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:

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

Campaign Template

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