ANNUAL MARKETING PLANNING
Keeping in mind these mistakes, we established some ground rules for the planning process: The primary purpose of marketing planning is to determine how to drive revenue growth today, how to set the company up for long-term growth, and how to do this efficiently–and to get everyone in the company on board with the plan. A couple KPIs (key performance indicators) is not a marketing plan. These are part of your plan, but not the entire marketing plan. Marketing’s planning process should be more similar to a product team’s process than a sales team’s: The critical marketing “deliverable” to get right is a roadmap of big bets (like product!). So, the bulk of planning time should be spent figuring out big bet projects . If you don’t spend time thinking about strategic bets, you won’t make them, and you won’t change the growth trajectory of the company. You'll fall into the random acts of marketing trap. Budgeting time for the behind-the-scenes work i...