You have a list of twenty ideas: rebuild the website, launch a newsletter, post on LinkedIn, try Google Ads, book a trade show stand, automate follow-ups. Every one of them can be defended. The team, meanwhile, is three people. A marketing action plan starts the moment you accept that you will not do everything, and decide the order for the rest.
I do this sorting at the start of almost every engagement, right after the diagnosis. I also apply it to my own content machine, the one that writes this blog. Scoring grids help me, but one rule matters more: whatever unblocks the rest goes first.
01Why a list of actions is not a plan
A list of actions says what you could do. A plan says what you do first, who owns it, and what you leave aside. The difference looks thin, but it decides whether the team moves forward or wears itself out on ten half-started topics.
Bpifrance Création breaks a marketing action plan into four steps: objectives, the list of actions, the timetable, and monitoring tools. The same page advises choosing actions according to your objectives, but also, and above all, according to what you can actually afford. I add what your people can actually carry. A project with nobody to look after it every week is not a project, it is a wish.
That is why I stop at five or six projects. I wrote about it when describing an SME marketing plan across several horizons: a small team cannot carry many more at once. Beyond that, every project moves a little, none of them lands, and the next committee finds everything "in progress".
02Write every idea as an expected outcome
Before scoring anything, I rewrite each idea. "Post on LinkedIn" is an activity. "Get qualified meeting requests from LinkedIn" is an outcome. You can only compare outcomes: an activity has no measurable impact, only a workload.
For each rewritten idea, I note four things:
- the written commercial objective it ties to, or the lack of one;
- the person who will own it;
- the measure that will tell us whether it works;
- what it depends on, and what it would unblock.
This step already shrinks the list. An idea that ties to no written objective, or that nobody can own, drops out on its own. I do not throw it away: it goes on a "not now" list, with the reason. If the objectives themselves are unclear, the problem sits further upstream, and what you need before ranking is a short marketing audit.
03Score ideas with a simple grid
A scoring grid does not decide for you. It makes everyone say why they are pushing an idea, and it brings disagreements into the open. I use two, depending on the length of the list.
ICE, to sort quickly
The ICE score marks each idea on three criteria: impact, confidence and ease. In a recorded conversation with Ethan Garr, Sean Ellis, who created the method, explains that he scores each criterion from 1 to 10. He estimates impact by asking what an improvement at one specific point in the funnel would change, and admits getting it badly wrong on an idea scored 4 that had far more effect than expected. Confidence, he says, rises with qualitative research: interviews, surveys, tests already run in the same area.
What helped me most in that conversation came from Ethan Garr. He describes failing with ICE when he applied it rigidly, with the top-scoring idea going through automatically. The score works better as a way to open the discussion and make a first shortlist, after which you look at the shortlisted ideas on their own merits. He also suggests comparing ideas within one broad area (acquisition, conversion, retention) rather than all at once.
RICE, when effort weighs heavily
When projects need weeks of work, I prefer RICE, described by Sean McBride at Intercom. It adds reach (how many people are affected over a period) and measures effort in person-months. The score is reach × impact × confidence, divided by effort. Impact is picked from a fixed scale (3, 2, 1, 0.5, 0.25) and so is confidence (100%, 80%, 50%), which saves an hour of arguing over a decimal.
Vote before you discuss
The trap in a prioritisation workshop is that the most persuasive person, or the boss, imposes their ranking. Nielsen Norman Group recommends having everyone vote silently before any discussion, with each person getting roughly half as many votes as there are ideas, and voting privately when the team tends to defer to the boss. The same article advises against crossing more than two criteria on one matrix: beyond that, nobody can read the chart.
04Put whatever unblocks the rest first
This is the rule I place above every grid. Some projects bring nothing in directly, but until they are done, the others stall. Fixing how contact requests are tracked is a good example: without it, no channel can be compared with another, and every impact score remains an opinion.
The Intercom article says as much: a lower-scoring project can go first if another project depends on it. The score then makes that choice visible rather than ruling it out.
I lived through this on a content production project. The initial instinct was to write more. Looking at where the work actually stopped, the bottleneck was not writing but publishing, done by hand, one article at a time. Automating publishing before producing more was the right order. Writing more would only have lengthened the queue.
To spot these projects, I ask three questions of each idea. Does it bring us closer to a written commercial objective? Do we have the means to do it properly, not by halves? Does it unblock something else? An idea that answers yes to the third question moves up, even with an average score.
05Keep the plan and review the order every month
An ordered marketing action plan looks a lot like a Scrum team's backlog. The Scrum Guide describes it as an emergent, ordered list of what is needed to improve the product, and makes one person accountable for ordering it. Both ideas are useful in marketing: the order changes when you learn something, and one person decides when two projects compete for the same week.
My content machine works exactly like this. A versioned calendar holds every topic with its priority, its planned date and its status. Only one article moves at a time, thanks to a lock. A topic marked "on hold" means a human decision is needed, and the machine leaves it alone. Changing the pace does not mean touching the tool, only the dates in the calendar.
To review the order, I do not wait for the end of the year. I rely on a monthly marketing committee: a report that goes out on its own before the meeting, then an hour to decide. We look at the projects under way, close one if its measure has given its answer, and bring one in from the "not now" list.
An honest limit: no grid makes up for vague objectives. If leadership has not written down what it expects from marketing this year, the most careful ranking will only move the argument somewhere else. And on a very short list, three or four ideas, a grid is pointless: a twenty-minute conversation is enough.
06Where to start on Monday
Take your list of ideas as it is, even if it is messy. Rewrite each line as an expected outcome, with a possible owner. Cross out anything that ties to no written objective, and put it on a "not now" list. Then look, among what remains, for the project that unblocks the others: it is very often the first one.
If you would like an outside view to do this sorting, it is part of what I offer on engagements, and my portfolio shows the kind of projects I run. Happy to talk it through.