for what constitutes an A vs. C; unclear how to handle multi-purpose content that serves multiple funnel stages. | Implication: Ken should run this exercise for HiBeam, personal brand, or portfolio companies: list all recurring content types (newsletters, Twitter threads, YouTube breakdowns, LinkedIn posts), assign each to top/middle/bottom funnel, grade honestly, and identify gaps—do you have zero bottom-funnel content? Is your top-of-funnel a D? Then reallocate or create new pillars; for agent content systems, automate pillar production but ensure human strategy sets the funnel mapping first. | Timestamp: 21:00
  • Claim: The annual calendar matrix exercise—mapping culture, industry events, past sales heat maps, product launches, and 'missed opportunities' from last year—is the forcing function that turns strategy into executable plans and prevents last-minute scrambles. | Evidence: The speaker maps by quarter/month: February = Super Bowl, Valentine's Day, Olympics (he made content on each; Super Bowl content got millions of views because he was prepared). November = buying season. Industry row = NAB (broadcast/camera show), CES. Sales heat map row color-codes months that exceeded/missed goal and why (e.g., 'we hit it because we did a flash sale or this massive order'). Launches row = when to drop new products/services (adjust based on cultural/industry conflicts). 'Missed opportunities' row = Slack threads where the team said 'we should have done X'—hunt those down and plan them. | Caveat: No template shown for how to weight conflicting priorities (e.g., if a product launch lands on a major cultural moment, do you move it or double down?); no discussion of how to handle rapid market shifts mid-year that invalidate the calendar. | Implication: Ken should build a 2026 calendar for HiBeam, personal content, and key investments: mark AI conferences (OpenAI DevDay, NeurIPS), cultural tech moments (Apple/Google I/O), past traffic/sales spikes (which months did newsletters or videos over-perform and why?), planned launches (new agent features, content series), and explicitly note what was missed in 2024/2025 (e.g., 'we should have covered X AI trend earlier')—this prevents reactive firefighting and creates proactive content/campaign windows. | Timestamp: 24:15
  • Claim: Every campaign must have 50/50 internal and external promotion: internal = content team, email, owned channels; external = creator collabs, product seeding, media outreach. Most brands over-index on internal and wonder why campaigns don't break out. | Evidence: The speaker has a separate full video on campaign planning (teaser → unveil → sustain, with BTS content throughout) and provides a worksheet; the key addition from the workshops is the 50/50 rule: 'Who are you getting involved in the unveils? A creator you can collaborate on the campaign launch? Are you seeding that product out? How do you get media involved?' | Caveat: 50/50 is stated as a general principle without case studies or attribution data showing external promotion's incremental impact; no guidance on how to secure creator/media participation if you lack budget or relationships. | Implication: For product launches or major content series, Ken should plan external amplification upfront (not as an afterthought): which creators, media outlets, or communities can co-promote? For agent systems, this means thinking beyond owned distribution—how do you get AI Twitter, newsletters, podcasts to cover your launch? Budget time and resources for outreach, not just internal execution. | Timestamp: 28:40
  • Claim: Asset repurposing systems—tracking and reusing creator/influencer/UGC content across PDPs, emails, ads—are the highest-leverage tactic for under-resourced teams; most brands leave this value on the table because they lack tracking and assignment workflows. | Evidence: The speaker provides a worksheet outlining 'the flow of your internal assets, things you get from creators or influencers or sending free product. What are all the things you can do with them?' He suggests tasking under-utilized team members with this: 'If you can't create more but you want to make sure you're doing the most and you're putting it on your PDPs and your emails, this is a great way to really task a marketing team.' | Caveat: No specific tools, platforms, or processes recommended beyond the conceptual worksheet; no discussion of rights management, creator approvals, or how to avoid asset fatigue from overuse. | Implication: Ken should implement asset repurposing as a forcing function for lean operations: every piece of UGC, every influencer deliverable, every internal shoot should have a checklist of reuse destinations (email header, PDP testimonial, ad creative, social post, blog embed); for agent systems, this is a prime automation opportunity—build a workflow that tags assets by funnel stage, channel, and usage rights, then auto-suggests repurposing opportunities. | Timestamp: 29:10

Detailed Brief

Marketing Funnel Exercise: Audit Current State, Map Desired Future, Diagnose Gaps

  • Claims: Every brand must map what they do at top (awareness), middle (education/consideration), and bottom (conversion) of the funnel, then grade whether they're 'actually good at it.'; Funnel shape varies by market size: mainstream products (Toyotas, lipstick, guys' t-shirts) have wide funnels where lots of top-funnel traffic should convert; ultra-niche B2B (seven-figure software contracts for ultra-wealthy clients) have narrow funnels where top-of-funnel can be small but must be highly targeted.; The key is not total top-of-funnel volume but how many exit the bottom (sales); some businesses go wide to reach a small qualified audience.; Many enterprise brands at the workshops were strong on top-of-funnel but weak on bottom—'they aren't selling hard enough, they aren't asking for money enough.'
  • Evidence: Workshop format: map what we do today (awareness tactics, consideration tactics, conversion tactics) → grade effectiveness → map what we want to do tomorrow → identify 1–2 new initiatives max.; Bottom-of-funnel tactics listed: SMS (texting to buy), email, sales rep enablement, Instagram Stories CTAs, broadcast channels, retargeting.; Example participant: software firm selling seven-figure contracts to ultra-wealthy businesses asked 'how do we play in this funnel with such a small other end?'; answer is the funnel still works, just fewer people exit the bottom.; The speaker observed large brands (airlines, activewear) getting decent attention but not compelling consumers to buy due to weak or non-aggressive conversion tactics.
  • Caveats: No rubric provided for 'good' vs. 'bad' at each stage—grading is subjective and comparative.; No discussion of how to handle multi-touchpoint customer journeys or attribution complexity across funnel stages.; The framework assumes a linear funnel; some modern customer journeys are non-linear (social discovery → DTC purchase → later awareness of brand story).
  • Implications: Ken should run this audit for HiBeam, personal brand, or portfolio companies: list every tactic at each funnel stage, grade honestly, identify the weakest link, and focus there before adding new channels.; For AI/agent GTM, apply the same logic: what drives awareness (organic content, communities, media), consideration (demos, case studies, explainers), conversion (free trial CTAs, sales outreach, onboarding automation)?; If you're hitting growth ceilings despite good top-of-funnel metrics, the bottleneck is likely middle (not enough education/trust-building) or bottom (not asking for the sale), not more awareness—fix conversion first.

Normie-to-Fringe / Sales-to-Awareness Brand Options Matrix: The Approval and Prioritization Tool

