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As marketers we understand that a marketing plan is the most important and strategic document we will produce all year. The problem is we don’t always treat it as such.
For many of us, the urgent seems to get in the way of the important and we end up rushing to complete our plans at the end of the year to make deadlines associated with executive team presentations. We often create the plans in silos with little input from sales or the product team. For those of you who have been with a company for more than a year, were you lazy and started with last year’s plan and built the current plan off of it? Be honest.
CMOs that have teams with more than 5 marketers usually have several functions to manage. The problem is that each of these functions are often focused on what they do well and not the greater goals. For this reason, marketing teams can have misaligned goals and campaigns tend to be function-specific rather than focused on the target audience and message. This dramatically impacts the effectiveness of the marketing plan.
Even when you have a plan, the team doesn’t always follow it or know how to apply it to their function. How many times in the middle of a planning cycle have you heard an event’s person say, “I think we should run a dinner series” without any context to the plan or why or with who? Or a digital marketer says “Let’s do an email program to the database” without thinking about segmentation or tying it to campaigns outlined in the plan? These are one-off tactical activities that are marketing-channel specific. More probable than not, these efforts failed, or at least did not meet expectations. The question is, why?
There are five primary reasons why marketers run rudderless marketing activities and do not follow the plan:
1.The plan that was built at the beginning of the year was not detailed enough for the team to use as a guide for their efforts
2.The team never fully understood how the strategy fit with their function, so they defaulted to what they know how to do instead of doing what aligns with the goals and strategy
3.The plan was solid, but it resides in a presentation deck somewhere, never to be seen again
4.Each member of the team built his or her own plan, and those were never integrated across the functions
5.There wasn’t a comprehensive, goals-driven plan
If there wasn’t a plan in place, which unfortunately happens far too often, then there will probably be a change in marketing leader- ship soon. All of the other scenarios listed above are direct failures of the CMO not setting a clear strategy, getting team buy-in, and continually reinforcing the direction by revisiting the plan.
To ensure you do not get caught in the busywork marketing cycle and are aligned with the marketing strategy, there are a series of questions you need to ask when new ideas, campaigns and programs come to light:
What is the goal we are trying to accomplish?
What is the right strategy to accomplish this goal? Who is the target audience?
What are the messages we want to deliver to that target audience based on their needs?
Does this tie into a larger theme? What are the metrics of success?
If the answers align with the current plan and you are practicing an agile marketing approach, then you should consider the new initiative. But caution, if the conversation gets tactical and stuck on the marketing channel of delivery without providing answers consistent with your plan, walk away.
What is a marketing Plan?
Let’s take a step back and talk about the definition of a market- ing plan. In early 2020, Wikipedia offers the following:
“A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written marketing plan so that goals may be achieved. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, without a sound strategic foundation, it is of little use to a business”
After reading that definition, maybe this is why marketing is of “little use to the business.” When done correctly, there is no “may be part of an overall business plan,” it is a large portion of the business plan. And you need to think and prepare that way.
Companies that sell to consumers (B2C) usually view marketing as the most strategic function at the organization. For companies that sell to other businesses (B2B), marketing can be viewed as a support function for sales. In either case, the foundation for the marketing plan is the same: you need to identify the right buyer who s a need for your product, and you need to deliver a compelling message to inspire them to purchase.
Every comprehensive marketing plan should include the following strategic marketing element in this order to build off each other:
1.Situational analysis (historical data)
2. Market research and analysis
3.Company goals
4.Marketing goals (roll-up to company goals)
5.Marketing strategies
6.Target audience (segmentation and need)
7.Positioning and messaging
8.Product and services direction and definition
9.Pricing and packaging
10.Competitive analysis
11.Sales channel strategy (distribution model, customer acquisition and lifetime value
12.Sales support (messaging, training, tools)
13.Partner/channel strategy
14.Product and services launches
15. Campaigns
16.Marketing channels/vehicles (PR, trade shows, social, email, website, direct mail, etc.)
17.Programs
18.Marketing activity timeline/calendar
19.Marketing team structure/growth/responsibilities (org chart)
20.Technology (software)
21.Budget allocation
22.Testing (messages, ideas, markets)
23.Metrics of achievement
24.Assumptions, dependencies, risks
Unless you are the head of marketing or marketing operations, you may not be responsible for all these plan elements. However, every person plays a part in the success of the plan, so work with your team to carve out your role.
Building an Agile Marketing Plan
Let’s say you and your team have just built the best plan ever using the Marketing Plan Framework (MPF). The plan fully aligns with the goals as they stand today and details a comprehensive strat- egy for achieving them. You start executing the plan to perfection and then, out of nowhere, the roadblocks to success start to appear. Before you know it, you are off course.
