How to Build Your Next Year's Marketing Plan

And just like that, it's almost time to ring in the new year. Looking ahead of schedule and devoting ample time to planning out your campaigns and marketing milestones is not only essential for success, but also for allocating resources and finding where gaps exist. Waiting too long to plan can result in unrealistic expectations, team goals that don't align with company objectives, and a marketing team scrambling to throw something together as quickly as possible instead of focusing on top quality output.

What ever happened to staying Agile? Yes, it's true that Agile methodologies have many benefits for marketing teams, but there's a huge difference between being Agile and being unprepared. Let's take a look at the differences:

Source: https://www.wrike.com/blog/effect-agile-marketing-teams-infographic/

With Agile in mind, it's imperative that you become proactive about your plans for next year. Let's take a look at some steps to get you to a full-fledged marketing plan for 2018:

1. Cover Lessons Learned From Last Year

The only way to start planning for the future is by learning from the past. Before you dive in and start listing tasks for your team, take a look at the past year (and even previous years). Find out what went right and wrong so you can avoid past mistakes and repeat proven successes. Not sure what to cover? Download this free list of questions that will help you evaluate the performance of past marketing initiatives.

2. Align On Objectives... and Stick With Them

A recent study by HubSpot found that only 23% of companies are exceeding their revenue goals — and of those not exceeding their goals, 74% don’t know the number of monthly visits, leads, MQLs, or sales opportunities they need.

While company vision can be commonly known across many teams, it's important to dig even deeper and talk about marketing goals and objectives for the new year. Without a consensus on marketing objectives, there is zero unity on priorities and projects.

Keep in mind that, while lead generation and increasing trials and MQLs are extremely important, there are several ways to measure success. Don't be afraid to get creative and come up with metrics that will push your marketing team to explore uncharted territory.

"Unfortunately, many marketing departments don’t get creative with the metrics that serve as benchmarks for performance; their main metrics usually revolve around leads generated, sales, etc," says Jeff Kear, Owner of Planning Pod. "However, there are usually more telling metrics for measuring your marketing effectiveness. For example: percentage of leads (free trials) vs. unique Website visitors; percentage of leads vs. conversions (paid customers); monthly recurring revenue.”

To some, it's fairly easy to align on objectives at the beginning of the year, it's harder to stick to them as the year progresses. Shifting objectives throughout the year can clog productivity and make it difficult to measure growth and success.

Ready to start planning? Download these free templates to get a head start on the new year.

3. Evaluate Resources

Once you've established goals for the new year, it's time to go over what resources you currently have, and what resources you will need to reach those goals.

A couple of things to ask yourself when evaluating resources:

What is my team's typical bandwidth? Are they overloaded? ---> Hire additional (wo)manpower.
How are the communication channels? Are you working with remote teams extensively? ---> Invest in a collaboration tool.
Is data easily lost between email chains and constant meetings? Do you need a better way to organize your work? ---> Adopt a work management tool.
Is your Ops team ready for the changes coming down the pike? Can they handle the workload? ---> Scale your Marketing Operations.
Is Design able to get the approvals they need quickly so they can spend more time being creative? ---> Streamline creative execution.

Requesting more budget to obtain these resources can be especially difficult; which is why it's crucial to measure and review past initiatives (see Step 1) and work out a milestone payment schedule so you can make a case for more resources.

4. Build Out A Calendar

To help concretize ideas and plans, it's good practice to sit down and start scheduling everything from email campaigns, to conferences, to blog content.

Being Agile, plans may change and deadlines may shift. Aligning with other teams on messaging and physically planning out a calendar with clear deadlines will help build a consistent brand voice across different platforms. It will also make it easier to gain visibility into ongoing projects (when deadlines do shift), and keep everyone accountable for their own projects.

When building a calendar, it's good to work backwards. Look at your OKRs and where you want to be at the very end of the year. Not just you, but your customers (and potential customers) as well. What should they think about when they see your brand? How do you want them to feel when they read an email from your organization? What kind of insights do you want to see from them?

Once you've ironed out the ideal end-of-year milestone, work backwards, outlining what needs to be done to get to that point. Agree on a clear, consistent message you want to share each month (or quarter), then brainstorm the exact topics and content later. Getting a big picture scheduled out right away will help you build a structure to work off of and give all the other teams visibility into your plans.

5. Kick It Off Right

In the words of famed author Stephen King: "The scariest moment is always just before you start." So start it off right.

Ringing in the new year with an exciting marketing kick-off trip, a party, or if you're looking for something more budget-friendly, organizing awesome team building games that are actually fun — these are all great ideas for building momentum and excitement. Remember, your team's success is your success and starting a whole new year of projects can be daunting, so treating them with a fun event or outing will get them excited for what's to come.

Don't Stop There...

Once you're done with next year's planning, take a look down the road and do some research on new marketing trends. Where do you want your marketing org to be in 5 years? How about 10 years?