  • Claims: The matrix maps all marketing tactics on two axes: Normie (easily approved, low-risk) to Fringe (bleeding-edge, career/company bets) and Sales (direct revenue focus) to Awareness (top-of-funnel, hard to measure).; Normie/Sales quadrant: wholesale, email, Google ads, Meta ads, YouTube ads, cold outbound—safe, measurable, CFO-friendly but may cap growth.; Fringe/Sales quadrant: creators on brand accounts, TikTok ads, product seeding, affiliate (TikTok Shop, software), SMS (OneText), AppLovin, live selling (TikTok/Whatnot)—scalable but 'weirder' than Meta.; Normie/Awareness quadrant: LinkedIn posting, trade shows, Instagram/TikTok organic, influencer—standard top-of-funnel plays.; Fringe/Awareness quadrant: organic YouTube (rare for brands), X, social shows, multi-account strategy, Snap, streaming (example: brands targeting Gen Alpha must invest in streaming now or lose to Jake Paul's W and other Twitch-native brands).; Brands hitting $30–50M revenue ceilings are stuck in normie/sales quadrant; scaling requires a 'plunge of faith' into awareness (top row) with a budget allocation (e.g., 9% of 14% total marketing spend) that CFOs accept won't show immediate ROAS but unlocks next tier.
  • Evidence: Three recurring tour themes: (1) team structure, (2) how to get risky stuff approved, (3) how to choose among infinite channel options—this matrix addresses (2) and (3).; The speaker says 'bring them this video' if you're stuck at the $30–50M threshold: dozens of workshop firms face the same issue, and the solution is explicit budget allocation to awareness despite unmeasurable ROI.; Streaming example: Right Guard, Under Armour, legacy college-audience brands are 'terrified' because Gen Alpha 'don't give a shit about traditional brands,' only Twitch/streaming culture; Jake Paul's W succeeds because it's native to that infrastructure; a three-year streaming investment is an awareness play to 'own a niche.'; SMS (OneText) and AppLovin called out by name as fringe/sales channels that scale like Meta but feel riskier; the speaker has 'no sponsor relationship' with OneText but recommends it for card-on-file SMS; notes 'toxic shills on Twitter' promote AppLovin without disclosure but it remains a viable channel.
  • Caveats: The speaker says the matrix is 'not perfect' and placements are subjective—'you may feel certain things would be in different places.'; No data on success rates, ROI, or failure rates for fringe tactics; it's a mental model for risk/reward, not a predictive framework.; The $30–50M threshold may not apply to all business models (e.g., ultra-high-ticket B2B, subscription SaaS, venture-funded growth-at-all-costs).; No guidance on how to sequence normie → fringe migration or what percentage of budget to shift when.
  • Implications: Ken should map current and potential marketing/GTM tactics for HiBeam, investments, and content onto this matrix: are you over-indexed in normie/sales (safe but capped)? Are you placing intelligent fringe bets (e.g., agent-driven content for awareness, TikTok Shop for DTC)?; For portfolio companies, use this to diagnose growth plateaus: if they're stuck at $30–50M doing only Meta/Google/email, they need exec alignment on a small awareness budget (LinkedIn organic, influencer, organic YouTube, trade shows) to break through—frame it as 'this is the tax to reach the next tier.'; For AI/agent content ops, fringe/awareness bets = organic YouTube (rare for brands), multi-account social, streaming—high upside if you're early but requires sustained investment and patience.; When evaluating new channels, ask: (1) Is this normie or fringe? (2) Does it drive sales or awareness? (3) Can we execute it well with current team capacity (2 new initiatives max per 6 months)?

Content Funnel and Pillar Mapping: Apply Marketing Funnel Logic to Social, Grade Your Pillars A–F

  • Claims: Content pillars = 3–5 repeatable format+topic combinations you produce monthly (e.g., green screen breakdowns, vlogs, e-commerce photo carousels).; Every brand already has pillars whether they realize it or not; the exercise is to identify them, map them to top/middle/bottom funnel, and grade A–F (compared to competitors and in general).; Top-of-funnel content = virality, views, awareness (e.g., the speaker's product reviews get millions of views, attract marketing-interested audience).; Middle-of-funnel content = education, nurturing, affinity-building (e.g., his marketing education videos like 'why truffles changed' or 'influencer 2026 trends').; Bottom-of-funnel content = CTAs, sales, KPIs (e.g., brand deals, email list drives; tactics include ManyChat for comment-to-email, Stories CTAs, retargeting in organic and paid).; Most brands are 'pretty decent' at middle-of-funnel but weak on top (not enough virality/reach) or bottom (not asking for the sale).
  • Evidence: The speaker's own content funnel breakdown: product reviews (top) → marketing education (middle) → brand deals/email CTAs (bottom).; He assigns team members to each pillar ('Shelby's going to do it, Carl's going to do it') to ensure accountability.; Bottom-of-funnel content tactics: ManyChat (comment automation to email list), Instagram Stories CTAs, broadcast channels, retargeting in organic/paid content.
  • Caveats: Grading is subjective ('do we do them well, especially versus the field that you're at'); no standardized rubric.; No discussion of how to handle content that serves multiple funnel stages (e.g., a product demo video that's both educational and conversion-focused).; The 3–5 pillar constraint may not fit all brands (e.g., media companies with dozens of content types; solo creators with limited bandwidth).
  • Implications: Ken should audit HiBeam and personal content: list all recurring formats (newsletters, Twitter threads, YouTube, LinkedIn), map to top/middle/bottom funnel, grade each, and identify gaps—do you have zero bottom-funnel CTAs? Is your top-of-funnel content a C?; For AI content systems, automate pillar production (e.g., agents generate green screen scripts, carousel designs, email CTAs) but keep human strategy on funnel mapping and grading—automation scales execution, not strategic diagnosis.; If you're getting views but no conversions, the problem is likely middle or bottom: are you educating/nurturing enough? Are you asking for the sale aggressively? Fix that before chasing more top-of-funnel virality.; Assign pillars to specific team members or agents to ensure accountability and avoid 'great ideas' that never ship.

Annual Calendar Matrix: Map Culture, Industry, Sales Heat Maps, Launches, and Missed Opportunities to Prevent Reactive Scrambles

  • Claims: The calendar exercise maps five rows by quarter/month: (1) what's happening in culture (Super Bowl, Olympics, Valentine's Day, back-to-school, World Cup, buying season), (2) your industry events (NAB, CES, Coachella if relevant), (3) sales heat map (Shopify data: which months exceeded/missed goal and why), (4) planned product/service launches, (5) missed opportunities from last year (Slack threads where the team said 'we should have done X').; Cultural moments are high-leverage if you're prepared: the speaker's Super Bowl content got millions of views because he planned for it; he skipped NBA All-Star Weekend because he predicted low virality.; Sales heat map should be color-coded (red/yellow/green) and annotated with why you hit or missed goal (flash sale, major order, successful social campaign)—this reveals replicable patterns and holes to fill.; Launches should be timed around (or deliberately against) cultural/industry moments to avoid conflicts or capitalize on attention.; Missed opportunities are the forcing function to prevent repeating last year's regrets—explicitly hunt down Slack/team notes about 'we should have done X' and plan it this year.
  • Evidence: The speaker's own calendar: February = Super Bowl, Valentine's Day, Olympics (made content on each; Super Bowl millions of views, 'biggest marketing creator participating in that moment'); November = buying season; skipped All-Star Weekend.; Industry example: when he worked in camera drones, NAB (broadcast show) and CES (Las Vegas) were annual fixtures; retailers stock shelves based on what they see there.; The downloadable calendar template is 'all white' and users shade it red/yellow/green based on performance, then annotate.; He says 'this is your moment to critically think back' and avoid letting good ideas die in Slack threads.
  • Caveats: No guidance on how to prioritize conflicting opportunities (e.g., product launch collides with cultural moment—do you move it or double down?).; No discussion of how to adapt mid-year if the calendar becomes obsolete due to market shifts, competitor actions, or internal pivots.; The framework assumes annual planning cycles; may not fit fast-moving startups or highly seasonal businesses that plan quarterly.
  • Implications: Ken should build a 2026 calendar for HiBeam, personal brand, and key investments: mark AI conferences (OpenAI DevDay, NeurIPS), big tech announcements (Apple/Google I/O), past traffic/sales spikes (which newsletter issues or videos over-performed and why?), planned agent feature launches, and explicitly note 2024/2025 missed opportunities (e.g., 'we should have covered multimodal agents earlier').; Use the calendar as a shared alignment tool with teams/partners: everyone knows what's coming, when to prepare content/campaigns, and what we're betting on vs. skipping.; For content/campaigns, plan 4–6 weeks ahead of major moments to ensure creative production, external partnerships (creators, media), and internal approvals are locked before the window opens.; Sales heat map analysis = predictive planning: if Q4 always over-performs due to buying season, front-load inventory/ad spend; if Q1 always misses, schedule a flash sale or new launch to fill the gap.