The list of reasons why your plan can crumble is long. Below are some common causes:
1.Economic volatility causes budget cuts
2.Competition comes out with a new and improved product or revised pricing
3.You have employee turnover of key marketers on your team
4.Your plan isn’t achieving the stated goals
5.The sales team is not prepared to do its part
6.The CEO changes the company direction
7.The R&D team does not hit its release dates
8.The industry you sell to starts drying up
9.You fail to get traction in a new geography
10.You have to overspend on a campaign, so you need to modify the plan
11.The team does not understand or buy into the plan
12.You hire the wrong skill set or onboard someone late, creating a capacity gap
13.New hires don’t pan out, leaving you shorthanded
14.Vendors you hire don’t understand the plan and have mis- aligned output
15.The sales team decides to take a different approach or direction
16.Your partners do not hold up their end of the bargain Lead generation emergencies arise and distract the team
18.Campaigns and programs get delayed creating a ripple effect downstream
19.Major marketing events get cancelled 20.Marketing leadership changes
How many of these have you experienced? Hopefully this list did not send a chill up your spine, but these are the key contributors as to why CMOs have the shortest lifespan in the C-suite. So what does this mean? It means you need to build a plan that is flexible and prepares for different scenarios. In other words, you need to build an agile marketing plan.
Why do you need to need to be agile? Because stuff happens— both good and bad. In either case, your plan can get back burnered while full effort is put toward taking advantage of the new oppor- tunity or resolving the current issue at hand. All too often, after the disruption subsides, the plan is derailed, and the team engages in rudderless marketing activities hoping that something works. The problem is that hope is not a strategy, and more often than not, this only results in unachieved goals
An agile marketing plan is made up of 3 key components:
1.Flexing for opportunistic marketing
2.Underachievement scenario planning
3.Overachievement scenario planning
Flexing for Opportunistic Marketing
Depending on your company size, numerous unplanned opportunities will emerge over the course of the year, such as: a customer wants to do a press release with you, an industry analyst ranks your
product or service the best on the planet, or a partner wants to OEM your product and do joint marketing.
In marketing, you are constantly working with the outside world. The problem is that you can’t control what these external audiences do or the timing of the opportunities they place at your feet. You can only control your end of the equation.
Typically, there are three reasons you pass on unplanned opportunities:
timing, resources, and budget. But if you have that information at your fingertips, then you can quickly compare a new opportunity against the current plan to determine which will have more impact on the goals. For this reason, the key steps to the evaluation process are:
Assess if the opportunity helps to achieve the annual marketing goals and is executable
Prioritize by comparing new opportunities against existing marketing campaigns
Collaborate with the team to plan for new oppor- tunities and modify existing campaigns
Reallocate funds accurately without going over budget
Re-engage with the original plan to get back on track
A word of caution: Don’t let frequent urgent opportunities distract you from the original goals-based plan, but be flexible if the opportunity is too good to pass up.
There is a seven-step process for building and executing scenarios:
1.Identify the driving forces behind the potential risks, issues, or decisions
2.Determine the impact to the current goals
3.Create a new set of goals that map to underachievement or overachievement
4.Rank the strategies, campaigns and programs by criticality (highest impact to the business), keeping in mind budget thresholds (especially in case of cuts) a.Align the ranked marketing initiatives to the scenarios based on severity up or down b.Assign a numerical ranking or categorization such as keep, consider, cut
5.Build a tiering structure based on the level of under or overachievement
6.Select metrics for monitoring and create thresholds for when scenarios are triggered
7.Assess the impact of switching to the scenario and adjust accordingly to alternative strategies
Alternative strategies for overachievement are limitless, but when you underachieve, human and financial resources usually get tight. There are some inexpensive marketing options to explore if you have to put together an underachievement plan. Switching from paid to free marketing is the best place to start. Strategies such as content, social, viral, word of mouth, and joint marketing with partners (splitting the expenses) can be very cost effective and will stretch your discretionary spend. If the cuts are primarily to headcount, reallocating financial resources to AI-related marketing software can create lots of efficiencies across the board. You can also look at cheaper offshore vendors for activities such as design, SEM, and telemarketing.
Marketing Plan Template
| Plan Element | Plan contents |
| Situation analysis | |
| Market research & analysis | |
| Company goals | |
| Marketing goals | |
| Marketing strategies | |
| Target audience (including segmentation) | |
| Positioning and messaging | |
| Product and services direction and definition | |
| Pricing and packaging | |
| Competitive analysis | |
| Sales channel strategy | |
| Sales support | |
| Partner/channel strategy | |
| Product and services launches | |
| Campaigns | |
| Marketing channels (vehicles) | |
| Programs Marketing activity timeline Team structure, growth and responsibilities Technology (software) Budget allocation Testing Metrics of achievement Assumptions, dependencies, risks to success |
Campaign Template
| Campaign Name | |
| Goals | |
| Audience | |
| Topline Message | |
| Supporting Messages | |
| Marketing Strategy | |
| Call To Action | |
| Success Metrics | |
| Campaign Duration | |
| Content | |
| Marketing Channels | |
| Customer Marketing Activity PR/AR Activity Nurturing Activity Internal Communications Timeline Budget Expected ROI |
What does it take to be a great CMO? Vision and creativity are important, but “operational marketing” is essential if you’re going to make your vision a reality. Perhaps the most important job of a CMO is to orchestrate all the parts of their team to do the only thing CEOs really care about: deliver results!
Courtesy: Archway
