How to Build a Marketing Plan That Scales

Written by: Husam Jandal, Digital Marketing Consultant and Business Strategist, Husam Jandal International

One of the greatest challenges businesses face as they grow is managing their internal processes. When you start small, people are often performing multiple jobs, tracking might be managed through spreadsheets, and details about client accounts may only exist in the minds of the people who manage them. As you know, this approach isn’t scalable. The more you grow, the more essential it becomes to have clear roles, shared sources of truth, and repeatable processes. The same is true of marketing.

In fact, marketers with a clear and documented strategy are 313 percent more successful than their counterparts, according to WordStream. This is something your factoring company can accomplish, too. I’ll walk you through the steps involved in building a tailored marketing plan that scales below.

Step 1: Gather the Right Insights

Businesses that develop marketing strategies based on data are successful 95 percent of the time, per Statista research. Because of this, it’s essential to ground your overall strategy in data and start with a clear, honest picture of where your business stands today. 

●      Examine First-Party Data: Use tools like your customer relationship management (CRM) software, factoring software, and web analytics to understand who your clients are. Look for details like their industries, invoice volume, length of time with your company, and how they found you. At the same time, make a note of who isn’t converting, staying with your company long, or contributing to your profit, and the commonalities behind these accounts.

●      Analyze Your Competitors: Do a quick analysis of your competitors, including factors and other business funding providers. Identify what they do well and any gaps they’re leaving behind.

●      Perform A SWOT Analysis: Turn your findings into a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis. Make the strengths and opportunities sections as detailed as possible, as they will help you determine goals, identify the best ways to grow, and more as you move to the later stages of your marketing plan development.

Step 2: Define Clear, Measurable Goals

Consider leveraging the SMART Goals framework and ensure the goals you create are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. It boosts the odds of success by providing clarity and accountability.

●      Begin with Your Broad Business Goals: For instance, you might have client growth goals, such as adding 100 new clients within the next 12 months or expanding into two new industries. Or, you might focus on revenue and volume. Increasing monthly invoice purchases by 20 percent for the quarter or reaching $200 million in purchased receivables by the end of the year would fit in this bracket. You might also focus on operational efficiency, client retention, or even market visibility.

●      Develop Digital Marketing Goals to Support Your Business Goals: Let’s say your company goal is to increase invoice purchases by 20 percent. The marketing goal would then feed into it. A mix of approaches could apply here. For instance, you might focus on new client acquisition, increasing volume from existing clients, or extending the average client relationship by six months. Each of these areas can contribute to boosting volume.

Step 3: Define Your Audience

At this stage, you know the background and where you want to go. The next step is to get clarity on who you need to connect with to help ensure you get there.

●      Refer to Your Research and Goals: The insights you’ve gathered will guide your decision. For instance, if you are focused on attracting new clients, you’ll want to consider which industries are underserved by others and who you’re exceptionally poised to serve well. If your research uncovered that you have a very loyal client base with long relationships, you may be able to tap into it for referrals.

●      Develop Personas: Once you have the broader trends, create personas. These are fictional representations of people who fit into each of the audiences you’re trying to reach. Consider demographics, such as name, occupation, and location, as well as psychographics, like their goals, key challenges, potential objections to factoring with your company, and what they value most about factoring. Also consider details like how they source information and which types of content they’re most likely to consume. After all, an owner-operator in trucking who is on the road all day will engage with your brand much differently than the head of operations at a staffing firm, for example.

Step 4: Choose the Right Marketing Channels

You can’t, and shouldn’t, try to be everywhere all at once. Some channels will be far more effective for you than others, and those are the ones to which you’ll want to apply the most energy.

●      Leverage the Digital Marketing Tree Approach: The Digital Marketing Tree provides a clear outline for deploying various strategies and channels. With it, you start by collecting “ground fruit.” It’s the easiest to gather and sets the foundation for everything after. This includes things like ensuring your website is ready for visitors and building out your social media presence. From there, you’ll work your way up the tree to more involved strategies, deploying them one at a time.

●      Focus Efforts Where Your Personas Are Likely to Engage: The Digital Marketing Tree points you in the right direction, but you’ll need to refer back to your personas to determine the nuances. For instance, your staffing persona will likely consume your content on LinkedIn, but your trucking persona will probably be on Facebook or X instead. Use these insights to determine where you’ll devote resources.

Step 5: Craft Messaging That Educates and Builds Trust

Your messaging is where everything comes together. It’s how you take the insights, goals, audiences, and channels you’ve defined and translate them into communication that resonates. The aim is to educate prospects, build confidence in your brand, strengthen the relationship, and guide them to the goal you’ve set.

●      Refer to Personas for Challenges and Pushbacks: Draw on the obstacles and goals you uncovered during persona development to shape your message. For instance, a trucking owner-operator may need reassurance about the speed of funding, while a staffing executive may focus on payroll reliability.

●      Identify Key Points to Meet with Content: Look at the points in the client journey where education or reassurance matters most, such as when prospects are comparing providers, waiting on a funding decision, or considering whether to renew their agreement.

●      Develop Assets with Personas in Mind: Create content that matches both the concerns and the habits of your personas. That might mean quick explainers for a trucker, in-depth case studies for a staffing professional, or industry insights for the owner of an oilfield company.

Step 6: Build a Repeatable Process

Creating a repeatable process ensures that campaigns can be run smoothly, results can be tracked reliably, and new team members can get up to speed quickly.

●      Equip Your Company with the Right Tools: Put systems in place to support collaboration and accountability. This typically includes a CRM, project management software, social posting tool, email marketing software, and a content calendar that gives everyone visibility into what’s planned and what’s in motion.

●      Automate Processes Where Possible: Free up time for strategic work by automating recurring tasks. Email sequences, social posting, reporting, and lead nurturing can often be streamlined with the right technology.

●      Document Workflows for Consistency: Define and record the steps for campaign planning, content development, and lead follow-up so they can be repeated and improved over time. Clear processes reduce errors and allow you to scale without losing quality.

Step 7: Measure, Refine, and Optimize Continuously

Ongoing measurement ensures your marketing plan stays aligned with your goals as conditions change. Rather than running campaigns on autopilot, build in regular checkpoints to assess performance and make adjustments.

●      Learn from Campaigns: Review the results of each initiative to see what connected with your audience and what fell short.

●      Track Results at Regular Intervals: Focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to your goals and revisit them monthly to stay on course.

●      Zero in on What’s Working: Reallocate budget and time toward the strategies that consistently deliver, while phasing out what underperforms.

●      Continue Testing: Reserve time and budget for trying new approaches so you can adapt and uncover fresh opportunities as you grow.

Scale When Ready

They say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Building a marketing plan that scales takes time, too. Every cycle brings sharper insights, stronger connections, and more reliable results. When you keep building on what works, the path forward opens wider and the opportunities for growth expand.

About the Author

Husam Jandal is an internationally recognized marketing and business strategist who has been helping businesses achieve transformative growth for more than two decades. As a trusted consultant, author, educator, and speaker, Husam’s in-depth knowledge of the challenges businesses face and unique ability to fuse proven strategies with tailored insights empower companies to reach new heights and attain lasting success.