Six Tips On How to Approach Your Marketing Planning

Post by Allocadia’s Chief Product Officer Katherine Berry

In today’s changing marketing world, planning and budgeting have become more complicated than ever. In addition to the perennial focus on driving revenue, today’s marketers have to include new people, technologies and channels, combined with increased pressures on accountability and efficiency into the planning process. For those of you whose fiscal year starts again this January, now is the time when you start thinking about your marketing plan and budget. So how should you approach planning this year, with all this new stuff in mind?

As Chief Product Officer at Allocadia, I’ve talked with many customers and gained valuable insight as to how some of the best marketing leaders approach their fiscal year planning. Here are six tips you can use to help ease your planning this year:

1. Determine what information is critical to the C-Suite: When thinking about your marketing plan for the next fiscal year, be prepared to answer executives’ questions on basic inquiries into the business of marketing, such as what your spend forecast is, or your plan vs. actual. Unlike sales teams, who use sales operational data captured in CRMs to help explain money coming in to the C-Suite, marketers don’t have an accurate view of marketing operational data (our spend, at what time, against what Corporate Objective) to explain the money going out to the C-Suite. Marketing campaign systems – such as Automation and Social systems – do a great job of capturing data and determining ROI on specific campaigns, and CRM systems do a great job of capturing data on revenue, but today’s marketers need to manage their critical operational data and then link it to this results data across the board to determine overall marketing ROI. Be prepared in the planning stage by thinking about what questions the C-Suite will want to know, such as:
   1. How does your plan align to your corporate objectives? (I.e. what is your split by product, target market or objective?)
   2. How does your plan align to your allocated budget?
   3. How does your actual spend align to your corporate objectives?
   4. How does your actual spend align with your allocated budget?
   5. How much are you on track to spend? And what can we cut?
   6. What are your anticipated Results? And your actual Results? (For e.g. Marketing Qualified Leads, Expected Revenue or ROI?)
2. Look at new methodologies for planning and budget allocation: SiriusDecisions’ Campaign Framework and IDC’s Marketing Taxonomy both provide models for better planning, including different, strategic approaches to budget allocation. SiriusDecisions suggests allocating budget by campaign in order to align your marketing organization. This top-down allocation is partnered with bottom-up functional or executional allocation by region or cost center to “get the money to the people who are spending it”. IDC ‘s Marketing Taxonomy provides marketers with a hierarchical way of categorizing the different types of marketing investment, so marketers can get an accurate and consistent picture of their investments (which is the essential foundation to understanding ROI later). Watch our recent webinars, “How to Align Marketing Campaign Plans and Budgets with SiriusDecisions and Allocadia” and “Best Practices in Marketing Budgeting for Improved ROMI with IDC, VMWare and Allocadia to learn more.”
3. Put together a coalition focused on planning (especially if you are proposing new ways of planning): In her first blog in the Leading in Change series, Allocadia CEO and co-founder Kristine Steuart wrote on how marketers can move up the marketing ladder highlighting some of the suggestions mentioned in the IBM CMO Survey. Kristine (and IBM) offered the following recommendation: “Create a small action team composed of eager marketing futurists – individuals within your organization who have the potential to be CMOs themselves someday. Give these people a short timeframe to review the issues and develop recommendations for resolving them. Breaking the challenges into smaller chunks will enable you to address the big picture as well as the details and dependencies. It can also help you identify opportunities for small wins and boost support for more radical initiatives.”“We often see our customers put together these kinds of “coalitions of the willing” whether it be to pilot a new initiative or tackle a hard problem.
4. Bring your creative and data-driven sides together: We repeatedly hear that marketing needs to become more data driven. We have recently released a set of company-wide user engagement dashboards which are being actively used in team meetings and have reminded us of the power of strong data visualizations (up-coming post on this project soon). Dashboards with meaningful data that are well designed provide a clear path for decisions and actions. We hear the same from customers when they talk about doing their Marketing Planning meetings using visual dashboards as a basis to gain insight and make decisions. With Allocadia’s fully embedded BI tool, users can take advantage of the dashboard designer to get creative with images and layouts. Read more tips on best-in-class dashboards from our BI partner Good Data.
5. Strike the right balance between planning and execution: Balance between planning and execution is key for marketers in today’s world. It can be easy to get lost in planning, and forget to move to execution. As stated in this excellent LinkedIn article, too often leaders tend to focus on planning and strategy, and forget to focus on execution. As a leader in a growing company, I’ve always had strong opinions of striking the right balance between the two: too much planning means no results, but not enough planning means the wrong results. Today’s CMOs need to get up to speed on new and innovative ways to do business, but they need to be aware of spending too much time researching, learning, and strategizing, and not enough time communicating with their customers. To ensure you’re spending enough time on execution, ask yourself, what have people seen from your team recently?
6. Don’t just do what you did last year: We assist many customers with what we call “roll-overs” — setting up their accounts to manage next year’s budget. These customers ask us to copy their activities over from year to year. When this happens, we try to challenge them to think differently by evaluating which activities drove the most revenue and start their planning from that base. When you can tie results to investments you are in a better position to use this data to make better decisions on your plan.

What are your tips for improved marketing planning? Comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Allocadia Co-founder and Chief Product Officer will share her insights about designing software for marketers. Katherine shares the product vision and progress about the Allocadia product and how her team is working to provide customers with the best user experience an enterprise marketing solution can offer.

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