Beth Gard, of lotus823, says, "Set in stone a comprehensive 12-month marketing strategy and goals for the next five years. Developing a strategy with clear action items and setting both short-term and long-term goals pushes you to assign team members and actually implement the tasks.”

Failing to plan is planning to fail, so plan for success by kicking off the new year on the right foot.

Marketing 5 min read

Survival of the Marketer: How to Prioritize Against Crammed Deadlines

Use these steps to prioritize your marketing campaigns and decide which projects should be the focus of your team’s time and resources.

Marketing 3 min read

Viral Marketing Strategies from Crazy Successful Campaigns

It's the holy grail of online marketing: the campaign that goes viral. Massive numbers of views, a staggering amount of social shares, and the kind of brand awareness money simply can't buy. But crafting a successful viral campaign is no easy feat; in fact, most experts say you can't really plan it with a marketing strategy definition at all — it either happens, or it doesn't, and luck is no small factor. But that doesn't mean you can't craft your campaigns to increase your odds of viral success. The key is to tap into your audience’s "lizard brain." “Stories that evoke very primal emotions tend to work best,” says Neetzan Zimmerman. He should know: during his time at Gawker, he generated an insane amount of traffic — more than all of his other colleagues combined. So which emotions do you target? How do you start? By getting to know your audience and understanding what makes them tick, first and foremost! Then, try these three proven viral strategies to help your next campaign spread like wildfire. 1. Make them laugh. Why it works: Funny marketing videos downplay the hard sell and instead go for "surprise and delight." They make people say, “I have got to see that again!” This cranks up the view count, and makes people want to share a laugh with friends. Positive emotions like joy are much more likely to trigger an action like social sharing. (Check out our recent work humor video, "Beware the Managers from Hell!") 2. Make a bold statement. Why it works: These campaigns go for the gut, tapping into powerful emotions. People connect to your message on a deeper, "Me too!" level and genuinely want to spread the word or share your cause. 3. Make their jaws drop. Why it works: The awe factor. These are the videos that make people turn to their friends and say, "You gotta see this!" Everyone wants to be the first person to share something cool or amazing with their friends. Warning! Don’t get so wrapped up in achieving viral status that you stray too far and your campaign ends up having nothing to do with your brand. If people remember your campaign but can’t remember what company or product it’s associated with, your efforts are wasted. Follow the DroneCo Comic for More Startup Fun! Browse previous episodes of Welcome to DroneCo in the comic archive, and subscribe to the strip to get each new episode. Then follow DroneCo on Twitter to keep up with the gang all week long. Share the comic on your own site with this embed code: Webcomic brought to you by Wrike