Campaign Planning: 50/50 Internal/External Promotion, Teaser → Unveil → Sustain Structure, and Asset Repurposing as Lean Leverage

  • Claims: Every campaign needs teaser, unveil, sustain phases with more content than you think, plus BTS (behind-the-scenes) content throughout—the speaker has a full separate video on this and provides a worksheet.; The critical addition from workshops: 50/50 internal vs. external promotion. Internal = content team, email, owned channels. External = creator collabs, product seeding, media outreach. Most brands over-index on internal and wonder why campaigns don't break out.; Asset repurposing is the highest-leverage tactic for under-resourced teams: systematically track and reuse creator/influencer/UGC content across PDPs (product detail pages), emails, ads.; Develop a workflow to assign under-tasked team members to repurposing: 'If you can't create more but you want to make sure you're doing the most… this is a great way to really task a marketing team.'
  • Evidence: Campaign worksheet based on the speaker's full video: includes sections for teaser, unveil, BTS, sustain, internal actions (content team, email list), external actions (who to collab with on launch, seeding, media).; The speaker says 'you should probably have a 50-50 emphasis on where your internal promotions go and how much external promotion you can have.'; Asset repurposing worksheet 'outlines the flow of your internal assets, things you get from creators or influencers or sending free product'—what are all the things you can do with them?; He suggests this is useful for teams that feel 'under-tasked' or have 'no budget to do more.'
  • Caveats: No examples of successful 50/50 campaigns or case studies showing external promotion's incremental impact.; No tools, platforms, or processes recommended for asset repurposing beyond the conceptual worksheet.; No discussion of rights management, creator approvals for reuse, or how to avoid asset fatigue from overuse.; The teaser/unveil/sustain structure may not fit all campaign types (e.g., always-on content, product drops with zero pre-announcement).
  • Implications: For product launches, Ken should plan external amplification upfront: which creators, newsletters, podcasts, communities can co-promote? Don't treat external as an afterthought—budget time and resources for outreach before the launch window.; For AI/agent launches, external = AI Twitter, Hacker News, AI newsletters (TheRundown, Ben's Bites), podcasts (Latent Space, TWIML), Discord communities—map these and start relationship-building early, not day-of-launch.; Asset repurposing = prime automation opportunity: build a workflow that tags every UGC, influencer deliverable, internal shoot by funnel stage, channel, usage rights, then auto-suggests repurposing destinations (email header, PDP testimonial, ad creative, social post)—this is a forcing function for lean ops and high asset ROI.; If launching a major content series or agent feature, structure it with teaser (build anticipation), unveil (big splash with internal + external), BTS (humanize the process, build narrative), sustain (ongoing content, case studies, updates)—don't just launch and hope.

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Normie to Fringe / Sales to Awareness Matrix: A 2x2 prioritization tool that maps marketing tactics by risk level (normie = easily approved, fringe = bleeding-edge career bets) and goal type (sales = direct revenue, awareness = top-of-funnel, hard to measure). Used to diagnose why brands plateau at $30–50M (stuck in normie/sales quadrant) and make explicit the 'plunge of faith' required to scale via awareness investment.
  • $30–50M Revenue Ceiling: The growth threshold where performance marketing (Meta/Google ads, email, measurable ROI) caps out and brands must shift budget to unmeasurable awareness plays (influencer, organic YouTube, trade shows, streaming) to unlock the next tier. CFOs/CEOs resist because awareness doesn't show immediate ROAS, but dozens of workshop brands confirmed this pattern; solution is allocating a small percentage (e.g., 9% of 14% marketing budget) to awareness and measuring holistically (does it lift Meta ad performance, wholesale, lifetime value?).
  • Content Pillar = Format + Topic: A repeatable content type produced monthly, defined by both format (green screen, vlog, carousel, explainer) and topic (product reviews, brand breakdowns, how-tos). Brands should have 3–5 pillars at any time, map each to top/middle/bottom funnel, grade A–F, and assign team ownership. Most brands have pillars implicitly; the exercise makes them explicit for strategic optimization.
  • 50/50 Internal/External Promotion Rule: Campaign planning principle: 50% of promotion should be internal (owned channels, content team, email, social) and 50% external (creator collabs, product seeding, media outreach). Most brands over-index on internal and wonder why campaigns don't break out; external amplification requires upfront planning, relationship-building, and budget allocation.
  • Two New Initiatives Max per Six Months: Constraint principle from workshop observations: even large teams can only execute two net-new marketing initiatives well in a six-month period; trying more dilutes quality and kills results. 90% of brands should focus on doing existing things better, not adding new channels. Forces prioritization and prevents 'shiny object syndrome.'
  • Asset Repurposing Workflow: System for tracking and reusing creator/influencer/UGC content across PDPs, emails, ads, social. The highest-leverage tactic for under-resourced teams; requires a workflow to assign team members and checklist of reuse destinations. Prime automation opportunity for AI/agent systems.
  • Calendar Matrix (Culture + Industry + Sales Heat Map + Launches + Missed Opportunities): Annual planning tool with five rows mapped by quarter/month: (1) cultural moments (Super Bowl, Olympics, back-to-school), (2) industry events (NAB, CES, trade shows), (3) sales performance from last year (Shopify data: which months exceeded/missed goal and why), (4) planned product/service launches, (5) missed opportunities from last year (Slack threads where team said 'we should have done X'). Prevents reactive scrambles and ensures proactive campaign windows.
  • OneText (SMS platform): Card-on-file SMS platform recommended by the speaker (no sponsor relationship) for bottom-of-funnel conversion. SMS is 'fringe/sales' on the matrix—brands are still afraid of it despite scalability comparable to Meta ads. Noted alongside AppLovin (also fringe/sales, promoted by 'toxic shills on Twitter' who don't disclose relationships).
  • Streaming as Gen Alpha Awareness Play: Fringe/awareness tactic: brands targeting Gen Alpha (who consume heavily via Twitch/YouTube live, not traditional sports/TV) must invest in streaming now or lose to native brands like Jake Paul's W. Example: Right Guard, Under Armour, legacy college-audience brands are 'terrified' because Gen Alpha 'don't give a shit about traditional brands.' A three-year streaming investment is a long-term awareness play to own a niche, not a direct sales driver.
  • Creative Strategy Program: The speaker's new offering (brought out of beta) for marketing and brand strategy training, similar to his Cut30 program but focused on making marketers 'weapons grade' and training brand teams on modern marketing. Applications below the video; targeted at marketers at 'substantial level' in their career.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • If Ken's portfolio companies or clients are plateauing at $30–50M revenue despite strong Meta/Google/email performance, this is the diagnostic: they need exec alignment on a small awareness budget (LinkedIn organic, influencer, trade shows, streaming for Gen Alpha) to break the ceiling. Frame it as 'the tax to reach the next tier' and show this video to de-risk the CFO/CEO conversation—dozens of enterprise brands face the same issue.
  • The 'two new initiatives max per six months' rule is a forcing function for prioritization in agent roadmaps, content calendars, and GTM plans. Ken should apply this to HiBeam and investments: constrain to 1–2 net-new bets per quarter, improve existing workflows first, and avoid 'shiny object syndrome' that dilutes execution quality.
  • The Normie-to-Fringe matrix is a mental model for AI/agent GTM and content strategy: are you stuck in normie/sales (safe but commoditized) or placing intelligent fringe bets (e.g., streaming for Gen Alpha, TikTok Shop for DTC, organic YouTube for awareness)? For investing, ask founders where their marketing stack sits on this matrix and whether they have a thesis for when to jump to fringe.
  • Content pillar mapping to funnel stages is critical for AI content automation: agents can scale execution (generate scripts, designs, CTAs) but humans must set the strategic funnel mapping first. Ken should audit HiBeam/personal content pillars, map to top/middle/bottom funnel, grade A–F, and identify gaps before automating production.
  • Asset repurposing is a prime automation opportunity for lean ops: build a workflow that tags every UGC, influencer deliverable, internal shoot by funnel stage, channel, usage rights, then auto-suggests repurposing destinations. This is high-leverage for under-resourced teams and a forcing function for asset ROI.
  • The calendar matrix exercise is useful for HiBeam and investments: map AI conferences (OpenAI DevDay, NeurIPS), big tech announcements (Apple/Google I/O), past traffic/sales spikes, planned agent feature launches, and 2024/2025 missed opportunities. Use it as a shared alignment tool to prevent reactive firefighting and create proactive content/campaign windows.
  • For AI/agent launches, external promotion (AI Twitter, newsletters, podcasts, communities) must be 50% of the plan, not an afterthought. Start relationship-building early—don't just launch on Product Hunt and hope. The speaker's 50/50 rule applies: budget time and resources for outreach before the launch window.
  • If Ken works with enterprise or growth-stage companies with decent brand awareness but weak conversions, audit bottom-of-funnel rigor: are they using SMS (OneText), ManyChat for comment-to-email, Stories/broadcast CTAs, aggressive retargeting? Many large orgs treat social as pure awareness and leave conversion to separate teams, creating a gap—fixing this is high-leverage and low-risk.

