How To Supercharge Your Marketing Planning
Ready to supercharge your marketing planning? Here are the tips you need.
You've likely engaged in marketing planning throughout your career, but many marketers tend to miss out on essential, yet simple components that can make all the difference between success and failure. These critical elements are often the key to turning a good plan into a great one.
Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just getting started, following these strategies will help you breeze through the year, transforming your planning efforts into a powerful driver of success for your business.
Make It Consistent
Whether your business structure is simple or complex, ensuring consistency in your planning across all parties involved brings numerous benefits. It simplifies the ability to plan accurately, identify gaps, align resources, allocate budgets, and gather meaningful input and buy-in from stakeholders.
Organizing components into categories—such as events, digital assets, content creation, and sales support—provides a clear structure. Offering all participants a straightforward template helps organize plans and requirements, while still allowing for creativity and flexibility. This approach can be easily refined and adapted throughout the planning process.
This becomes especially important when your planning involves multiple business units, various stakeholders, and layers of approval. By combining and organizing everything into a simple, easy-to-understand format, you create clarity. This enables everyone to work more effectively, ensuring plans solidify, budgets are allocated appropriately across competing priorities, stakeholders are on board, and teams are ready to execute once the plan is finalized.
“A successful marketing plan goes beyond just creating a strategy; it requires consistency, collaboration, and the right focus to drive results.”
Focus on the Right Things
The right things to focus on aren’t simply the actions one individual wants to take; they are the things that those tasked with growing the business believe are important, are willing to participate in, and that marketing agrees should be prioritized.
While many actions will be clear and easily agreed upon by all stakeholders, less obvious decisions benefit from a structured approach. This method creates checks and balances, preventing the loudest, most passionate, or persistent voices from forcing in ideas that may not be the best fit for the plan.
The most critical aspect is to quantify and qualify success during execution. By doing so, you can determine what truly worked and delivered a return on investment. Results and outcomes should guide decisions on what to prioritize, helping inform next year’s plans if they are not available for this year’s. This approach ensures smarter decision-making and more effective use of limited investment dollars.
Prioritize Programmatic Marketing
When organizing your plans, consider adopting a programmatic framework—a systematic approach to marketing that keeps you consistently in front of your target audience 24/7, 365 days a year. This approach is more effective than planning one-off tactical efforts that often lead to periods of invisibility and irregular promotion.
For example, you could group your initiatives aimed at driving awareness and consideration into a single program. This could include broader targeting strategies like advertising, social media, press releases, and more. By doing so, you can clearly plan and prioritize these efforts, while categorizing content as a separate program. This allows you to better plan the content you need to support your activities and allocate your budget across the entire ecosystem for the year.
Thinking and planning programmatically doesn’t mean excluding one-time events or tactical initiatives. Rather, it enables you to integrate these events with other strategies, creating cohesive online and offline experiences. This ensures that all your activities are aligned and maintain a consistent frequency and cadence without gaps or conflicts.
Combine Digital & In-Person
Salespeople often prioritize in-person events and opportunities for face-to-face interactions, while marketing leaders focus on digital marketing, as much of the buying journey takes place before a buyer is ready to engage with a salesperson.
In reality, both in-person events and digital marketing must work in tandem. By integrating the two, you can maintain consistent engagement and create experiences that guide buyers through the entire process—whether they’re new prospects or repeat customers.
However, it’s important not to let large conferences and pay-for-play events overshadow smaller, more intimate gatherings like exclusive dining experiences, targeted networking events, and peer connections. These events can help you break through the typical industry noise. When paired with pre-, during-, and post-event digital experiences, they can further set your brand and solutions apart.
Fund Activities & Earmark Dollars
One of the most crucial aspects of planning is not only creating a strategy but also securing funding upfront. Equally important is earmarking those funds within the organization’s budget process, ensuring they are not diverted to other areas and are readily available when needed.
A lack of funding is one of the biggest barriers organizations face when trying to use marketing effectively for growth. If you can’t afford what you’ve planned, what’s the point of planning? How can the business grow if there’s no investment in marketing, with the conviction and accountability to follow through on strategies believed to drive meaningful growth?
When earmarking funds, it’s also essential to eliminate obstacles that hinder their use, such as unnecessary approvals and gatekeepers that slow down decision-making. These barriers can prevent you from executing key initiatives at the pace needed, which is essentially the same as not having allocated the funds in the first place.
Cross-Functional Interlock
It’s important to remember the right course of action is always one that everyone agrees on, which is why it’s crucial that your entire marketing planning process is supported by strong interlock between sales and marketing. However, it should go beyond that, ensuring alignment with stakeholders across various functions and levels within the organization to ensure success throughout the year.
Collaboration with the teams that support key areas like content, channel execution, data, and insights is especially important. It’s a mistake to assume others will automatically help when needed, especially if you haven’t informed them about your needs, the timing involved, or any special considerations they need to account for throughout the year.
Marketing execution is complex and requires a team effort, with many functions coming together across numerous iterations and evolutions. By providing clear visibility and securing buy-in from all functions, you create a unified, cohesive approach that operates efficiently and effectively, helping to achieve milestones, drive outcomes, and celebrate success—ultimately deepening collaboration and fostering a culture of winning.
Proactively Schedule Reviews
Planning doesn’t end when your organization completes its formal planning process. Instead, it transforms into an ongoing, dynamic activity, supported by regular check-ins to ensure accountability. These reviews help keep teams on track and within budget each quarter, ensuring the organization operates with purpose and is positioned to achieve its goals and expected outcomes.
Scheduling quarterly reviews of plans and budgets at the start of the year—one for each team responsible for execution—helps maintain focus on this essential task as the year progresses. It allows teams to prepare for reviews, making them efficient and minimizing disruption to operations.
However, be careful not to rely solely on quarterly reviews as a replacement for strong day-to-day management of plans and budgets. Despite thorough planning, unforeseen challenges—such as canceled events, technology issues, client problems, and budget discrepancies—will inevitably arise and need to be addressed in real time.
In Conclusion
A successful marketing plan goes beyond just creating a strategy; it requires consistency, collaboration, and the right focus to drive results. By incorporating programmatic approaches, integrating digital and in-person strategies, and ensuring cross-functional alignment, you’ll build a solid foundation for sustained success. Regular reviews and securing necessary funding will help keep your plan flexible and responsive to any challenges that arise.
Now is the time to take action. Review your marketing planning process, identify areas for improvement, and implement these strategies to set your business up for success in the coming year. By doing so, you’ll drive better outcomes, smarter decision-making, and ultimately, a stronger return on investment.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Marketing Leader | Adept Entrepreneur | People Developer
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
