Marketing Planning Best Practices

Marketing plans are a fickle undertaking.

As CMO, a roadmap is essential to guide your team and reach your goals. But, you also need to remain open to detours, as roadblocks arise and new opportunities cross your path.

How can you create structure, while staying flexible? Follow these best practices to build an agile, data-informed marketing plan.  

4 Best Practices for Dynamic Marketing Plans

Refresh Your Research

The success of your marketing plan hinges on how well you understand your audience. Demographic data can only tell you so much about who your customer is, the real insights lie in how they shop. Don’t rely on the same static personas every year. Customer preferences fluctuate, demand ebbs and flows, and pain points evolve.

Tap into recent sales reports and compare historical cycles to spot any changes in buying patterns or customer profiles. Is there an untapped audience you could target more effectively? Can you adapt your campaigns to overcome common closed-lost issues? Don’t forget to account for seasonal trends as you review data, develop your plan, and allocate budget.

Explore Different Spending Scenarios

No matter how much you have to spend, distributing your marketing budget can be a painstaking process. With so many brand touchpoints to contend with, where should you invest to support a seamless, high-converting customer journey? To predict future ROI with confidence, start with past performance.

Analyze customer interactions with your brand - preferably with an attribution tool that overcomes cookie limitations and keeps historical records intact. Then, zero in on the marketing initiatives and touchpoints that directly drive pipeline and revenue. Build forecasts to tweak your numbers and compare various spend strategies. With this data at your fingertips, budget allocation quickly falls into place.

Don’t Gatekeep Your Goals

Get specific about your goals and collaborate with key stakeholders on metrics and KPIs. Make sure to align your marketing plan with wider business needs and objectives: Is your current focus on new customer acquisition, or building loyalty? Does the sales team really want “more leads”, or is it a question of improving lead quality?

Next, create accessible reports to track your goals. Don’t just list KPIs, build out dashboards that offer actionable insights for both sales and marketing. For example, an MQL to SAL report can shed light on lead quality, while funnel velocity reports help identify roadblocks in the sales process. For cross-functional visibility, keep these reports native to your CRM as a unified source of truth.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

No marketing plan is complete without a system to measure and improve results. Set up dynamic dashboards for each of your agreed KPIs to take the heavy lifting out of reporting. With real-time performance data clearly visible to everyone on the team, you can spend less time manually analyzing outcomes, and more time taking action.

Regularly review the performance of different campaigns, tactics, and channels against your goals. Remember, you don’t have to rigidly adhere to your original plan. The beauty of real-time reporting is it facilitates a dynamic response. Stay agile and capitalize on unexpected wins as they happen. Optimize for what works and pivot where needed.

Drive Results With a Data-Driven Marketing Plan

As marketers, the best laid plans often go awry - and that’s okay. Build a solid foundation with up-to-the-minute data, aligned KPIs, and carefully measured results. But most importantly, develop a plan that evolves and adapts in response to real-time performance.