What Should Marketing Stop Doing in 2027?

Summary

Annual planning usually focuses on what to add. This post makes the case for deciding what to stop first. It walks through a simple stop, fix, or scale exercise for marketing programs, tools, reporting, and activity, plus five questions to decide what goes and what to do with each list.

By Lisa Heay, Vice President of Business Operations at Heinz Marketing

Every planning season looks about the same. Someone opens last year’s plan, copies it into a new tab, and starts adding some stuff: a new channel, a new tool they’ve heard about, an AI pilot (or several).

What almost never makes the discussion is what you’re going to stop doing.

That’s a problem, because marketing teams rarely run out of ideas. They run out of time, budget, and attention, but never ideas. Every new thing you add in 2027 has to come from somewhere. If you don’t decide where, the year decides for you, and usually the new initiative gets half done while the old ones keep running on autopilot.

So before you lock in your 2027 plan, try a different exercise.

Sort everything into stop, fix, or scale

List what your team actually spends time and money on, and then put each item in one of three buckets:

• Stop: It isn’t producing results, and it won’t with a reasonable amount of effort.
• Fix: It’s worth doing, but something is broken. Maybe it’s the process, data, targeting, or the ownership.
• Scale: It’s working, and more resources would get you more out of it.

In the end, most teams will find that their scale list is short and their stop list turns out longer than they’d like to admit. That’s normal, because the whole point of the stop column is to fund the scale column.

Here’s where to look first.

1. Programs that run because they’ve always run

Every team has one. The monthly webinar with shrinking attendance. The trade show booth you keep booking because skipping it feels risky. The newsletter nobody has measured in two years.

None of these are bad on the surface. The question is whether anyone can say what each one does for pipeline or revenue today, not what it did when it launched two years ago.

For each recurring program, write one sentence on what it’s supposed to accomplish and one number that shows whether it does. If you can’t fill in that information, put it on a review list.

2. Tools you pay for but hardly use

Martech stacks grow quietly: a tool gets purchased for one campaign, the person who championed it leaves, and then the renewal keeps charging your credit card. Overlap creeps in, too. Two tools that schedule social posts or three that offer some version of intent data.

Q4 is the right time to look under the hood, since a lot of contracts renew in the new year and budgets lock soon after. Start simple: pull a list of every subscription, its owner, and its renewal date. That alone usually turns up a few surprises. (I’ll go deeper on this next month with five questions to ask before you renew any tool.)

3. Reporting that doesn’t change decisions

Reports take real time to build, and plenty of them get skimmed, filed, and never acted on.

Here’s a quick test. If a metric moved 20% next month, would anyone do anything differently? If not, you’re tracking it out of habit. Fewer metrics, each tied to a decision, make leadership meetings shorter and a lot more useful. It’s worth a closer look before you set up your 2027 scorecard.

4. Activity that looks busy but doesn’t move the business

Likes, opens, followers, and downloads all feel like progress. If they aren’t connected to the accounts you want to win, though, they’re vanity metrics with a budget line.

This one takes judgment. Some top-of-funnel work pays off later and is hard to attribute, and cutting everything you can’t measure is its own mistake. Be honest about which activities you believe in and why. Then stop defending the ones that survive only because they look good on a slide or simply because you’ve always done them.

How to decide what goes

Start with anything on your review list, and run each item through five questions:

1. What is this supposed to do for the business?
2. What evidence do we have that it’s doing that?
3. What would happen if we paused it for one quarter?
4. If we were starting from scratch, would we add it?
5. Who owns it? If the answer is nobody, it’s probably a stop or a fix. (More on that in Tom’s recent post: Improving Accountability in Marketing Teams.)

Put each list to work

Once everything is sorted, each list gets its own next step.

Your stop list

• Stopping doesn’t have to be permanent. If you’re unsure, you can pause something for a quarter and watch what happens. If nobody notices, you have your answer.
• Tell people. A program someone cares about shouldn’t quietly disappear. A short note on what’s stopping and why saves a lot of frustration later.

Your fix list

• Name the problem and an owner. Write down the one thing that’s broken and who is responsible for fixing it.
• Set a deadline. Give each fix a quarter. If it isn’t working better by then, it moves to the stop list.
• Keep it short. A fix list with 15 items on it is really a stop list you haven’t committed to yet.

Your scale list

• Give the freed-up resources a home. Name where the time and budget are going. Otherwise they get absorbed, and you’re right back where you started.
• Decide what more should get you. Pick the number you expect to move, so you’ll know whether the extra investment pays off.

Then put a check-in on the calendar for next quarter. Things change, and an item on your fix list today could be ready to scale (or ready to stop) by Spring.

Shorter plans win

A plan with fewer priorities, each fully resourced, will beat a longer plan that spreads the team thin. Deciding what to stop is how you get there.

Next month, I’ll dig into one piece of this a little deeper: what to ask before you renew any martech tool.

If you’d like a second set of eyes on your 2027 marketing plan, Heinz Marketing can help. Email us at acceleration@heinzmarketing.com.

Photo by Vlada Karpovich: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-doing-paperwork-7433839/