How Often Should a Marketing Plan Be Revisited?

Once you have gone to the effort and time to create a marketing plan, it’s important that the document doesn’t just sit on a shelf (or even in a shared file) for the rest of the year. Instead, the marketing department should revisit their marketing plan regularly to ensure specific goals and objectives are being met and tweak it for greater future success opportunities. There are a few specific instances that call for reviewing a marketing plan. You should revisit a marketing plan at the following times:

At the end of a campaign: When a digital marketing campaign or television ad campaign ends, it’s imperative that you revisit the marketing plan. You’re not looking just to check off that the campaign is complete, but to critically analyze what worked and what didn’t based on analytics related to the campaign, feedback from involved team members, and key performance indicators dictated before the start of the campaign. This can help the marketing team make changes to similar upcoming marketing campaigns in the marketing plan to ensure they capitalize on learnings from completed campaigns.

When something changes: When you experience a change either within the marketing department landscape or in relation to a product or service you offer, you should revisit the marketing plan to determine whether adjustments need to be made to the marketing activities scheduled for the coming months. Additionally, if you realize that a marketing channel you previously overlooked could be helping drive revenue, revisiting the marketing plan is a smart way to make sure it is added thoughtfully to the existing plan rather than unintentionally stealing resources from a planned activity.

Quarterly: Marketing plans should also be revisited quarterly. Some marketing departments might choose to revisit their marketing plans monthly, but this will depend on the types of marketing activities your team executes. Revisiting marketing plans quarterly should allow a marketing department to analyze their efforts based on year over year data collected from quarterly reviews held in previous years. Quarterly reviews of the marketing plan should also provide opportunities for the marketing department to adjust course if a particular element of the marketing plan isn’t working.

Most marketing plans outline the particular activities to achieve the marketing strategy for the coming year, so marketing plans will also need to be revisited annually. However, it would likely be to create a new marketing plan for the upcoming year rather than adjust its current marketing plan. How often the typical marketing plan is evaluated will depend on the marketing department’s needs and how many campaigns they have planned throughout the year.