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Entrepreneurs are usually eager to market their businesses, but they are considerably less enthusiastic about creating a marketing plan. That distinction can become expensive. Posting on Instagram, buying Google ads, sponsoring an event, sending promotional emails, hiring creators or producing videos are all marketing tactics, but none constitutes a marketing strategy on its own. Without a larger plan connecting those activities to customers, revenue and measurable business objectives, companies can spend considerable amounts of money while accomplishing remarkably little.

The challenge has become greater because businesses have more ways to reach customers than ever before. DataReportal estimated that 322 million Americans were internet users at the beginning of 2025, representing more than 93% of the population, while the country had approximately 253 million social media user identities. That enormous digital audience creates opportunity, but it also creates tremendous competition for attention. A marketing plan brings discipline to that competition by defining whom a business wants to reach, why those customers should care, where the company can find them, what it should say, how much it can afford to spend and, most importantly, how it will determine whether the investment worked.

Start With the Business Goal, Not the Marketing Channel

One of the easiest ways to waste a marketing budget is to select the tactic before establishing the objective. Saying a company needs to be on TikTok, post more frequently on LinkedIn or attract more Instagram followers may describe activities, but those are not business objectives. Generating 300 qualified sales leads during the fourth quarter, increasing repeat purchases by 15%, acquiring 1,000 new customers, generating $500,000 in sales from a new product or successfully entering a new geographic market are objectives. A strong marketing plan works backward from those desired business outcomes and determines which tactics are most likely to produce them.

That becomes particularly important when budgets are under pressure. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets averaged 7.7% of company revenue, unchanged from the previous year, while 59% of CMOs said they did not have sufficient budget to execute their strategies. The CMO Survey reported a somewhat higher benchmark, with marketing spending representing approximately 9.4% of company revenue and 11.4% of overall company budgets in its 2025 research. Different industries, company sizes and methodologies naturally produce different benchmarks, which is precisely why entrepreneurs should resist blindly adopting another company's marketing percentage.

A startup introducing an unfamiliar product may need to invest aggressively in awareness and customer acquisition, while a mature professional-services company with recurring clients and strong referrals may require considerably less. The more useful question is not how much other companies spend, but what the business is trying to accomplish and what level of investment will realistically be required to accomplish it. Once the objective is clear, the budget becomes a strategic decision rather than an arbitrary number.

Know Exactly Who You Want as a Customer

“Everyone” is one of the most expensive target markets in business because trying to appeal to everybody usually produces marketing that connects strongly with nobody. A marketing plan forces entrepreneurs to identify the customers most likely to purchase, remain loyal and generate profitable growth. Depending on the company, segmentation might include geography, age, income, occupation, industry, company size, purchasing behavior, language, lifestyle or a specific problem that customers need solved.

For a B2B company, the target may become even narrower. A cybersecurity company, for example, may not really be targeting businesses broadly. Its most valuable prospects could be information-security executives at financial-services companies with more than 500 employees. A commercial cleaning company may discover that medical offices generate substantially greater customer lifetime value than restaurants or retail establishments. That information should influence where the company spends its money and what message it uses.

Precision matters because customers do not purchase demographic categories; they purchase solutions. A useful customer profile therefore needs to explain more than who the customer is. It should identify what that person wants, what frustrates them, where they search for information, what alternatives they are considering, what could prevent them from buying and what ultimately motivates them to act. Without that knowledge, marketing quickly becomes expensive guesswork.

Understand the Competition Before Spending Money

A good marketing plan also forces entrepreneurs to look beyond their own companies and understand the environment in which customers are making purchasing decisions. Business owners should know who their major competitors are, what those competitors charge, where they advertise, how they position themselves and what promises they make. Customer reviews can be particularly valuable because they reveal what buyers praise, what disappoints them and where competitors may be leaving openings in the market.

Competitive research does not mean copying competitors. It means understanding the marketplace well enough to identify how your business can be meaningfully different. That has become especially important for local companies because the competitive battlefield increasingly begins on customers' phones. BrightLocal's 2025 consumer research found that 70% of general online searches among surveyed U.S. consumers were conducted using Google, while nearly three in five consumers searched online multiple times per day. Among consumers conducting local searches, 67% said they often or always proceeded to examine business reviews.

