Einstein proffered that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.
Then I must ask the rhetorical question: how close do marketers come to that definition when it comes to marketing planning? The search term ‘marketing planning’ has appeared in the top five search terms on the MLC website for 24 months running. Our annual executive survey has reported ‘planning’ as a top-five area of improvement nearly every year since the poll’s inception.
Sincerely now, what do marketers keep doing year after year that keeps yielding the same underwhelming results?
There are two near-constant mistakes that prevent most organizations from building successful marketing plans:
1. They replicate the previous year’s marketing plan, subtly tweaking resource allocation and marketing activities from the previous year, which was only slightly different from the year before that, and so forth.
2. Interim changes to plans are either made with little regard to the original strategy, or not made at all. In layman’s terms, some call this tactic the ‘stick-it-in-a-drawer’ method of planning.
Taken together, these mistakes yield plans that are unresponsive to changing market conditions, miss shifts in customer needs, and produce tactical plans reliant on ‘traditional’ media. With continued uncertainty in today’s economy and social media shifting the communications landscape daily, an incremental, unadaptable marketing plan is the surest path to wasted effort and misguided strategy.
So rather than simply expecting different results, how can marketer do planning differently? For starters, marketing plans must link to corporate strategy – it’s the only way to demonstrate the function’s contribution to the ultimate arbiter: shareholder value. Marketers should implement metrics immediately after settling on strategy – not after selecting tactics. Cross-functional leaders don’t much care how many Facebook fans you have; they want to know whether your strategy worked … which most CFOs measure in dollars. The closer your metrics are to financial outcomes, the stronger the case for marketing investment becomes.
With linkage to corporate priorities, Marketing’s performance is inextricably linked to the performance of peer functions. Harness that cross-functional input during planning – solicit input from Sales (particularly B2B companies); understand how the R&D pipeline will impact future sales; make sure Market Research provides the best customer insight. Lastly, practice integrated marketing communications, with each medium and touchpoint serving a clear purpose toward the achievement of marketing objectives.
Implementing these principles will at least break the insanity habit, but by no means will they alone yield long-term success. There remains a need to build a repeatable process embedded in daily workflow, where the plan is a living document referenced throughout the year.
MLC Members, if you’re struggling with planning, we’d love to understand your specific challenges so we can build better resources to support you on this perennial pain point. Please take this two-minute survey about the state of your organization’s marketing planning process or e-mail my colleague Abhaya Menon, and we’ll be sure to follow up!
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