By Whitney Satin
Labor Day marked the unofficial close of summer. And sadly, it also marks the unofficial end to reasonable procrastination when it comes to planning for 2011.
We’ve done our best at Wide Angle to provide inspiration across the dog days of summer, highlighting best practices to link marketing activity to strategic priorities, select meaningful metrics, and make the case for additional marketing dollars. You’re out of the woods … almost.
In most companies, much of the planning occurs in a bottom-up fashion, with a number of separate plans created even within the marketing organization. We’ll see marketers with a plan from the Promotions team, a plan from the Web team, a plan from the Social Media team, etc. This kind of planning process is too disjointed, too disconnected, and—with so many pages of individual planning documents—too cumbersome to support any consistent, integrated execution across the broader marketing team.
Enter one of my favorite planning tools: the “Plan on a Page” from MasterCard. This is literally one page that explicitly ties marketing activities back to higher-level objectives, serving as a roadmap for Marketing but then also helping peer functions understand the role they play in achieving those objectives. In addition to its sheer brevity, there are a few principles necessary to make this approach work:
- Limit the scope. MasterCard ruthlessly distills its goal for the year down to just one thing. Admittedly easier said than done, but really the foundation for building all the later steps in the “Plan on a Page”.
- Keep it focused. Choose a small number of objectives that directly drive the stated business goal. Then detail those strategies that present the most effective way to achieve the stated objectives.
- Make it count. Select metrics that, if achieved, mean we executed on the strategies … which means we should also hit our objectives and the goal. Focus on marketing activities that will drive these metrics up, and weed out those that don’t actually help us achieve desired business outcomes.
A big complaint we hear from the membership about planning is how hard it is to make 10, 20, sometimes 100+ page documents come alive for peer functions (like Sales or New Product Development) or for outside stakeholders (like ad agencies). With the “Plan on a Page” it’s here for the entire world to see—not buried on page 37 behind all the market research and financials.
MLC members: check out the full case from MasterCard for a more detailed look at developing the “Plan on a Page”.
And with planning season in full swing, be sure to check out our upgraded marketing planning solution. MarkPlan™ 2010 is a software suite that leads you through a series of well defined steps and proven templates for building strategic marketing plans that fit your organization. Think of it as a TurboTax wizard that will help you generate your marketing plan. Learn More.
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[...] Whitney presented the ultimate in simple marketing plans – MasterCard’s plan on a page. While putting [...]