Reviews themselves have become an almost routine part of the buying process. Separate BrightLocal research found that only 4% of consumers said they never read online business reviews. For an entrepreneur, that means the competition is no longer simply the company across the street. It includes every credible alternative appearing on a customer's screen when that prospective buyer begins searching. A marketing plan needs to account for how the company will become visible during that search and what will persuade the customer to choose it.

Give Customers a Reason to Choose You

Marketing plans frequently collapse under the weight of meaningless corporate language. Companies describe themselves as innovative, customer-focused, results-driven, committed to excellence and dedicated to providing high-quality solutions. The problem is that competitors are usually saying exactly the same things, leaving customers with little meaningful distinction between them.

A useful value proposition answers a much more difficult question: Why should someone choose your company instead? Perhaps the business saves customers significant time, provides expertise competitors cannot easily duplicate or offers a faster and more convenient experience. Maybe it specializes in an underserved industry or customer segment, or perhaps its product produces a measurable financial return. Whatever the advantage is, prospective customers should be able to understand it quickly.

The marketing plan should then carry that positioning consistently through the company's website, advertising, sales materials, social media, email campaigns, events and customer experience. A business that presents itself as a premium provider, for example, undermines its positioning if its website looks outdated, its sales team takes days to respond or its customer service feels indifferent. Marketing is not simply what a company says about itself; customers experience the brand through every interaction they have with the business.

Choose Marketing Channels Based on Customers, Not Hype

Once the audience and positioning are clear, choosing marketing channels becomes much easier. The temptation is to be everywhere, particularly when businesses constantly hear that they need to join the newest social platform or adopt the latest digital trend. Most companies do not need to be everywhere. They need to be highly visible in the places where their most valuable customers actually spend their time and make purchasing decisions.

For some businesses, search will be critical because customers already have purchasing intent when they begin looking. Others may generate stronger returns from LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, email, trade shows, industry publications, community events, sponsorships, partnerships or direct sales. Constant Contact research involving 1,600 newer small businesses across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada found that 63% relied on social media as their primary marketing channel, while 73% said paid and organic social posts were their biggest revenue drivers.

Building a business entirely around social media, however, introduces another risk because the company does not own the platform or the audience. Algorithms change, organic reach fluctuates and platforms can modify their rules with little warning. That helps explain the continuing importance of email. A later Constant Contact survey of 2,500 small-business decision-makers found that 44% considered email their most effective marketing channel, up from 23% the previous year, while 78% of small businesses reported using video in their marketing.

The lesson is not that email is better than social media or that every business needs to become a video producer. Successful marketing usually requires a deliberate mix of channels serving different purposes. Social media can create discovery, search can capture purchasing intent, content can establish expertise, email can nurture relationships, events can create personal connections, advertising can accelerate reach and salespeople can convert interest into revenue. The channels should support one another rather than operate as disconnected activities.

Give Every Marketing Dollar a Job

A marketing budget should do more than state how much money a company intends to spend. It should explain where the money is going, why the business is making that investment and what management expects it to accomplish. That means allocating resources among paid advertising, content, search marketing, email, events, sponsorships, technology, creative production, public relations, market research and outside agencies according to business priorities rather than spreading money across activities simply because competitors are doing them.

Gartner found that paid media represented 30.6% of marketing budgets among the large organizations it surveyed in 2025. At the same time, 39% of CMOs planned to reduce agency spending, illustrating the pressure marketing organizations face to improve productivity. Smaller businesses face that pressure even more acutely because every wasted marketing dollar is money that cannot be invested in payroll, inventory, technology or expansion.

Consider a company that wants to acquire 500 new customers and determines that it can profitably spend $100 to acquire each one. That creates a potential $50,000 customer-acquisition investment. Management can then test whether paid search, social advertising, referrals, events, partnerships or another strategy can consistently deliver customers below that threshold. Marketing has suddenly moved from the vague idea that the company should “advertise more” to a measurable financial decision tied to the economics of the business.

Hispanic-Owned Businesses Are Becoming a Larger Economic Force

The need for disciplined marketing strategy is especially relevant for Hispanic-owned businesses, which represent a rapidly expanding component of American entrepreneurship. U.S. Census Bureau data show that the country had approximately 465,000 Hispanic-owned employer businesses in 2022, an increase of nearly 45% from 2017. Those businesses generated approximately $653 billion in annual revenue and employed roughly 3.6 million workers, demonstrating that Hispanic entrepreneurship is increasingly significant not only to individual communities but to the broader U.S. economy.

