Planning. For Marketers.

Even in high school I knew I wanted to be a marketer but I realized during my first job (in media) that I had no idea what kind of marketing I wanted to do. So I joined an agency.

Whether brand, creative, experiential, or performance – there’s a lot to be learned during a good stint at an agency. I had exposure to tons of different industries, business models, and of course - egos. I learned to come up with ideas quickly and pitch them effectively. I got really good at powerpoint presentations.

But, after a few years there, I realized that I couldn’t be agency-side anymore. Clients are demanding. The hours are long. Pitching ain’t easy. But none of these were my main reason for leaving.

My gripe was the feeling of being transactional. Being transitory. Working agency side meant that I was far removed from the planning process. The campaigns we were hired to execute were shiny objects and not to be learned from or given the opportunity to evolve. Success was rarely compounded.

I wanted to be closer to the strategy. (Strategy > Structure > Skills, right?).

It’s the beginning of 2023 and, like many companies, we’re at the tail end of our annual planning at soona. This is the fourth company where I’ve been close to the planning process since leaving agency life and now have a few dozen annual/quarterly planning exercises under my belt.

Planning is a process that is thorough, painstaking, critical, and sometimes even argumentative. I love it.

Planning is also an imperfect process. By the time you’re done planning, the plan itself is likely out of date. Regardless, it’s a time to say YES to the things you need to accomplish and say NO to the hundreds of other things you could do instead. This is when you define and sharpen your strategy.

A good plan includes:

The Financial Model.

(^^^ This was a great read on financial models from a CFOs perspective)

The model isn’t a budget, although that’s part of it too. It documents the goals for both growth and efficiency broken down by month and with the results of a number of assumptions made about the business and marketing’s abilities to reach new targets.

Planning is extremely challenging for marketing as we typically own the largest chunk of budget next to headcount cost and are on the frontline of reacting to and impacting the financial model.

There are typically three inputs:

1. The top-down view: spend and new customer acquisition. This often begins as a negotiation between the desired growth rate and the usually lesser increase in spending. Why can’t we 3x revenue with only 1.5x more spend? In this delta, the business will challenge our comfort with diminishing returns and efficiency.

   1. We mainly focus on the new customer challenge. Our inputs into the model l outline our promises of diversifying new channels, investing in creative, approaching seasonality, driving unpaid organic or referral channels, and much more.

2. The bottoms-up view: retention behavior to predict growth of existing/repeat revenue. Data science will be your friend with a predictive retention curve and churn analysis here but you can also use some simpler methods like trailing 3-6-12 months repeat revenue to make a prediction too.

3. Step changers: we then collaborate with our partners in product and operations to determine net new changes in the business that may cause a step change. Expansion into a new market, launching a new product, changing pricing, introducing a new pricing plan, or any number of other efforts might be reflected as a step change in repeat behavior or new customer acquisition. Plot these each on the calendar and we have a pretty thorough view of how the year will (hopefully) unfold.

PROTIP: If you’re ever interviewing for a VP/C-level growth position make sure you meet with the head of finance during the process. You’ll want to make sure they’re super sharp and make sure to befriend them very quickly!

OKRs

So much has been written about Objectives and Key Results that it’s become the default approach to planning - especially in tech and startups.

I won’t explain it here but I will share my hit or miss experience with them.

Hit: A good OKR process gives a lot of clarity. It narrowly defines our objective in the form of an approach. “To become the best company at X” is not an objective, it’s just a goal. “To become the best company at X by doing Y” is an objective.

Hit: When CEOs or a centralized few work on the Os. Too many cooks in the kitchen and we have too many Os.

Miss: Allowing every team to create their own set of objectives - even if just an attempt to “translate” the main company-level objectives by department. I’d caution against this unless the company is extremely diversified with distinct business units. Otherwise we have a tendency to play telephone while hearing what we want to hear.

Hit: KRs are great - especially if you can remove all derivative or leading indicators and isolate just one or two KRs per objective. Even better if you can build a streamlined dashboard as an output of the planning process.

Miss: companies often try to go an extra step and apply an impact metric to every project (we’ll get to that in a second) that ladders up to that KR. By implementing a new email marketing system we will improve repeat rate by x%. In my experience, this next step is a step too far. A lick and stick a finger in the air exercise. Instead, ask departments to priority stack their ideas by impact and effort, approve those, execute, and measure. Yes, projects should be measured but rarely are they accurately predicted to be of any meaning at all. Get to work.

Projects

A flaw of “OKR” simply as an acronym is that it doesn’t encapsulate the absolute necessity to include projects and roadmaps into the planning process. I’d attempt to create a new acronym or add a P to OKRs but that would be a reach for this humble newsletter.

Project planning is where you as a manager should really bring in your department leads and their teams into the planning process. Challenge them to bring their best and boldest ideas to the table. To scrutinize each based on impact and effort.

Good project planning will yield accountability. Singular ownership, clear dates, and the below-the-line costs that ladder back up to the budgets outlined in the financial model.

Good project planning reveals deficiencies in resourcing and an opportunity to make a case for giving you more support. Each project is an idea. Sell the idea well enough and extra resources will come. Extra resources for you represent new challenges and new growth in your career which is exactly why the planning process has to be taken seriously!

And, after 1000+ words I’ll close with the fact that I don’t think my approach to planning is perfect. I don’t think every company operates the same. I’m still learning, still tweaking, and still growing. I’m still in the process of compounding success.

I don’t think each Marketing Clarity newsletter will be this long in the future but I thoroughly enjoyed writing this one. Hopefully, you enjoyed it too - let me know!

Follow me @rikin311 on Twitter.