Watch Map

  • 00:00: Intro: tour recap, five exercises overview, downloadable worksheets available
  • 02:30: Exercise 1: Marketing funnel audit (top/middle/bottom → what we do today vs. tomorrow)
  • 08:50: Key observation: enterprise brands doing lots of top-of-funnel but not selling hard enough at bottom
  • 10:45: The $30–50M revenue ceiling: why performance marketing caps and awareness is a 'plunge of faith'
  • 14:20: Exercise 2: Normie-to-Fringe / Sales-to-Awareness matrix (approval and prioritization tool)
  • 18:30: Two new initiatives max per six months, even for large teams; 90% should just do existing things better
  • 21:00: Exercise 3: Content funnel and pillar mapping (3–5 pillars, map to funnel stages, grade A–F, assign team ownership)
  • 24:15: Exercise 4: Annual calendar matrix (culture, industry, sales heat map, launches, missed opportunities)
  • 28:40: Exercise 5: Campaign planning (50/50 internal/external promotion, teaser/unveil/sustain structure)
  • 29:10: Asset repurposing workflow for under-resourced teams; Creative Strategy Program mention
  • 30:45: Wrap-up: downloadable worksheets, community call in March, tour feedback request

Source/Metadata

  • Title: How to Make a Marketing Plan (2026 Playbook)
  • Transcript words: 9940
  • Duration seconds: 1130
  • Timestamp note: Timestamps estimated based on transcript flow and video duration of 1130 seconds (18:50); chapter markers not present in transcript but inferred from structural shifts.
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Full transcript 4865 words · 44 min read
0:00

SPEAKER_00

In this video, we are going to talk about how to make a marketing plan, a 2026 guide.

0:05

SPEAKER_00

As many of you know, I was on tour earlier this year. We did two stops in New York, Miami, Toronto, and in each place, we had 40 brands come in to do live workshopping around their marketing plans for the year. I ran through a series of five exercises and we had brands from small independents all the way up to major airlines and activewear companies, software, workshopping how they can actually make a difference in this really complicated marketing climate. I'm going to walk through all of those same exact exercises here in this video. There are downloads to accompany this with all the worksheets we used. So even if you couldn't make it in person, you can still sit down and actually go through it. I highly recommend doing this with your notebooks out, actually walking through it for your brand or one of your clients, or just theoretically, and really going through the exercise to think about what you can do to make a difference in marketing this year. And then you can save this for any future time you're doing year or quarterly planning. These are a great set of exercises to do. I'm excited because when I was on tour, I got to see the actual differences and problems that businesses had, what their problems are really dealing with versus just the things we see on the internet. It's a lot different in real life. A big part of why I wanted to go was to be able to learn what challenges people actually have so that I have things to make content about that are really relevant to you. I feel like we've really nailed that here. Let's get into it. So first off, if you missed last week's community call, you can see the recording and the downloads below as well. We will have another one coming up in March. So please get on the list for that. I love workshopping with you in person and online. It's one of my big goals for this year. Now, alternatively, if you want to see the new tour dates and you want to be a part of that tour coming up, Air, who put together this last one, and I were talking about what the next dates are. Let us know the markets you're in as we are trying to plan that actively. But let's start off by walking through the exercises that we're going to go through today. The first is we're going to walk through the brand's marketing funnel. Look at what are we good at today? What are we good at tomorrow and explain the funnel in general? Then we're going to look at this chart of all the different marketing initiatives that are going on in the world and why you would consider doing them in a world where there are so many options now. It's really hard to decide. We're going to show how the marketing funnel applies to content and the content funnel and why content marketing is so aligned now. We're going to talk briefly about asset repurposing because we know not everyone has the ability to do more each year. Sometimes you have to do more with what you already have. Then we're going to go through your year planning calendar. Let's start with the marketing funnel exercise. This is something I think any company, even an individual, if you market yourself or your service or your offer or your creator should do. If you aren't familiar with the marketing funnel, this is how people go from attention at the top. What does your brand do to generate awareness? How do you get more and more people aware of what you do? How do you graduate them down through the funnel, get them educated on your brand and considering purchasing what you do, following you, etc., all the way to the bottom where they actually make the sale. And so the point of this exercise and how it works is that every brand should look at what are we doing right now at each of these three stages of the funnel. At the top, what do we do right now for awareness? How do we bring in attention? And then the key question is, are we actually good at it? Does this work for us? Same thing in the middle. If you're getting good attention, you bring people in with viral videos or ads, etc., are you good at converting the attention you already get into people that are interested to buy? How do you educate? How do you nurture? How do they build affinity with your brand or your product, whether it's software or cosmetics? And then at the bottom, how are we getting the sale? Are we actually pushing people through the funnel down to a sale? This is where I want to stop for a second and outline that funnels are very different for different businesses and for different creators, anything you do. So for instance, if you sell a very mainstream product, you sell Toyotas, you sell lipstick that every woman could use, you sell guys' t-shirts, your top of funnel has a lot of potential to get to your bottom of funnel. You have a wide funnel. A lot of people come in at the top, a lot of people can exit at the bottom if you're good because you have a big market for your products. So your job is to try and get a lot of people really educated and buying at the bottom. And you don't want to have a ton of drop-off from the top of your funnel to the bottom. A lot of businesses are in a very different position where they have very specific people they want to buy. One of the people at our workshop was a software firm that sells only to ultra-wealthy businesses with super high needs. Their contracts are seven figures and they're wondering, how do we play in this marketing funnel? We have such a small other end. And the difference is it's not actually that different. It's just way less people come out the bottom. You need to figure out a way to reach your target demo. And maybe you can get ultra-targeted with that. But for a lot of people, it's going to be somewhat wider. And your only care whether you reach a million people at the top or 100,000 at the top is how many people come out the bottom. Are you getting to the sale you want to get to? It's an important concept to wrap your head around because some people may want to go wide to get to small. But in this exercise, we map out what do we do today for awareness? What do we do today to actually get people educated and build affinity with our brand? And that could be anything from educational content to our email automation series to the logo repetition in ads. They're reminded of it to what we do inside our community and events. We hold a lot of middle of funnel content and marketing initiatives to the bottom. How do we get people to convert? And the bottom, I want to call out and I have it here in the chart. What are you doing for SMS? You're texting people to buy. What are you doing for email? How do your sales reps operate? Do they have the right materials if you have a sales process? What are you doing on your Instagram stories? Are you pushing out sales stuff on your broadcast channels? There are a lot of bottom of funnel options. And for a lot of brands who are already getting decent attention but not converting enough, you should just focus 100% on this. And what I noticed inside this event is there actually were a lot of brands. We definitely skewed more towards bigger and enterprise brands that were at the actual workshops. That was their real

0:09

SPEAKER_00

Chart. What are you doing for SMS? You're texting people to buy. What are you doing for email? How's your sales reps operate? Do they have the right materials if you have a sales process? What are you doing on your Instagram stories? Are you pushing out sales stuff on your broadcast channels? There's a lot of bottom of funnel options. And for a lot of brands who are already getting decent attention but not converting enough, you should just focus 100% on this.

0:26

SPEAKER_00

And what I noticed inside this event is there actually were a lot of brands. We definitely skewed more towards bigger and enterprise brands that were at the actual workshops. That was their real problem: they aren't selling hard enough. They're actually doing lots of top of funnel, but they aren't asking for money enough and they aren't aggressively doing it or doing it in a way that's compelling for the consumer to want to engage in. So then on this chart, we go through what are we doing today? And then we map out where do we want to be tomorrow? What could we do? Are we doing great at top of funnel? Don't change anything. Are we doing great at the bottom? Don't change anything. Or do we want to update our strategy? So how do you decide what you want to update your strategy with? That's when we get to this chart, which I love. One of my fun ideas, which is the Normie to Fringe Sales to Awareness Brand Options Chart. This is all the marketing you could do. And it's listed on a scale. So on the left here, we have Normie. Things that you can get approved no matter how stingy your boss is, no matter how risk averse they are. That's Normie.

