Marketing Plan? Communication Strategy? Content Strategy?
Let Me Bring Some Light Into This Mess.
It all started when I heard, again, “We need help with our marketing.” What they meant was a few more social posts, maybe a flyer for the next event. Well, that’s not marketing, that’s part of communication (and before you scream, I am not talking PR and corporate com here).
I used an iceberg image a while ago to shed some light on this, as I thought it captured the idea very well. What you see above the water is operational marketing and communication: your webinars, your social posts, your newsletters, your flyers.
What’s doing the actual work in the background, submerged and mostly invisible, is strategic marketing, including product marketing.
This is where the fundamental choices are made: which market to focus on, which products to develop, who you’re really trying to reach, how you want to position yourself against competitors, what you stand for, how you price your offer, and what you’re ultimately trying to achieve.
For a diagnostics company, that might mean deciding to focus specifically on clinical virology labs and compete on speed and workflow simplicity rather than price. These decisions shape everything that follows, but they don’t say anything yet about a single LinkedIn post.
The marketing plan is what turns that strategy into a year (or a rolling year) of actual, budgeted activity: which campaigns, roughly when, with what resources behind them, and what kind of ROI is expected.
At that point, still nothing about individual posts, articles or flyers. Just the shape of the year. So far so good.
Now it’s getting interesting.
Inside the marketing plan sit communication strategy and content strategy.
Communication strategy asks who needs to hear this, through which channels, in what way, and why now.
Content strategy asks what actually needs to be said and created to support that: which topics earn a place, what evidence backs them up, what a piece of content is meant to do for the person reading it.
One without the other and you either say the right thing to no one, or say nothing much to the right people.
Together, they’re the backbone of the marketing plan, based on its strategy.
And now it’s getting even trickier.
Each of those, in turn, gets its own operational layer. The communication plan lays out which activities happen, where, when, and who owns them. The content plan (or calendar) lays out which pieces get made: topic, format, date, owner. Different documents, different questions, built side by side.
Where all of this actually becomes visible to a scientist, a lab manager, a distributor, is the campaign. That’s the moment when marketing, communication, and content strategy turn into something operational: a webinar, an application note, a LinkedIn post, all pulling the same direction because the thinking was done properly beneath the surface.
Well, so far, the theory.
In practice, it’s rarely that clear-cut. Ask five marketing managers where marketing strategy ends and the marketing plan begins, and you’ll likely get five different answers.
If you studied marketing, you might be nodding along: yes, that’s roughly what I learned too. But work across enough companies, teams and projects, and you’ll see these terms used differently everywhere you go.
For me, getting every label exactly right counts less than having a red line that makes sense and helps me work. I use the same logic for marketing, communication and content: strategy first, then the plan, then the actual work.
And that’s what turned “Oh, what a mess” into “Okay, I have a plan.”
I don’t want to keep it just theoretically, so next blog, I’ll take one real campaign I recently did for a client and walk it through every layer, from the first strategic choice down to the actual publication, so you can see the theory do its job in practice.