Marketing plans of action

While a company should always be willing to try out new ideas and marketing tools, you may find all your effort is futile if you have no overriding plan of attack leading your actions.
In our past marketing efforts we have sometimes tried marketing attempts here and there with no real thought behind it and no real measurement of success other then if there were any sales generated.
With present and future marketing efforts we are first discussing and deciding on a bigger plan of action, breaking this down into smaller efforts, taking these actions and then measuring the success or downfall of each step.