The Annual Marketing Plan: It should be the most wonderful time of year
The annual marketing or brand plan. A process that should involve exercising your strategic muscle, creative flow, ideation, collaboration and setting an ambition for the year ahead.
Yet for so many organisations and marketeers, it’s become a cumbersome, often painful exercise that no-one relishes, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief over once it’s done. And that’s before any of it is put into action.
As leaders, how can we use the process and output (the plan) as a creative, inspiring springboard for the team, and year ahead?
How do we orchestrate the many parts, teams, ideas, channels as one?
How do we build a plan that’s ready to implement?
How do we get over the siloes – be that of differing agendas, ways of working, geography or hybrid working, budgets?
How do we measure its effectiveness?
And most importantly, how do we make it memorable, fun, and something everyone wants to contribute to?
Having sat through the process - as a contributor, agency partner, team member – and facilitated many clients and marketing teams through theirs, there are some guiding principles I always work by:
1. Have a north star.
Where you’ve teams and disciplines feeding into a plan, you need to set out the ambition and direction clearly up front. What’s your north star? The guiding goal for the year ahead, that everything in the plan must ladder up to and support. Teams need something to evaluate their thinking and creativity against. Simple articulation is key here.
2. Get away from your everyday.
This may sound challenging. But no-one is ever going to think outside of what they do today when they’re in the environment of their everyday.
When was the last time the team engaged with the voice of your customer? When did you last experience the product, or the world from the POV of those who buy from you? Or just go somewhere inspiring, unusual, to get brains flowing. I’ve run these sessions in museums, historic venues, after a long walk or over dinner: it is amazing the difference in thinking when teams are ‘freed’.
3. Identify your conductor.
I use the orchestra / conductor analogy over and over. Truly integrated marketing requires orchestration. Not even the best marketing teams in the world just make it happen.
Someone, or something, must play the role of the conductor during both planning and execution. Be that you as the leader, a member of your team, a facilitator, or your lead agency.
If the conductor wasn’t there, the orchestra and its output (music) would fall apart. This is no different.
4. Milestones and formats.
No-one thrives in a 3-day death by PowerPoint workshop, or agenda lacking variation and pace.
Change the environment but change the format up too.
How can you break it up into milestones over the planning period?
What needs to be delivered by presentation vs. where can you run a session to get the team thinking on their feet?
What thinking frameworks can you use to stretch and challenge?
How can tech and collaboration tools help you join up and iteratively build?
5. A plan to follow. And plan to change.
Good marketing planning can always adapt to change. Have a plan to follow, and plan to accommodate change.
How do you review and iterate in a considered, not chaotic way during the year so to not lose sight of that north star?
Process, perspective, and insight are key. Regularly reviewing success against your KPIs and metrics (which should be set during planning), analyse, and agree the action. As a rule of thumb, if you review monthly, no more than 3 actions for the month ahead.
6. Balancing brand and performance.
This is a topic in of itself. However, in most scenarios, we need both.
Common understanding and appreciation for the other is often the greatest challenge I’ve witnessed in organisations where it becomes a battle for airtime, budget, and resource.
Set a guide on split, and an understanding amongst the whole team of the roles of both, and how they interplay with each other based on your north star, business needs and sector. Then evaluate over time; attribution and econometric modelling is becoming a part of a marketeer’s toolkit and worth exploring.
7. Keep it alive in the business.
The plan is done. Signed off. Does anyone ever look at it again?
Keeping the north star alive for the following 12 months is key. Summarise it on a page that becomes the team’s ‘crib sheet’.
Use it (the north star) at every key milestone, planning and review meeting. Encourage everyone to evaluate regularly – and use someone to keep everyone accountable and reflect reality vs. plan.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.