Why Annual Marketing Plans Are Outdated: Embrace Agility with Quarterly Planning
As we near the end of the financial year, most marketing professionals are already preparing drafts of their annual marketing plans for the following year. Although developing a broad strategic plan may appear attractive, conventional forms of siloed annual marketing plans fail to offer the flexibility necessary to address on-the-ground dynamics. This blog explores why yearly plans often fall short on their own and how a more granular approach can save the day.
Why Annual Plans Often Fail
Organizational marketing plans are an excellent way to organize activities for the year. The success of the plan, however, is impacted by several factors that may be both in and outside the sphere of control of the marketing leader.
1. Factors Within Your Control
There are areas within a marketing team’s control that can directly impact success:
- Performance of Marketing Assets: This includes the effectiveness of content, ad campaigns, other key assets, and so on. If your in-process performance metrics do not correlate with your plan, you have the ability to influence the course correction through budget control and/or increased efforts.
- Outcomes Handling: All marketing campaigns are aimed at driving sales success. However, annual plans are mostly not equipped to address dynamics in the sales organization. If there are a lot of in-progress or unopened MQLs, it is a clear indication of insufficiency in sales bandwidth. Onboarding in-house sales personnel or enrolling channel partners to address backlogs in lead processing can help address the problem of plenty.
2. Factors Outside Your Control
Many external factors that can impact a marketing plan can also be beyond marketers’ influence:
- Competitive Activity: Competitor activities, such as new product launches, new campaigns, or even changes its ad spend are mostly unpredictable.
- Economic Environment: The availability of commodities, cost of production, inflation rates, interest rates, and consumer attitudes can vary and influence marketing communication.
- Regulatory Influence: Regulations and sector-level policies may change, rendering marketing strategies obsolete suddenly.
With so many influencing factors, expecting a single, solid annual marketing plan to guide a year long marketing effort is unrealistic.
A Smarter Approach: Quarterly Plans and Weekly Milestones
Now we know that a monolithic annual marketing plan is not very useful, so is an ultra-granular weekly plan. Weekly plans are too reactive and uncertain, leaving no room to plan, prepare, and perform. It is better to set an annual direction with a more specific quarterly plan and a weekly list of tasks to achieve the quarterly plans. This structure maintains flexibility that enables teams to act swiftly to meet emerging challenges and execute opportunities.
1. At the Year Level: Set a Direction, Not a Fixed Plan
It’s essential to have a clear marketing direction for the year. Key indicators like Cost of Customer Acquisition (CoCA), Cost of Lead Acquisition (CoLA), Marketing Spend as a Percentage of Revenue, and Return on Marketing Investment (RoMI) provide this annual guidance. However, specific plans to achieve these indicators should be mapped out quarterly rather than annually.
2. Break Down Annual Goals into Quarterly Plans
Quarterly plans help achieve the overarching annual direction. This involves setting goals for:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Targeted goals help guide campaign priorities and audience targeting.
- Budget Allocation: Adjust budgets quarterly based on performance and emerging needs.
- Efficiency Metrics: Key indicators like conversion rates, reach, and engagement help track progress.
These “results-focused” outcomes at the quarterly level help make small and firm strides towards the yearly guidance. More importantly, missing targets in a quarter will highlight the gap-to-goal that needs to be added to the remaining quarters. Exceeding goals can help make decisions like reduced ad spend (can’t help but dream).
3. Weekly Tasks Keep You on Track
Weekly tasks are manageable, specific actions that build up to quarterly goals. These may include:
- Calendar: The actions needed to achieve the quarterly plans must be broken down to weekly tasks that include both recurring and non-recurring ones. Having a little bit of room to respond to “out-of-control” factors as discussed earlier can help manage time better.
- Adherence to Schedules: Sticking to a timeline ensures a steady pace and structured workflow. Meeting the weekly schedules will ensure that the small incremental steps are taken towards making the quarterly plan.
- Tactical Metrics: Tracking metrics like opens, clicks, reach, engagement, traffic, and conversions keep marketing efforts aligned and allow for real-time adjustments to tasks.
Weekly accomplishments should feed into quarterly metrics, which in turn drives progress toward the annual direction. This granular approach prevents a last-minute scramble at the end of the year.
Advantages of Quarterly Planning with Weekly Milestones
Quarterly strategies supported by weekly tasks offer several key benefits over a traditional annual plan.
- Agility: Teams can pivot to address both over- and under-performance and make adjustments each quarter. Responding to both in-control and out-of-control parameters are possible with a granular plan.
- Enhanced Control: Quarterly reviews provide more frequent checkpoints, ensuring in-year control and reducing the risk of falling short of goals.
- Resource Management: Adjusting resources and spending quarterly allows for more efficient yearly allocation.
Making It Work: Key Dependencies
To ensure quarterly planning succeeds, there are specific considerations that marketing leaders should keep in mind.
- Set an Annual Budget: An annual marketing budget offers a financial framework, with flexibility allowed within quarterly allocation.
- Clear Accountability: Every role should have clear metrics owned by individual team members to ensure responsibility for every key performance indicator.
- Sufficient Resourcing: Weekly tasks should be adequately resourced to meet schedule and budget requirements.
- Visibility Across Metrics: Teams need consistent tracking through weekly, quarterly, and annual metrics. This visibility keeps progress in check and builds accountability.
Conclusion
Changing from the annual marketing plan to quarterly strategies and weekly activities provides marketing departments a more flexible, cost-effective, and responsible way of working toward goals. Flexibility is essential for teams to respond to market changes, manage resources effectively, and keep them aligned with the overall objectives.
Remember, what counts at year-end is simple: Cost of Customer Acquisition (CoCA), Marketing Spending as a Percentage of Revenue, and the Return on Marketing Investment (RoMI). Using such indicators makes the way to success a sequence of clearly defined and understandable objectives.
Attempting to predict a full year can be challenging because things can change halfway through a year; thus, quarterly and weekly planning could be helpful to keep your marketing on track.
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