0:30

SPEAKER_00

This was one of, I think there's probably three key topics that came up on tour. One was how do you structure our team nowadays? That was a big one that came up. I'm going to do a video on later. The second was this: how do I get stuff approved? That was a huge thing that came up. And we just did a grandfather's pod about this last week. And the third one was this: how do we decide what to do in all of these initiatives? And so I've put this chart together. It's not perfect. You may feel that certain things would be in different places, but really it's designed to say, what can I easily get approved and anyone could do on the Normie side? On the fringe side, it's what can I do to be at the bleeding edge? I might want to make a bet on that. I will bet my career. I can advance in my career by being ahead of it. I will bet my company. I can compete with people that are slower, can't get things approved by being on the edge. And then where are our focuses, right? Because sales and awareness are very different goals. If you are a business, smaller business, you're probably hyper-focused on sales. You say, we need to get sales to grow. We can't waste our time on awareness. And you're right.

0:35

SPEAKER_00

But then for a lot of brands, they reach a cap. They go, we've had all this marketing that's been so measurable for so long. We've run our meta ads, we've run our Google ads, we do email, we sell these accounts, we've hit a threshold. We just can't get any larger. And this is a hard point for a lot of businesses. And we discussed this in depth because so many businesses have hit this. It's usually between 30 and $50 million where you go, oh my God, all this stuff that got us here was measurable, was safe. The CFO liked it, CEO liked it. Marketing was extremely mathematical. But to get to that next level, you have to make a jump. The awareness level is a plunge of faith and you cannot scale beyond some of those numbers that you hit without taking that plunge into, we have to look at marketing more holistically. We have to get into awareness. And if you're in this position, every business is in this position. I've been in businesses that have fallen apart in this position. But bring them this video. Tell them there are dozens and dozens of firms that we met with in the last few weeks that are at that point where we need to scale. We need to go into awareness. Everyone feels it's too risky. How do we balance that? And for a lot of people, it's just assigning percents of the marketing budget. Yes, we do the same thing we used to do. And we're doing that with 9% of the 14% we spend on marketing or whatever that ratio is for your business. But what you'll notice is you start doing more of that awareness. It increases the efficacy of what you do on meta. It increases the efficacy of what you do in wholesale. And you can't measure it the same way you can measure a meta flow. It's important to think about. So calling out some of the things on here, in this normie sales corner, wholesale selling into retail, email marketing, Google ads, meta ads, YouTube ads, cold outbound, we're just reaching directly out to businesses for your leads. You know what those are. Going over here into fringe sales. If you're putting creators on your accounts, that is a slightly more sales driven marketing approach. Are you running ads on TikTok? Are you seeding, sending out free product in the hopes of getting posts? Do you run an affiliate program as ultra sales focused, but more fringe for doing affiliate on TikTok shop? Or if you're doing affiliate for software. SMS. People are still afraid of SMS. I cannot recommend more something like one text, no sponsor relationship. They have card on file SMS text, an incredible piece of software. App loving. A lot of toxic shills on Twitter who don't disclose their app loving relationships who have talked about this, but it is still a channel that you can scale in the same way as meta. It's just weirder. And then live selling. Can you get on TikTok, Whatnot, but you're actually selling and generating profitable lives on your own channels or with creators that covers the sales end.

0:39

SPEAKER_00

And again, there's more on this. Take your own initiatives, you know, and put them on this chart, move things to where you think they are. I'm not acting like this is the end all Bible.

0:44

SPEAKER_00

Now let's go into awareness. So LinkedIn posting is more of awareness focus, going to trade shows, hyper awareness focus, unless they're really tied into wholesale. Instagram and TikTok organic social. Influencer kind of straddles that line. I'd argue it's slightly more awareness focused and then more into fringe. Are you doing organic YouTube? That's pretty rare, but obviously you'll see people. I've made a lot of videos on the air channel that is them doing organic awareness on YouTube. X, God forsaken X. If you're doing something more like a social show, you have multi-account strategy on social media where you have five or six Instagram accounts, clipping, you have a snap strategy. And then I put streaming at the other end, different than live selling. But if the reason I want to call this one out is say you are a brand that's really hyper focused on Gen Alpha. And when Gen Alpha becomes consumers and they consume a lot through streaming, you may not get a lot of sales right now, but I'd be terrified if I was Right Guard.

0:49

SPEAKER_00

but obviously you'll see people like I've made a lot of videos on the air channel that is them doing organic awareness on YouTube, X. If you're doing something more like a social show, you have multi-account strategy on social media where you have five or six Instagram accounts, clipping, you have a snap strategy. And then I put streaming at the other end, different than live selling. But if the reason I want to call this one out is say you are a brand is really hyper focused on Gen Alpha. And when Gen Alpha becomes consumers and they consume a lot through streaming, you may not get a lot of sales right now, but I'd be terrified if I was Right Guard, if I was Under Armour, if I was anyone who had traditionally had a college audience, they don't give a shit about any of the traditional brands they had. They only care about what's in their own infrastructure and culture. That's why you see brands like Jake Paul's W pop up. And I would be saying, man, we have to do a three-year investment in streaming to gain relevancy as an awareness play. It's a good example of fringe awareness to be able to own a niche. So once you've used it, once you've run through this brand options chart, you can come back up and say, what are we going to do? And realistically for 90% of businesses, what you're going to do is just do the existing things that you do better. That's going to be the primary. But if you are a business in a place where you want to add more, two is the maximum things that the team, even if you have a big team, can really do and execute well, even in a six month period. I would be putting those on here for the year. And I would say, where are they at? Is this initiative helping our top of funnel? Is there helping our bottom? Is it helping our consideration? Don't ignore the middle, even though my chart was more focused the other way. Where do we need the most help? What are one to two initiatives that we can add on here? And then you actually map that out. And now you have the top end of a plan. So now it's up to you if you want to do these other two stages of what order you want to do it. But this is the content funnel, which is basically looking at social media the same way. What do we do on Instagram to get more attention? What we do on TikTok to get more attention at an awareness level? What puts up views for us? What do we do at the middle to educate? And then what do we do at the bottom? And my content pillar system, where it says we have three to five types of content as a brand we put out at any given time. Look at your pillars. And every brand has it. Whether you think you do or not, you probably already have three to five types of content. So a pillar would be a format plus a topic. I do we do green screen breakdowns, we do vlogs for behind the scenes, we do carousels of our e-commerce photos, any one of those things you repeat regularly each in a month is a pillar. And if you don't have those, you can go through the exercise of designing them. Yes, we want to do these pillars. And that's part of this, you take those pillars and you map them to the funnel. Does this pillar participate in top of funnel and middle funnel or bottom of funnel? Let me do this as an example for my own content, my product versus brand content is top of funnel, I do product reviews primarily for my top of funnel content as a creator that gets me a lot of views, I get millions of views regularly breaking down what products I think people should buy how marketing works, that brings me people that are likely interested in marketing, that's my real target demographic people that are interested in marketing and branding, they are also interested in what they buy and why so that's the top of my funnel, but in the middle, I do lots of marketing educational videos, a lot of content you've watched where I'll talk about why truffles were changed as a concept or these five brand campaigns or let's break down how influencer marketing changed in 26. That's my middle of funnel, I'm educating. Not everyone graduates from product reviews down there, that's completely fine, but it gets me my target demographic in the middle. And then at the bottom, I have brand deals and I have stuff that drives to my email list and that's my bottom of funnel content. I have my pillars to reflect that. What you would want to do is look at the pillars you have today and assign a grade to them. Do we do them well, especially versus the field that you're at, comparative to other businesses in our niche and then in general, what are we doing? A through F, we're doing good, we're doing bad. And then you can look at how's that mapped to the funnel, how's our top of funnel on social today? Okay, is it a C? How is our middle of funnel? Okay, that's a B. Most brands are pretty decent middle of funnel. And then bottom of funnel, how are we asking for the sale? How are we driving KPIs? Are we using ManyChat for comments to drive people to our email list? Do we sell well on stories? Do we really leverage retargeting in our organic content and paid? What are we doing on bottom of funnel? And it might not always be related to content, you might have to have this conversation in tandem with your market. Then look at tomorrow, what do we want our pillars to be? What could they be? What content could we create? How do we take these grades higher? And how do we map our content to the funnel higher? And that's the conversation you want to go workshop. And then most importantly with this, a lot of people have great social ideas. Who's going to do it? What's the action that we want a creator on our main account? Who's going to do it on the team? Yeah, Shelby's going to do it. Carl's going to do it. Important exercise to work through. And then we're going to map this to the calendar. And this is an excellent exercise everyone should do. Create a brand of any size is go through the calendar for the year. First line, I do this by quarter by month, what's happening in culture. So for instance, in February, I had it mapped out that the Super Bowl is there, Valentine's Day is there and the Olympics is there. And I made content about each of them. And it was really important content for me to be able to be capturing the zeitgeist. So my Super Bowl content put up millions of views. I was probably the biggest marketing creator participating in that moment and got the most out of it of anyone because I was prepared for it. And then I look at my own content for culture going on. We have the World Cup coming. Am I going to participate in that I decided not to do All Star Weekend because I didn't think there was going to be enough virality around it. November, I had buying season, I'm just mapping out what's happening in culture back to school, all these things you could participate in, then you have your industry. So for

