It’s planning season. You’re the marketing lead for your brand, strategic business unit or company. How do you begin formulating a marketing plan that builds upon last year’s successes and eliminates the tactics that did not pull in the expected ROI or did not help in reaching overall marketing objectives? Where do you begin when planning season starts in less than two weeks?

Whether you have the autonomy or not to overhaul your marketing planning process, consider these two steps and 9 tips designed to increase marketing budgets, move your company into new marketing areas, and engage your team.

Break your two week marketing planning prep period into two parts:
1. Gather and Gauge
2. Greet and Engage

Here are some tips to consider under each step:

Gather and Gauge

1) Locate and re-read last year’s marketing plan. Determine if last year’s plan format should change. Hint: If the plan has not been updated and re-circulated in the past year, you may need a more team-friendly plan format. Too many marketing plans consist of endless multiples of PowerPoint slides. We’ve found that creating a one-page roadmap (that is regularly updated and distributed) helps keep the team and plan aligned. Click here to read about a one-page to IntelliStep™ plan from Pipitone Group. This one-page format will roadmap internal communications, channel marketing, customer acquisition, customer retention, awareness and measurement steps. The IntelliStep Plan uses pictures to represent major plan initiatives and shows how they are integrated and how they relate to your timeline.

2) Simplify overall results for easy sharing.  You only have two weeks to prepare. Narrow results to a set of meaningful numbers. For B2B planning report at minimum:
Revenue change
     –Simplify and report change in revenue by product line or by service
        offering versus year ago.
Estimate market share change relative to competitors.

Consider the layers of analysis that could be added to the above and make provisions to have new results be part of next year’s measurement and evaluation planning. Consider how you might add new measurements on customer acquisition, or customer retention. Determine if you need and can get syndicated sales data to learn your true market share changes relative to competition. Could proprietary research help you? In next year’s plan you may want to consider using social media to conduct inexpensive market research. 

3) Revisit the marketing campaigns that contributed to successful product/service revenue increases. In the areas where you were successful, look at your company’s and your competitor’s messaging and boil down to what worked. Pull out the marketing initiatives that you believe might still be effective next year. Separate them into brand building and business building activities.

Further evaluate the successful campaigns. Is your company’s current umbrella positioning still relevant and meaningful? Do your product or service advantages still hold up? Do you have or can you create an “irresistible” offer?
Finally for next year’s plan, decide what the successful components or new ideas would be most effective in further developing existing, or in developing new channels.

4) Prepare a preliminary wish list of marketing initiatives you would like to have next year.

5) Shorten the list.

6) Set meetings for step two.

Greet and Engage

7) Meet with core stakeholders. Get a solid hour each with the key sales, marketing, management and if possible a core customer or two. Ask what can our company offer that is better than what our competitors can offer? What would constitute an irresistible offer? What is on your marketing wish list?

Share a bit of your learning where it is applicable. Ensure that the stakeholder and other team representatives will attend your marketing mindstorming session.

8) Invite the team to a marketing mindstorming session. Use your findings and the results of your interviews to create an outline for the session. If possible handwrite the outline and key findings on large flipcharts.  Use the early ideas on the chart as a base, and let the team add dimension and/or eliminate waste. The internal communication that happens between your stakeholders here should be “priceless”. 

9)  Finally, build a usable, sharable plan that maximizes potential to succeed (refer again to tip #1).