Most of my recent success has been in SaaS discipline working with organizations in the Business Development area and to onboard external groups such as customers, influencers, affiliates, and resellers. I have also managed and worked closely with sales and marketing teams and even been that department for some. Marketing is a messy subject. It is not linear. It is not a deterministic process; you do this and this happens, cause and effect. Anyone can come up with a great marketing strategy and in the same vein anyone can come up with a marketing idea. As long as you build plans, websites and develop strategies in isolation of customers your chance of success is minimized. The noise at the top of the funnel is just too great to accomplish much with an unproven funnel. You define a persona, acquire a list or use PPC, create an autoresponder and if it is a purchase of substance, you go through that hierarchy type thinking trying to find the decision-maker. It requires Harry Potter-like magic thinking and assumes that you know everything in the beginning. Good ideas can fail even when carried out by competent people and organizations. The idea is to create a strategic direction through small incremental iterations. It is less about theorizing and planning and more about designing and deploying in a type of a sprint. I would approach your efforts by carrying out five to twelve experiments(sprints/marketing campaigns) on three to five different ideas (or versions of a similar idea). The number of experiments should be aligned with the investment and the consequences of failure; the amount of your skin in the game. That may sound like a lot of tweaking and experimenting, but this should not take more than a couple of weeks- less time than what most teams would spend to write a marketing plan or a road map. You could even call this a soft launch if you would like. But it can be done quickly and with little overhead and evolve into something much bigger.