How do we start our planning process?

Every marketing team will be asked; “what are your targets for next year, next quarter, next month?”. Some marketing teams will not know where to start. At times it can feel like a “how long is a piece of string?” type of question. 

Depending on your organisation’s approach to budgeting and forecasting, you will likely have two options for planning; A Bottom Up Approach or A Top Down Approach.

A Bottom Up Approach

This is the most collaborative approach for your marketing team. In this instance your team will determine what strategies, programs, campaigns and tactics they want to deliver over the defined time period. They will look at past performance, market analysis, resources required, conversion rates and all other relevant inputs to drive their choices. 

Once they have defined the desired marketing plan, they will look to match the resources required to these activities. To aid this, the team will need to quantify what outputs their plan will drive. This will require calculations to be made on the return on investment based on past campaign performance, estimated impact of specific strategies and / or estimates based on industry standard conversion rates etc. 

After budget requirements and return on investment (ROI) projections are captured, this will be presented to your leadership team or board for review. If the leadership team can only provide some of the desired budget, your team may then need to make adjustments. Decisions should be made on which activities are kept and which will need to be shelved. Setting “SMART” goals for each strategy, program, campaign and tactic will make these decisions easier. More on this later…

A Top Down Approach

Due to the makeup of your organisation’s leadership, budgeting process or historical approach, your goals and budget may be given by the leadership team. It will then the responsibility of the marketing team to create a plan to achieve these goals based on the budget provided. 

Goals and budget should be influenced at the leadership level by factors such as past performance, marketing and overall budget trends (such as year on year growth or decline) and overall organisational strategy. For example, leadership may feel that marketing delivered well last year with their specific budget and therefore want to invest more this year. This increase should have a specific expectation in relation to performance and ROI. 

The task of the marketing team now is to take this budget and ascertain the right strategies, programs, campaigns and tactics to use to provide the best ROI. They will need to find the most ROI positive activities to put their budget and resources into. Your team will have to review past performance and eliminate activities that are not performing and invest in activities that have been ROI positive. Where possible your team should work on things proportional to the level of ROI. 

If there are new activities planned with no previous performance to reference, planning will need to be able to ascertain the ROI level in advance and track performance when the campaign is live. 

This type of planning can limit the marketing team in pursuing new strategies. However, it can aid organisations that do not have resources to spend time in large planning cycles. It can also help organisations who do not have large marketing teams to work with external agencies. Here they can reach out to agencies to help them achieve their goals and deliver the expected ROI based on their expertise. 

Both of these approaches rely on accurate goal setting. In each approach teams and organisations should ensure that their goals are as S.M.A.R.T as possible. 

S.M.A.R.T Goals

• Specific - the goals should have a defined intent. It needs to be as granular as possible in terms of what the goal is related to and what activity it is related to.
• Measurable - the team should be able to say whether it has been achieved or not based on specific calculations. Data points and calculations should be defined whether they are based on qualitative or quantitative data. 
• Achievable - the goals you set should not be too aspirational. They should be grounded in reality. Conversely they should not be deliberately too conservative. This will incorrectly inflate the view of the marketing team's performance. 
• Relevant - the goals should be directly related to an element or elements of the overall marketing or overall organisation’s strategy. All goals should ladder up to the overall performance of the organisation. 
• Time - Specific - each goal should have a time frame attached to it. There needs to be a start point and an endpoint. If a goal is not achieved in the specified time frame, then this needs to be accepted as under performance vs the goal. 

For more information on marketing planning and how Alcomis can help your organisation in your planning process contact phelim@alcomis.ie or contact us here