0:54

SPEAKER_00

content about each of them. And it was really important content for me to be able to capture the zeitgeist. So my Super Bowl content put up millions of views. I was probably the biggest marketing creator participating in that moment and got the most out of it of anyone because I was prepared for it. And then I look at my own content for culture going on. We have the World Cup coming. Am I going to participate in that? I decided not to do All Star Weekend because I didn't think there was going to be enough virality around it. In November, I had buying season. I'm just mapping out what's happening in culture—back to school, all these things you could participate in. Then you have your industry. So for instance, when I worked in camera drones, NAB was a huge show in our industry. It's a broadcast show where people go buy cameras and then retailers go to buy products they're going to stock on their shelves in the camera space. So we always have NAB as a big thing. CES in Las Vegas—those are industry events. So in your industry, are there interior design shows or fashion shows or cosmetic shows or things that you're going to do? Coachella might be an industry show technically for you if you sell a certain type of product. Where do they lie? Then go through your sales heat map, pull up your Shopify data. What months did you do well and look at your goal? What month did we exceed goal? What month are we under goal? And map—we usually in the downloadable version of this, it's all white. We usually shade it red, yellow, green. And then really look at: okay, if you hit your sales goal, why did we hit it? Is there something that we have to replicate? Because a lot of people will hit it and they assume they hit it the next year, but don't do the same actions. You actually write out on this chart: hey, we hit it because we did a flash sale or because we had this massive order or whatever it was noted, or we had a successful social campaign. Okay, how can you repeat that? Same thing with social? When did we shine on social? And then when were we down? Then you can look at both how do we repeat what we did and then how do we fill the holes? And then here you can go through your actual launches. When do you plan to launch product? Do you want to move that because of what's happening in culture or your industry or last year's data? And you can work through it. Whenever I launch my collections or our new product or this new PDF, I would highly encourage you—even if you're an agency—to launch a new service or a new offer or a new showcase. That's a launch. Think about your marketing. I do this as a creator. I have launches. I launched a new series. I'm going to Japan and then we're likely going to launch new products. There's a lot of that—it's the way to think about it. And then last, one thing that we added while we were doing this tour was what we miss out on. So you can often note: last year, your team will have been in Slack, whatever it is. It was like, man, we really should have done X, but then you never have time to do it. This is your moment to critically think back, go through your Slack, to your teams and be like, okay, what did we miss out on? Let's try to hunt down some of those things so we know. So now you have your marketing funnel, your content funnel, your brand options, your calendar matrix. Two other ones that I'm going to zoom through quickly that you're going to have in this packet is asset repurposing. A lot of people are like, we don't have budget to do more. How can you do more with what you already have? So this outlines the flow of your internal assets, things you get from creators or influencers or sending free product. What are all the things you can do with them? And developing a system to track them is a really useful exercise. If you can't create more but you want to make sure you're doing the most and you're putting it on your PDPs and your emails, this is a great way to really task a marketing team, especially if you have people you feel are under tasked, to make sure they're doing actions with things you already have that can result in better middle of the funnel, bottom of funnel conversion for you. And then last is this campaign planning. I have a whole video on campaigns. I'm not going to dive into this deep, but this is a worksheet based on that. In that campaign video, I break down how you need to have a teaser, how you need to unveil, how you need a lot more content than you think, how you need BTS, how you need to then sustain your campaign. There's a whole video on it, but this is a worksheet you can now use for how to think about it. And the key topic that I will tell you here is you need to plan about internal and external for your campaigns. Internal—what do you do with your content team, your email list, etc.? But every good campaign also has external. Who are you getting involved in the unveils? A creator you can collaborate on the campaign launch? Are you seeding that product out? How do you get media involved? And can you map that? You should probably have a 50-50 emphasis on where your internal promotions go and how much external promotion you can have as well. Doing this in person was an entire day. We have four hours of workshopping panels, sitting down in small groups. I'm not going to give you the four-hour version of this, but you have these worksheets. These are how to use them. If you are a marketer or creator, you now have this in your toolkit. Run this for your brand. It's something you can expand on in your career. If you want to learn more about this and learn more about strategy, or you want to train people in your brands, we did bring our new creative strategy program—very similar to what I do in Cut30, but it's for marketing and brand strategy for marketers who want to become weapons grade for brands, that want to train their people on modern marketing. We have brought that out of beta and we are back running. So the applications for that are below. That is something if you are at a more substantial level in your career, you can tap into. You can grab all these docs for free down below. Big shout out to Air who put on the tour. I know we have lots of images and graphics included from that as we went through this YouTube. If you have questions on the marketing planning process, any of this below, please drop them and I'll be happy to answer. And we will be doing another community call in March where we can do it live. Thank you all so much for watching. Appreciate it.

0:58

SPEAKER_00

planning. There are a great set of exercises to do. I'm super excited because when I was on tour, I got to see the actual differences and problems that businesses had, what their problems are really dealing with versus just the things we see on the internet. It's a lot different in real life. A big part of why I wanted to go was to be able to learn what challenges people actually have so that I have things to make content about that are really relevant to you. I feel like we've really nailed that here. Let's get into it. Lock in. So first off, if you missed last week's community call,

1:23

SPEAKER_00

you can see the recording and the downloads below as well. We will have another one coming up in March. So please get on the list for that. I love workshopping with you in person and online. It's one of my big goals for this year. Now, alternatively, if you want to see the new tour dates and you want to be a part of that tour coming up, Air, who put together this last one, and I were talking about what the next dates are, let us know the markets you're in as we are trying to plan that actively. But let's start off by walking through the exercises that we're going to go through today. The first is

1:48

SPEAKER_00

we're going to walk through the brand's marketing phone. Look at what are we good at today? What are we good at tomorrow and explain the funnel in general? Then we're going to look at this chart of all the different marketing initiatives that are going on in the world and why you would consider doing them in the world where there's so many options now. It's really hard to decide. We're going to show how the marketing funnel applies to content and the content funnel and why content marketing are so aligned now. We're going to talk briefly about asset repurposing because we know not everyone has the

2:14

SPEAKER_00

ability to do more each year. Sometimes you have to do more with what you already have. Then we're going to go through your year planning calendar. Let's start with the marketing funnel exercise. This is something I think any company, even an individual, if you market yourself or your service or your offer or your creator should do. If you aren't familiar with the marketing funnel, this is how people go from attention at the top. What does your brand do to generate awareness? How do you get more and more people aware of what you do? How do you graduate them down through the funnel, get them educated on your

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brand and considering purchasing what you do, following you, etc. All the way to the bottom where they actually make the sale. And so the point of this exercise and how it works is that every brand should look at what are we doing right now at each of these three stages of the funnel. At the top, what do we do right now for awareness? How do we bring in attention? And then the key question is, are we actually good at it? Does this work for us? Same thing in the middle. If you're getting good attention, you bring people in with viral videos or ads, etc. Are you good at converting the attention you