Research from the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative has documented a similar trajectory. Its research found that the number of Latino-owned businesses increased 44% between 2018 and 2023, compared with approximately 5% growth among white-owned businesses. Hispanic entrepreneurs are also operating within an increasingly powerful economic ecosystem. The Latino Donor Collaborative's 2025 U.S. Latino GDP Report estimated that U.S. Latino economic output reached $4.1 trillion in 2023 and that inflation-adjusted U.S. Latino GDP expanded at an annualized rate of 4.4% between 2018 and 2023, approximately twice the 2.2% growth rate of the broader U.S. economy during that period.

Those numbers represent enormous opportunity, but demographic momentum should never be confused with a marketing strategy. A Hispanic-owned company cannot assume Hispanic consumers will automatically support it because of shared culture or identity. Customers still expect competitive pricing, strong service, quality products, convenience, credibility and a compelling reason to buy. Cultural understanding becomes a competitive advantage when entrepreneurs combine it with those fundamentals and use their knowledge to recognize customer behaviors, unmet needs and market opportunities that larger competitors may overlook.

The Hispanic market itself also requires greater sophistication than simply translating English advertising into Spanish. U.S. Hispanics encompass different generations, national origins, geographic markets, socioeconomic backgrounds and language preferences. Some consumers predominantly use Spanish, others primarily use English and millions move comfortably between both languages and cultural environments. A second-generation professional in Chicago, a recently arrived entrepreneur in Miami and a third-generation Mexican American business owner in Los Angeles may all be Hispanic, yet their media habits, purchasing behavior and expectations can be considerably different. Effective marketing recognizes those distinctions rather than treating more than 65 million people as one homogeneous customer segment.

Hispanic entrepreneurs should also resist the assumption that Hispanic ownership requires a Hispanic-only customer strategy. A company can be authentically rooted in Hispanic culture while competing for customers throughout the American marketplace. Food, music, entertainment, beauty and consumer brands have repeatedly demonstrated that culturally influenced products can cross demographic boundaries. The same principle applies to technology companies, accounting practices, construction firms, financial-services businesses, consulting companies and other B2B enterprises. Cultural intelligence can help open a market, but entrepreneurs should not allow it to artificially define the limits of their potential market.

Established corporations should pay attention to this growth as well. Hispanic-owned businesses are not merely part of a consumer demographic; they are employers, suppliers, contractors, technology companies, professional-services providers, distributors and prospective corporate customers. As Hispanic entrepreneurship expands, companies that understand this ecosystem will find opportunities not only to market to Hispanic consumers but to build business relationships with Hispanic entrepreneurs. For Hispanic-owned companies themselves, marketing discipline will help determine which businesses convert economic and demographic momentum into enduring enterprises.

Measure Business Results, Not Just Attention

One of the most dangerous developments in modern marketing is the ease with which activity can be mistaken for success. A social media post receiving 20,000 views can look impressive, but those views may have little business value if they do not produce customers, leads, sales or some other objective the company has deliberately chosen.

Every marketing plan should therefore establish key performance indicators before campaigns begin. Depending on the objective, those metrics could include qualified leads, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, cost per lead, website traffic, email subscriber growth, average order value, repeat purchases, customer lifetime value and revenue attributable to marketing. The appropriate metric depends on the objective, and not every campaign should be judged exclusively on immediate sales, particularly when the goal is awareness or consideration. The important point is that the business should know what success is supposed to look like before it starts spending money.

This remains a significant problem for smaller companies. Constant Contact's 2025 research found that only 18% of surveyed small businesses felt very confident about the effectiveness of their marketing, down from 27% the previous year, while understanding what was actually working remained a major challenge. A marketing plan should reduce that uncertainty by establishing a system for comparing investment with results. If an entrepreneur spends $10,000 on a campaign that generates $100,000 in profitable business, that provides useful evidence for future decisions. If another $10,000 campaign generates thousands of likes but almost no qualified customers, that information is equally valuable because management can redirect the next $10,000 toward something more productive.

