Before you build a campaign, write a single email, or touch your CRM — there’s one question that determines whether any of it will work.
Elizabeth Soler · 4 min read · Marketing Strategy
I’ve reviewed a lot of marketing plans. For startups, nonprofits, small businesses, and enterprise teams. And the ones that struggle — regardless of budget, team size, or industry — almost always have the same thing missing at the center of them.
It’s not a content calendar. It’s not a channel strategy. It’s not even a clearly defined audience, though that matters enormously too.
The thing that’s missing is an honest answer to one question:
What does this person need to believe in order to take the action we’re asking them to take?
That’s it. That’s the question. And it’s harder to answer than it sounds — because the instinct is almost always to talk about the product, the service, or the organization. To talk about what you do instead of what they need to think, feel, or understand before they’re ready to act.
When you start with this question, your entire marketing plan reorients. Instead of asking “what should we post this week?” you’re asking “what does someone need to understand before they’re ready to trust us with this decision?” Instead of building a campaign around your launch timeline, you’re building it around the customer’s journey toward readiness.
This shift changes your content. It changes your email strategy. It changes how you structure your website. It even changes how you configure your CRM — because once you know what beliefs need to shift, you can design your nurture journeys to actually shift them, rather than just sending updates and hoping someone converts.
Most marketing without this foundation falls into one of three patterns:
None of these are wrong exactly — but without the foundation of what the person needs to believe first, they’re disconnected from each other. They generate activity without building the conviction that leads to action.
Start by mapping the objections. What does your ideal client or customer currently believe that’s getting in the way? Some common ones:
Each of those is a belief that your marketing needs to address — not by arguing against it directly, but by telling stories, sharing evidence, and offering frameworks that help people arrive at a different conclusion on their own.
The reframe
Your marketing isn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. It’s creating the conditions for the right people to convince themselves. That’s a completely different job — and it produces completely different content.
Before you build your next campaign or write your next email, sit with this question for a moment. Not “what do we want to say?” but “what does this person need to believe before they’re ready to say yes?”
Write down three to five things. Then ask: does our current content actually address any of these? If the answer is mostly no — you’ve just found your strategy.
From there, build backwards. Each piece of content, each email in your journey, each page on your website should be doing one job: moving someone one step closer to the belief that makes action possible. When your marketing is organized around that job, everything becomes more coherent — and more effective.
This is the foundation I start with for every client, whether we’re building a marketing plan from scratch or restructuring an existing one. Get this right and everything else gets easier. Skip it and you’ll keep generating activity without quite understanding why it isn’t converting.
The Intentional Marketing Plan is a 37-page fillable template designed to help you do exactly what this post describes — get clear on what your audience needs to believe before you create a single piece of content. Includes SWOT analysis, positioning frameworks, budget planning, and Gantt charts.
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