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already get into people that are interested to buy? How do you educate? How do you nurture? How do they build affinity with your brand or your product, whether it's software or cosmetics? And then to the bottom, how are we getting the sale? Are we actually pushing people through the funnel down to a sale? This is where I want to stop for a second and outline that funnels are very different for different businesses and for different creators, anything you do. So for instance, if you sell a very mainstream product, you sell Toyotas, you sell lipstick that every woman could use, you sell guys t-shirts,

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your top of funnel has a lot of potential to get to your bottom of funnel. You have a wide funnel. So a lot of people come in at the top, a lot of people can exit at the bottom if you're good because you have a big market for your products. So your job is to try and get a lot of people really educated and buying at the bottom. And you don't want to have a ton of drop off from the top of your funnel to the bottom. A lot of businesses are in a very different position where they have very specific people they want to buy. One of the people at our workshop was a software firm that sells only to like ultra

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wealthy businesses with super high needs. Their contracts are seven figures and they're like, how do we play in this marketing funnel? We have a such a small other end. And the difference is it's not actually that different. It's just a way less people come out the bottom, you need to figure out a way to reach your target demo. And maybe you can get ultra targeted with that. But for a lot of people, it's going to be somewhat wider. And your only care whether you reach a million people at the top or 100,000 at the top is how many people come out the bottom. Are you getting to the sale you want to get to? And it's important

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concept to wrap your head around because some people may want to go wide to get to small. But in this exercise, we map out what do we do today for awareness? What do we do today to actually get people educated and build affinity with our brand? And so that could be anything from educational content to our email automation series to the logo repetition and ads. They're reminded of it to what we do inside our community and events. We hold lots of middle of funnel content and marketing initiatives to the bottom. How do we get people to convert? And the bottom, I want to call out and I have it here in the

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chart. What are you doing for SMS? You're texting people to buy. What are you doing for email? How's your sales reps operate? Do they have the right materials if you have a sales process? What are you doing on your Instagram stories? Are you pushing out sales stuff on your broadcast channels? There's a lot of bottom of funnel options. And for a lot of brands who are already getting decent attention but not converting enough, you should just focus 100% on this. And what I noticed inside this event is there actually were a lot of brands. We definitely skewed more towards bigger and enterprise brands that were at the actual workshops. That was their real

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problem is they aren't selling hard enough. They're actually doing lots of top of funnel, but they aren't asking for money enough and they aren't aggressively doing it or doing it in a way that's compelling for the consumer to want to engage in. So then on this chart, we go through what are we doing today? And then we map out where do we want to be tomorrow? What could we do? Are we doing great at top of funnel? Don't change anything. Are we doing great at the bottom? Don't change anything. Or do we want to update our strategy? So how do you decide what you want to update your strategy with? That's when we get to this chart, which I love. One of my fun

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ideas, which is the Normie to Fringe Sales to Awareness Brand Options Chart. This is all the marketing you could do. And it's listed on a scale. So on the left here, we have Normie. Things that you can get approved no matter how stingy your boss is, no matter how risk averse they are. That's Normie. This was one of, I think there's probably three key topics that came up on tour. One was how do you structure our team nowadays? That was a big one that came up. I'm going to do a video on later. The second was this, how do I get stuff approved? That was a huge thing that came up. And we just did

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a grandfather's pod about this last week. And the third one was basically this, how do we decide what to do in all of these initiatives? And so I've put this chart together. It's not perfect. You may feel that certain things would be in different places, but really it's designed to say, what can I easily get approved and anyone could do on the Normie side? On the fringe side, it's what can I do to be at the bleeding edge? I might want to make a bet on that I will bet my career. I can advance in my career by being ahead of it. I will bet my company. I can compete with people that are slower, can't get things

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approved by being on the edge. And then where are our focuses, right? Because sales and awareness are very different goals. If you are a business, smaller business, you're probably hyper-focused on sales. You say, we need to get sales to grow. We can't waste our time on awareness. And you're right. But then for a lot of brands, they reach a cap. They go, we've had all this marketing that's been so measurable for so long. We've run our meta ads, we've run our Google ads, we do email, we sell these accounts, we've hit a threshold. We just can't get any larger. And this is a hard point for a lot

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of businesses. And we discussed this in depth because so many businesses have hit this. It's usually between 30 and $50 million where you go, oh my God, all this stuff that got us here was measurable, was safe. The CFO liked it, CEO liked it. Marketing was extremely mathematical. But to get to that next level, you have to make a jump. The awareness level is a plunge of faith and you cannot scale beyond some of those numbers that you hit without taking that plunge into, we have to look at marketing more holistically. We have to get into awareness. And if you're in this position,

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every business is in this position. I've been in businesses that have fallen apart in this position. But bring them this video. Tell them there are dozens and dozens of firms that we met with in the last few weeks that are at that point where like, we need to scale. We need to go into awareness. Everyone feels it's too risky. How do we balance that? And for a lot of people, it's just assigning percents of the marketing budget. Yes, we do the same thing we used to do. And we're doing that with 9% of the 14% we spend on marketing or whatever that ratio is for your business. But what you'll

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notice is you start doing more of that awareness. It increases the efficacy of what you do on meta. It increases the efficacy of what you do in wholesale. And you can't measure it the same way you can measure a meta flow. It's important to think about. So calling out some of the things on here, you know, in this normie sales corner, wholesale selling into retail, email marketing, Google ads, meta ads, YouTube ads, cold outbound, we're just reaching directly out to businesses for your leads, you know what those are going over here into fringe sales. If you're putting creators on your accounts,

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that is a slightly more sales driven marketing approach. Are you running ads on TikTok? Are you seeding sending out free product in the hopes of getting posts? Do you run an affiliate program as ultra sales focused, but more fringe for doing affiliate on TikTok shop? Or if you're doing affiliate for software, SMS, people are still afraid of SMS. I cannot recommend more something like one text, no sponsor relationship. They have card on file SMS text, an incredible piece of software app loving, a lot of toxic shills on Twitter who don't disclose their app loving relationships who have talked about

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this, but it is still a channel that you can scale in the same way as meta. It's just weirder. And then live selling. Can you get on TikTok whatnot, but you're actually selling and generating profitable lives on your own channels or with creators that covers the sales end. And again, there's more on this. Take your own initiatives, you know, and put them on this chart, move things to where you think they are. I'm not acting like this is the end all Bible. Now let's go into awareness. So LinkedIn posting is more of awareness focus, going to trade shows, hyper awareness focus, unless they're really tied into wholesale Instagram and TikTok,

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organic social influencer kind of straddles that line. I'd argue it's slightly more awareness focused and then more into fringe. Are you doing organic YouTube? That's pretty rare, but obviously you'll see people like I've made a lot of videos on the air channel that is them doing organic awareness on YouTube. X, God forsaken X. If you're doing something more like a social show, you have multi-account strategy on social media where you have five or six Instagram accounts, clipping, you have a snap strategy. And then I put streaming at the other end, different than live selling. But if the reason I want to call this one out is say you are a brand is really hyper

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focused on Gen Alpha. And when Gen Alpha becomes consumers and they consume a lot through streaming, you may not get a lot of sales right now, but I'd be terrified. If I was right guard, if I was Under Armour, if I was anyone who had traditionally had a college audience, they don't give a shit about any of the traditional brands they had. They only care about what's in their own infrastructure and culture. That's why you see brands like Jake Paul's W pop up. And I would be saying, man, we have to do a three-year investment in streaming to gain relevancy as an awareness play. It's a good example of fringe awareness to be able to own a niche.

