Jani Hovila
I know you are busy. You're busy finalizing all the Q2 projects and planning H2 before the summer holidays, so I will try to keep this one short.
The yearly planning and budgeting season is getting closer. In our experience, this is the most important and easiest time to make big changes in the role of marketing and the value you promise to the organization in the coming years.
What we have witnessed when working with our clients is the need to separate tactical planning from more strategic-level planning.
Tactical planning = What happens in the marketing side of things – things you need to do in 2027.
Strategic planning = What needs to happen in the marketing function. What value do you want to impact, how well you are aligned in the organization, and is your function capable of providing the value that you and the management team expect from it?
How to excel in strategic planning
Here are some of the most influential questions and ideas to help you succeed in your yearly strategic planning and budgeting.
1. Clarify what success means in a yearly planning for you as a leader
Define what you want to change in the yearly planning. Define what works well, and you should keep, but also, what needs to stop. Based on the past year's performance and experience, what would you want to change? Define as concrete an outcome as you can.
• Do I need to change our marketing strategy? Do I need to get aligned with our new strategy?
• Is the role of marketing clear for our stakeholders? Should that be clearer?
• Are we delivering enough value to the organization as is, or should we focus on finding ways to make more value?
• Is our way of organizing marketing enabling us or hindering our progress?
• Do we have the right skills and capabilities in place?
• Do I need more resources in terms of team members or budget to provide the value?
• Are we doing the right things at a tactical level to get us to the next stage?
• How well is our management team aligned on the role of marketing?
As an example from a past client case, we discovered 5 main things to change in 2027 that the strategic level planning process needed to support:
• Clarify management team expectations, value mechanism, and the role of marketing
• Find a way to significantly raise our value and impact on the business
• Structure marketing around business cases to raise investment
• Propose a new team structure with a strong business case to improve business alignment
• Significantly reduce ad hoc
2. Reverse engineer the wanted outcome into actionable steps
Now, after you have clarity on what you define as success from the strategic yearly planning, you can reverse engineer your final outcome.
Think in milestones what you need to know to be successful.
With the client, we formulated this overarching process:
1. Stakeholder interviews about the expectations, the role of marketing, and where they see that they would make the most impact.
2. Vision workshops for the marketing team: Where they see their function in the next 3-5 years.
3. Structuring business cases for marketing with key stakeholders.
4. Management team presentation for the business cases (strategic level - where they should focus and the value of that).
5. Team planning: From business cases to tactical plans - How they achieve the results presented in the business cases.
6. Final yearly plans.
Of course, this is a simplified example from one client. What I think is shared in almost every case we work with, is that the successful yearly planning periods have three things in common:
• Clarity around the outcome for the marketing leader
• Starting from the top - Alignment and expectations
• The plans focus from start to end around the outcome and value, not on the tactics
To give you my favorite questions to spark conversation around this topic:
Do you know what you would do with 2x more resources? Can you show what you would do if resources were not a problem?
If you don’t know or can't show where you would put the extra investment, why would you get it? Always make sure that you can tell, and even better, if you are able to show what you would do with 2x or 3x the resources and how that would impact the business outcomes.
Who cares most about the marketing investment? If marketing investment were reduced, who would feel the pain? If we get more investment, who would be excited?
In the end, the investment or lack of investment should only impact the business and be indifferent to you. Business stakeholders should feel and see the pain or get the benefit. If it is you, the CMO, you probably need to work more on your business cases and alignment.
Hopefully, these gave you some ideas to help you successfully manage your yearly planning.
-JH-
Read more relatable articles:
Marketing should not be about campaigns, but a collection of business cases
Why it’s still hard to sell brand investments to the management team