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2 minute read
Whether you’re a marketer or a marketing leader, you’ll probably have experienced a time when you unveiled a marketing plan and came up against a barrage of questions, budget adjustments and maybe even disappointment, if expectations were somehow different from a business leader.
All that work and time invested into your beautiful marketing plan suddenly feels like a waste of time and can leave even the most resilient marketer feeling down-trodden.
But there is a way to avoid this!
If your marketing plan was the result of good marketing strategy steps then there’s probably nothing wrong with the plan itself. The missing link may have actually been the communication you had with the necessary stakeholders, leaders and team members along the way.
Taking a more consultative approach to the development of your marketing plan, including the strategic steps leading up to it would minimise the number of questions, budget changes and other reactions you may come up against.
The top tip to avoiding this scenario is to think about who needs to be involved at the point of marketing plan approval and ensure they have been involved and consulted at key points during the planning.
For instance, while reviewing or conducting market research and the diagnosis steps, working with the whole business makes a lot of sense. This impacts the decisions the whole business will make, marketing included but not in isolation.
The key insights found during the diagnosis steps would be fodder for strategic decisions the business should make collectively, i.e. what does the category or industry consist of, who are the key players, what are the latest technologies or policies that impact the industry and where it’s moving to, and therefore what the company needs to deliver against.
If the whole company works together on this, then the marketing, product, sales, finance and other teams will all be starting from the same baseline and understanding, immediately reducing some of the potential questions around how a marketing plan aims to deliver on the strategy.
Other examples of strategic elements the whole business should work together on would include market segmentation, targeting and goal setting, ideally utilising a good OKR framework.
Marketing can then take the lead on (or collaborate closely with product and sales on) positioning to the agreed target audience, branding, learnings and insights on past marketing performance and marketing hypotheses for effective tactics.
With the foundational elements completed as a whole of business, there should be greater alignment with individual teams to start developing the tactical elements that align with their skill sets. However each team will have an immediate base-line understanding on the ‘why’ a certain approach may have taken, or be able to ask questions to gain clarity on where the connection back to the agreed strategy is, instead of needing to ask to be educated on the output entirely.
It’s also recommended to regularly come back together with leaders, stakeholders and peers while working through the more specialised elements of the planning to check-in for continual alignment, providing the opportunity to ask questions and make adjustments throughout the process.
This avoids any last-minute surprises for any of the teams, marketing included, but also ensures the business results should be in a much better place to succeed due to being far more aligned and on point to the agreed strategy.
Enjoy a more collaborative approach and a better marketing and business outcome by working with your business in an optimal way, working together when it makes most sense and connecting back in regularly throughout planning to stay on track.
Read my other blogs for more tips on developing an effective, better marketing plan.