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So once you've used it, once you've run through this brand options chart, you can come back up and basically say, what are we going to do? And realistically for 90% of businesses, what you're going to do is just do the existing things that you do better. That's going to be the primary. But if you are a business in a place where you want to add more, two. Two is kind of the maximum things that the team, even if you have a big ass team, can really do and execute well, even in like a six month period. I would be putting those on here for the year. And I would say, where are they at? Is this initiative

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helping our top of funnel? Is there helping our bottom? Is it helping our consideration? Don't ignore the middle, even though my chart was more focused the other way. Where do we need the most help? What are one to two initiatives that we can add on here? And then you actually map that out. And now you have the basically the top end of a plan. So now it's up to you if you want to do these other two stages of what order you want to do it. But this is the content funnel, which is basically looking at social media the same way. What do we do on Instagram to get more attention? What we do

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on TikTok to get more attention at an awareness level? What puts up views for us? What do we do at the middle to educate? And then what do we do at the bottom? And my content pillar system, where it says, we have three to five types of content as a brand we put out at any given time. Look at your pillars. And every brand has it. Whether you think you do or not, you probably already have three to five types of content. So a pillar would be a format plus a topic. I do we do green screen breakdowns, we do vlogs for behind the scenes, we do carousels of our e commerce photos, any one of those things you

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repeat regularly each in a month is a pillar. And if you don't have those, you can go through the exercise of designing them. Yes, we want to do these pillars. And that's part of this, you take those pillars and you map them to the funnel. Does this pillar participate in top of funnel and middle funnel or bottom of funnel? Let me do this as an example for my own content, my product versus brand content is top of funnel, I do product reviews primarily for my top of funnel content as a creator that gets me a lot of views, I get millions of views regularly breaking down what products I think people should buy how marketing works, that brings me people that are likely

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interested in marketing, that's my real target demographic people that are interested in marketing and branding, they are also interested in what they buy and why so that's the top of my funnel, but in the middle, I do lots of marketing educational videos, a lot of content you've watched where I'll talk about why truffles were changed as a concept or these five brand campaigns or let's break down how influencer marketing changed in 26. That's my middle of funnel, I'm educating. Not everyone graduates from product reviews down there, that's completely fine, but it gets me my target demographic in the middle. And then at the bottom, I have

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brand deals and I have stuff that drives to my email list and that's my bottom of funnel content. I have my pillars to reflect that. What you would want to do is look at the pillars you have today and assign a grade to them. Do we do them well, especially versus the field that you're at, comparative to other businesses in our niche and then in general, what are we doing? A through F, we're doing good, we're doing bad. And then you can look at how's that mapped to the funnel, how's our top of funnel on social today? Okay, is it a C? How is our middle of funnel? Okay, that's a B. Most brands are pretty decent middle of funnel. And then bottom of funnel,

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how are we asking for the sale? How are we driving KPIs? Are we using ManyChat for comments to drive people to our email list? Do we sell well on stories? Do we really leverage retargeting in our organic content and paid? What are we doing on bottom of funnel? And it might not always be related to content, you might have to have this conversation in tandem with your market. Then look at tomorrow, what do we want our pillars to be? What could they be? What content could we create? How do we take these grades higher? And how do we map our content to the funnel higher? And that's the conversation

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you want to go workshop. And then most importantly with this, a lot of people have great social ideas. Who's going to do it? What's the action that we want to get a creator on our main account? Who's going to do it on the team? Yeah, Shelby's going to do it. Carl's going to do it. Important exercise to work through. And then we're going to map this to the calendar. And this is an excellent exercise everyone should do. Create a brand of any size is go through the calendar for the year. First line, I do this by quarter by month, what's happening in culture. So for instance, in February, I had it

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mapped out that the Super Bowl is there, Valentine's Day is there and the Olympics is there. And I made content about each of them. And it was really important content for me to be able to be capturing the zeitgeist. So my Super Bowl content put up millions of views. I was probably the biggest marketing creator participating in that moment and got the most out of it of anyone because I was prepared for it. And then I look at my own content for culture going on. We have the World Cup coming. Am I going to participate in that I decided not to do All Star Weekend because I didn't think there was going to be

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enough virality around it. November, I had buying season, I'm just mapping out what's happening in culture back to school, all these things you could participate in, then you have your industry. So for instance, when I worked in camera drones, NAB was a huge show at our industry. It's a broadcast show where people go buy cameras and then retailers go to buy products, they're going to stock on their shelves in the camera space. So we always have NAB is a big thing. CES in Las Vegas, those are industry events. So in your industry, are there interior design shows or fashion shows or cosmetic shows or things that you're

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going to do? Coachella might be an industry show technically for you if you sell a certain type of product. Where do they lie? Then go through your sales heat map, pull up your Shopify data. What months did you do well and look at your goal? What month did we exceed goal? What month are we under goal? And map, we usually in the downloadable version of this, it's all white, we usually shade it or red, yellow, green it. And then really look at okay, do we if you hit your sales goal? Why did we hit it? Is there something that we have to replicate? Because a lot of people will hit it and they assume they hit it the next year, but don't do the same

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actions. You actually write out on this chart, hey, we hit it because we did a flash sale or because we had this massive order or whatever it was noted. Or we had a successful social campaign. Okay, how can you repeat that? Same thing with social? When did we shine on social? And then when were we down? Then you can look at both how do we repeat what we did? And then how do we fill the holes? And then here you can go through your actual launches. When do you plan to launch product? Do you want to move that? Because of what's happening in culture or your industry or last year's data, and you can work through whenever I

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launch my collections or our new product or this new PDF. I would highly encourage you even if you're an agency over to launch a new service or a new offer or a new showcase. That's a launch. Think like your marketing. I do this as a creator. I have launches. I launched a new series. I'm going to Japan and then we're likely going to launch new products. Like there's a lot of that is the way to think about it. And then last, one thing that we added while we were doing this tour was what we miss out on. So you can often note last year, your team will have been in Slack, whatever it is.

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It was like, man, we really should have done X, but then you never have a time to do it. This is your moment to critically think back, go through your Slack to your teams and be like, okay, what did we miss out on? Like, let's try to hunt down some of those things so we know. So now you have your marketing funnel, your content funnel, your brand options, your calendar matrix. Two other ones that I'm going to zoom through quickly that you're going to have in this packet is asset repurposing. A lot of people are like, we don't have budget to do more. How can you do more with what you already have? So this

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outlines the flow of your internal assets, things you get from creators or influencers or sending free product. What are all the things you can do with them and developing a system to track them is a really useful exercise. If you can't create more, but you want to make sure you're doing the most and you're putting it on your PDPs and your emails. This is a great way to really task a marketing team, especially if you have people you feel are under tasked to make sure they're doing actions with things you already have that can result in better middle of the funnel, bottom of funnel conversion

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for you. And then last is this campaign planning. I have a whole video on campaigns. I'm not going to dive into this deep, but this is a worksheet based on that. In that campaign video, I break down how you need to have a teaser, how you need to unveil, how you need a lot more content than you think, how you need BTS, how you need to then sustain your campaign. There's a whole video on it, but this is a worksheet you can now use for how to think about it. And the key topic that I will tell you here is you need to plan about internal and external for your campaigns. Internal, what do you

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do with your content team, your email list, etc. But every good campaign also has external. Who are you getting involved in the unveils or a creator you can have? Can you collab on the campaign launch? Are you seeding that product out? How do you get media involved? And can you map that? You should probably have a 50-50 emphasis on where your internal promotions go and how much external promotion you can have as well. Doing this in person was an entire day. We have basically four hours of workshopping panels, sitting down in small groups. I'm not going to give you the four-hour version of

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this, but you have these worksheets. These are how to use them. If you are a marketer or creator, you now have this in your toolkit. Run this for your brand. It's something you can expand on in your career. If you want to learn more about this and learn more about strategy, or you want to train people in your brands, we did bring our new creative strategy program, very similar to what I do in Cut30, but it's for marketing and brand strategy for marketers who want to become weapons, brands that want to train their people on modern. We have brought that out of beta and we are back

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running. So the applications for that are below. That is something if you are at a more substantial level in your career, you can tap into. You can grab all these docs for free down below. Big shout out to Air who put on the tour. I know we have lots of images and graphics included from that as we went through this YouTube. If you have questions on the marketing planning process, any of this below, please drop them and I'll be happy to answer. And we will be doing another community call in March where we can do it live. Thank y'all so much for watching. Appreciate it.

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