AI Makes Strategy More Important, Not Less

Artificial intelligence is dramatically reducing the time and cost required to produce marketing content, creating enormous opportunities for businesses that previously lacked the resources to operate sophisticated marketing programs. Gartner reported that marketing leaders were already experiencing benefits from generative AI, including time efficiency reported by 49%, cost efficiency by 40% and increased capacity to produce additional content or handle more business by 27%. Among newer small businesses surveyed by Constant Contact, 72% planned to incorporate AI into their marketing during 2025, using the technology for activities including content creation, brainstorming, customer-data analysis and personalized communications.

The danger is assuming that faster content creation automatically produces better marketing. AI can generate 100 social media posts for a company that does not understand its customer, write thousands of words for a business with no meaningful differentiation and produce advertisements for a product the marketplace does not want. Technology can make an ineffective strategy operate faster just as easily as it can make a strong strategy more efficient.

As competitors gain access to many of the same AI tools, customer knowledge, positioning, creativity and strategic judgment may actually become more valuable. The competitive advantage will not necessarily belong to the business capable of generating the most content. It may belong to the company that knows precisely what should be created, whom it should reach, what action it should generate and how that activity contributes to revenue.

Turn the Marketing Plan Into a 12-Month Road Map

A marketing plan becomes most valuable when it moves from a strategic document into an operating calendar. Businesses should map major product launches, seasonal opportunities, events, advertising campaigns, email programs, content themes, partnerships and sales initiatives across the year, then establish deadlines, assign responsibility, allocate budgets and define expected outcomes. Doing so gives the company visibility into what is coming and prevents marketing from becoming a series of last-minute decisions.

The plan should then be reviewed regularly rather than placed in a folder and forgotten. Management should examine which campaigns generated qualified leads, which customers converted, which customer groups were most profitable, which messages performed best, where acquisition costs increased and which channels failed to meet expectations. The annual marketing plan establishes direction, while monthly analysis keeps that direction connected to changing business conditions and actual customer behavior.

Businesses should also reserve room for experimentation because a marketing plan should provide discipline without eliminating creativity. A portion of the budget can test new audiences, creative concepts, technologies, messages and platforms, but experimentation should be managed like an experiment. Establish a hypothesis, determine what success looks like, invest a controlled amount, measure the outcome and then decide whether the evidence justifies additional investment. This allows companies to pursue new opportunities without allowing every new trend to hijack the marketing budget.

Marketing Is Ultimately About Making Choices

The greatest value of a marketing plan may not be what it tells an entrepreneur to do, but what it gives that entrepreneur permission not to do. Every company has finite money, time and attention, which means no business can pursue every platform, customer segment, sponsorship opportunity, advertising product or marketing trend. A plan forces leadership to decide which customers matter most, which opportunities deserve investment and which distractions can be ignored.

That discipline matters even more as digital platforms, artificial intelligence and new media channels make it increasingly easy to create marketing activity. Entrepreneurs do not need more activity for activity's sake. They need a clear understanding of their customers, a compelling reason for those customers to buy, an intelligent mix of channels capable of reaching them and a measurement system that reveals whether those investments are producing business.

For Hispanic entrepreneurs, the opportunity is especially significant as Hispanic-owned companies and the broader Latino economy continue expanding their influence within the United States. Yet growth in the overall market does not guarantee growth for an individual company. Strategy still matters, execution still matters, customer experience still matters and profitability certainly matters. A marketing plan connects those pieces and transforms promotion from a collection of activities into a business-growth system. Ultimately, the difference between marketing activity and marketing strategy should be visible where it matters most: in customers, profitability and revenue.

Sources

• BrightLocal. (2025). Consumer search behavior: Where are your customers? BrightLocal.

• BrightLocal. (2025). Local Consumer Review Survey 2025. BrightLocal.

• Constant Contact. (2025). New wave of SMBs is social-first, technology driven, and highly adaptable. Constant Contact.

• Constant Contact. (2025). The state of small business marketing: Effort is up while confidence has declined. Constant Contact.

• DataReportal. (2025). Digital 2025: The United States of America. Kepios.

• Gartner, Inc. (2025). Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey reveals marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of overall company revenue. Gartner.

• Latino Donor Collaborative. (2025). 2025 Official U.S. Latino GDP Report. Latino Donor Collaborative.

• Moorman, C., & The CMO Survey. (2025). The CMO Survey: Highlights and insights report. The CMO Survey, Duke University.

• Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative. (2024). State of Latino Entrepreneurship 2024. Stanford University.

• U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). Annual Business Survey: Statistics for employer firms by ownership characteristics. U.S. Department of Commerce.