It’s that time of year, and I don’t mean the precious days between now and Christmas Day, when it’s too late to finish your shopping. I am of course talking about annual planning. If you aren’t already in the thick of it, most people are starting to pull together their plans for the upcoming fiscal year.
As excited as I get about the prospect of a fresh year, with fresh ideas and ambitions about how we can do things differently, I thought it was a good time to go back to basics and remind readers of a few best demonstrated practices that will keep your planning momentum going:
Step One: Start with what you know – Christmas comes every year, holidays, awareness days and weeks and events that you may want to align with are already published. Build out a blocking chart that starts with events that may be important to the organization for the upcoming year.
Step Two: Layer in anything that worked from the current fiscal – you may have already captured items as part of Step One.
Step Three: Layer in any product launches or new activities – things you know are happening, but timing could be a moving target. Plug those items in during areas of the year that either align with Step 1, or can fill holes during points in the year that could use a lift in activity.
Step Four: Look at what you spent this fiscal – Marketing budgets aren’t typically that volatile. I like to approach budget after I have already built out a high-level blocking chart. For me, this is about balancing a strategic conversation and allocating funds in the right spot.
When you can go to your leadership with a well thought out allocation and a complete picture of what the year will look like if certain activities get cut, you stand a better chance at securing additional funding if needed, and or, reallocating in a way that suits the needs of your organization by demonstrating that you are making the decision based on data.
Step Five: If you’re launching new products, remind your leadership that net new activities will require net new funding for maintenance. Sometimes this is a difficult discussion, because a lot of organizations like to take a “set it and forget it” approach to marketing – the reality is that if you spread your budget too thin by trying to accommodate too many new things, then you run the risk of falling short on execution and failing to deliver on your objectives.
I’ll provide a detailed post in the future about the rationale for new product marketing calculations, and how to come up with the best figure.
Step Six: Use action oriented language – leadership often doesn’t respond well to dollar values associated to words like “strategy”. As a marketing professional, you have to add color to the description so that leadership can understand and articulate beyond the word strategy. It may be a thing, but it’s a hard word to rationalize on its own without any additional descriptions.
Good luck!
Rebecca 