Marketing 7 min read

15 Suggestions to Improve Your Marketing Operations from Leaders

Learning about, and focusing on, improving marketing operations is becoming more critical for digital marketing teams trying to get ahead. Understanding your customers, implementing customer data properly, and measuring campaign performance are all key steps in building out your marketing ops. .In addition, marketing ops focuses on (1) managing the technologies that the marketing team purchases, and (2) measuring marketing effectiveness across the board. It’s not just your marketing techniques, but rather, it’s what goes on behind the scenes to make sure your campaigns reach their goals. . No one knows successful marketing operations better than the experienced marketers and business owners of today. Here are their secrets for improving your marketing ops: 1. Establish a cross-department workflow “The most important piece of improving your marketing operations is establishing a project workflow between marketing and the rest of the organization. The internal workings of individual teams can be heavily influenced by how other departments request projects and/or expect projects to be done. Once your workflow is established, using a tool to help task assignments, set deadlines, and follow up is critical.” —Daniel Bliley, Marketing Director, Passport 2. Work with your audience in mind “One issue with marketing, especially in digital, is the noise. There are so many companies saying the exact same thing, and companies don’t really do the proper research to figure out who they are, what their message is, who needs to hear that message, and how to get that message out. Start from the top down. Take the time to explore your analytics and the data, interview your customers, pay attention to social media conversations & get involved, then create content that aligns your goals with your audience’s goals, speak to your audience in a unique way, and constantly review & tweak.” —Patrick Delehanty, Digital Marketing Strategist, Marcel Digital 3. Know your customers “The vast majority of the time, people make bad marketing decisions because they don’t have the right information about their target audience. To remedy that, I’ve worked hard to tie our CRM to our email marketing to our signups to our web traffic, so when we’re reaching out to someone, we have a complete understanding of them.” —D. Keith Casey, Jr., Director of Product, Clarify.io 4. Align all consumer insights "I think in an ideal state there is a dedicated consumer insights team, but a team that doesn’t work in its own little silo. A team that is interactive not only with the marketing team but also the product team, as well as with others who touch the customer technology. They have to understand the full circle of customers’ curiosities so they can put together a real, robust view for those who need it." — Patrick Adams, CMO, PayPal 5. Establish your key marketing metrics “Establish 2 to 4 key metrics that will guide all your marketing efforts. Without establishing these benchmarks, your marketing team won’t have anything to shoot for individually or collectively. Unfortunately, many marketing departments don’t get creative with the metrics that serve as benchmarks for performance; their main metrics usually revolve around leads generated, sales, etc. However, there are usually more telling metrics for measuring your marketing effectiveness. For example, percentage of leads (free trials) vs. unique Website visitors; percentage of leads vs. conversions (paid customers); monthly recurring revenue.” —Jeff Kear, Owner, Planning Pod 6. Prioritize content development "We have a dedicated team that’s focused on content strategy and on creating what I call the content supply chain, mapping out where all the sources of content come from. Do we have the content already? How do we create new content? Who creates the content? It may be internal, it may be external. What format does that content take? Then, how do we work with the appropriate teams to get that content in the market? — Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet 7. Stay on brand "Ultimately [integrated planning] is a function that’s run through the marketing team. We establish the brand voice and try to create and implement consistency across all of our efforts, all of our communications channels, and all of our internal divisions/business units." — Evan Greene, CMO, The Recording Academy (The GRAMMYs) 8. Focus on the ROI of your campaigns “Focus on ROI and user retention. By measuring the return of each campaign, we’re able to identify which ones are actually working and prioritize those. Our ROI has grown from 35% to 200%. Now, we have more money to invest in other projects to continue growing.” —Gabriel Stürmer, Chief Marketing Officer, Cupcake Sweet Entertainment 9. Implement Lean methodology to discover which campaigns work “Implement the Lean methodology (build, measure, learn). In essence, during planning sessions, we develop a list of hypotheses & prioritize based on expected impact. We then devise bare-bones methods to test these hypotheses. In this way, we get data-driven feedback quickly, allowing us to invest more heavily in winners and cut losers.” —Ryan O’Donnell, Director of Marketing, Avalara TrustFile 10. Use a Scrum board to focus weekly priorities “Enhance your weekly task delegation through the implementation of a Scrum board. Scrum is an Agile framework for handling tasks, originally developed for software development teams to easily delegate tasks. There is nothing worse than being inefficient when it comes to marketing, so a Scrum board helps us develop a weekly plan of attack, and lets everyone know what they should be working on.” —Jake Lane, Growth Analyst, LawnStarter, Inc. 11. Keep experimenting with new marketing techniques “Great marketing is about experimentation, testing, and measuring different approaches to find what works best. An issue many marketing departments face is that everyone has their discrete responsibilities, so it’s left to the marketing director or VP to initiate new programs. However, this should be everyone’s responsibility. Your team should meet regularly to brainstorm and come up with one new idea to apply and measure. It can be big or small, as long as you try something new — otherwise, you may never find that one golden opportunity that makes your revenue curve bend upward.” —Jeff Kear, Owner, Planning Pod 12. Build a long-term marketing plan “Set in stone a comprehensive 12-month marketing strategy and goals for the next five years. Developing a strategy with clear action items and setting both short-term and long-term goals pushes you to assign team members and actually implement the tasks.” —Beth Gard, lotus823 13. Hire a strategic analyst “The first hire in the marketing operations role should be a strategic analyst. This role is focused on developing ROI measurements for marketing. Once the tracking is in place, then everything else within marketing should be aligned.” —David T. Scott, CMO, Scott on Marketing 14. Continue to manage customer data "We’re building a centralized marketing profile that is at the customer level and becomes the common definition used by marketing teams across the organization to drive their campaigns. Getting the data house in order, making it real-time, and managing it at the attribute level is what’s important. As is making sure that the experts who are really close to the products have the ability to control what’s most important to them in that profile. This allows us to federate it out and take a much more efficient view across the organization, rather than be a big centralized behemoth that is too slow and ultimately doesn’t work." — Steve Ireland, SVP/MD, JPMorgan Chase 15. Remain accountable "In order to be effective, marketers need to have credibility. Because they have to do a lot of leading by influence, they have to do a lot of aligning and engaging and evangelizing, and that only works when people trust you. They only trust you if you deliver the goods and are accountable; you do what you say and you say what you mean. — Peter Horst, CMO, The Hershey Company More marketing resources Marketing operations is a relatively new field, and there’s always more to learn. Here's a list of some of our resources for marketing leaders and teams (including our eBook, The Digital Marketer’s Guide: How To Drive Success at the Tactical Level) to help bring your next campaign to success. eBook: 7 Habits of High-Performance Marketing Teams Infographic: How to Choose Marketing Software eBook: The CMO’s Formula To 3x Your Digital Marketing Campaign Results Blog: The “We” in “Teamwork": How Marketers Can Drive Cross-Team Collaboration eBook: How to Avoid the Eight Pitfalls of Marketing Campaign Planning eBook: 5 Steps to Transforming Marketing Operations for Maximum Growth

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