Don’t Make These 10 Mistakes in your 2016 Marketing Plan
’Tis the season to be writing your 2016 Marketing Plan. As someone who’s written annual marketing plans ranging from $50,000 to $4 million, I’ve made my share (or more) of mistakes. Here are 10 of the really big ones for your enjoyment. Hopefully, you’ll avoid at least some of them.
1. Don’t use last year’s plan as a starting point
I know it’s tempting. Ask your CEO and Head of Sales what their business goals are and derive your marketing goals out of theirs. You’ll probably discover that you want to repeat some of last year’s activities in order to reach those goals, but you’ll inevitably decide to swipe some of the old activities for new ones, better aimed at reaching next year’s goals.
2. Don’t leave more than 20% of your budget without measurable goals
There will always be the odd corporate marketing activity, which can’t really be measured, but you really want to aim for measuring at least 80% of your marketing activities. Pick a relevant business metric for each budget item: no. of new leads, no. of customer meetings, no. of renewals, etc. — and attach a target number to it. This will be your best defense when your budget gets cut. And it will.
3. Don’t plan every detail of your plan for next December
Chances are you’ll be changing your game plan several times before next year’s holiday season. Prepare a high-level plan for Q2, Q3, and Q4. Create an in-depth, detailed action plan for Q1. This will serve as your sanity check to make sure the overall plan makes sense and you’ll be ready to hit the road as soon as your plan gets green-lighted.
4. Don’t be afraid to delegate
Your fears are not misplaced — you can probably create a better and faster marketing plan than most of your junior team members. But here’s what you’ll miss if you do:
- Fresh ideas your team members can come up with, not all of which you would have thought of yourself
- Your team members’ commitment to executing the plan they were part of creating
- The appreciation of your team members for the trust you placed in them
So break up your plan and delegate parts of it to your team members, guiding them on the what, and leaving the how to them. Start this process early, to allow yourself time for guidance, team member work, reviewing, correcting, and finally compiling everyone’s work back into the master plan.
5. Don’t assign every last dollar to an activity
Try and leave a 15–20% budget surplus for miscellaneous items you’ll need throughout the year. Your business reality will inevitably change. You’ll thank yourself later for leaving this surplus in your budget, which means you won’t necessarily have to cancel other activities planned to allow for the new ones.
6. Don’t put all the weight on your shoulders
Show up at your CEO’s office with a bloated budget and you’ll either get kicked out or — at best — asked to cut a significant portion of your budget. Try and offload certain items to other departments’ budgets:
- Salespeople’s travel expenses to trade shows?
Allocate them to the Sales or G&A budget. - Marketing automation systems?
Allocate them to the IT budget.
7. Don’t reinvent the wheel
Your mother was wrong. Well, sort of. You are unique. Just like everyone else is. In our context, that means that even though each company has its unique business and marketing goals, a lot of companies, especially in similar fields, share the way they allocate their marketing budgets.
Consult with 2–3 colleagues and read marketing benchmark reports like this one about your industry. They can serve as excellent starting point for asking for a budget raise, say for social media, “because 78% of companies in our industry are doing so.”
8. Don’t forget to sanity-check your breakdown
Build your budget in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. For each line item, specify the company business goal it furthers, the geographic territory it applies to, which product line it promotes, etc. When you’re done, derive pivot tables from your data and sanity-check the distribution you find between business goals, territories, and product lines.
Are they aligned with the company’s business goals? If not, go back to your budget and correct it until they are. Once you pass your own sanity check, create some nice pie charts showing the breakdown of your data by business goals, product lines, territories, and any other meaningful attribution your company uses, and present this to management. It will score you many points for the well-thought out budget you prepared and will make it easier for you to justify every line item.
9. Don’t avoid measuring trade show ROI
Trade shows take up a huge chunk of most B2B marketing budgets — anything from 40 to 70 percent, depending on your exact industry. Many times this investment is justifiable, but other times it is not. In order to truly justify your trade show budget, make sure to assign a concrete business goal to each show, e.g. no. of new leads, no. of distributor meetings, no. of new sales, etc. Track this number at least six months after the show in order to justify the next show’s budget and next year’s plan.
You can learn a lot more about planning and measuring exact trade show ROI in my book, The 50 Secrets of Trade Show Success.
10. Don’t automatically renew vendor contracts
Evaluate all your vendor agreements with technology and service providers annually. Many products and services have become cheaper to use throughout the years. While I probably wouldn’t choose a Fiverr designer for my company’s big re-branding project, I have successfully used them for tactical assignments like presentation design, proofreading, data entry, etc.
Many new technologies have emerged, which make it easier and cheaper than ever before to create landing pages, design banners, and do a lot of our daily grunt work. Make sure to research new tools that meet your needs and could potentially replace their older, more expensive alternatives, at least once a year.
What’s your best tip for creating an annual marketing plan? I’d love to hear your ideas and feedback in the comments section below.
