3 Challenges with Marketing Campaign Planning (and How to Solve Them) 

Building, communicating, and maintaining marketing plans has always been a challenge. It’s not difficult to conjure up inspiring campaigns and document them in campaign briefs and slides. That’s the easy (and fun) part.   

The hard part is reconciling your plan with your marketing colleagues, managers, and other stakeholders. And defending those plans by demonstrating that they will definitively hit desired targets. Oh, and of course, sharing dynamic plans via a universal, up-to-date marketing campaign calendar.  

The problem isn’t your plan, it’s where you document it. Plans built in isolated files offer nebulous, narrow views of activities, which introduce a host of challenges: 

• Limited visibility: When marketers create separate, distinct plans in isolation, it is extremely difficult to see issues like oversaturated or neglected target audiences. And plans that aren’t supported by a detailed breakdown of expected results lack integrity.   
• Inefficiency and waste: Widely distributed teams cannot see how their plans might conflict with other initiatives which hinders alignment, collaboration, and speed to market. Without a single integrated plan, efforts can drift from the agreed-on marketing objectives, leading to wasted budget and resources.  
• Inflexibility: Plans should never be static. Plans documented in PowerPoint and spreadsheets are rarely updated, and the process of updating them is time-consuming and error prone.  

Fortunately, Uptempo’s marketing planning software introduces powerful new features to address these challenges and give you more plan control and visibility, ultimately helping your team be more effective marketers.  

Struggling to maintain a universal marketing calendar? Here’s how Uptempo helps.  

One marketing calendar to rule them all

The quest for a marketing calendar that easily shows people what activity is in market at any given time is akin to the quest for the Holy Grail. Marketers spend an inordinate amount of time putting their plans into spreadsheets, PowerPoint tables (creating beautiful gantt charts), and SharePoint sites, only to find that they need to be constantly updated.  

Enter Uptempo’s marketing calendar—an intuitive workspace to document, share, and align plans. Get a high-level view to align with the organization’s strategy and then drill-down into the complex details of each program in the same calendar. Nested calendars provide detailed visualizations of go-to-market plans at any time. You can easily change your calendar timeframe, from annual down to specific weeks. For example, social media marketers might find the weekly view more relevant for their weekly tasks than the quarterly view.

Uptempo has significantly improved our campaign planning by providing comprehensive transparency within our organization, Congstar. This applies to the planning of all areas and teams, including the retrospective analysis of previous years.

Alexander Sowah, 
Manager Marketing Planning Budget, Congstar

Change in plans? No problem

One of the biggest blockers to centralizing marketing plans has been accommodating the nuance and complexities of the different teams across the organization. One size doesn’t fit all. Think of a global consumer products organization—there may be hundreds of products targeted at dozens of buyer types, each further segmented by varying geographies, cultures, and currencies. Trying to force this into a “marketing campaign planning” PowerPoint template can be difficult.  

Every company has their own planning framework and nomenclature. That shouldn’t have to change to accommodate a planning tool, but vice versa. Uptempo marketing campaign planning hierarchies give you the flexibility to build a plan that reflects the nuances of your go-to-market initiatives. Maybe you want to follow Forrester’s planning framework and put campaigns on top followed by program families, programs, tactic types, and individual tactics. No problem. Or you can organize your plans by global region first, then product, then campaign, then tactic. This flexibility improves the user experience and keeps everyone in the same platform instead of using rogue spreadsheets.

Better data, better insights

With Uptempo campaign planning, you can attach any number of custom attributes to your activities, like activity type, parent activity, strategic objective, in-market date, and more. These details ensure that you capture performance metadata in a way that benefits your specific business.  You can quickly zero in on different parts of the plan and view programs through multiple distinct lenses. For example, you can expand plan hierarchies, or group and filter by any attribute to see what’s happening at any time. And if you need more details, simply open the activity details panel to see all the relevant information, including budget source and balance.   

Plan better with Uptempo

Why work in outdated, error-prone slides and spreadsheets in a world where visibility, speed, and agility are the keys to impactful marketing?  Uptempo provides marketers with an intuitive timeline and nested view of the entire marketing plan to improve communication and collaboration across distributed organizations. Plan better, spend smarter, and execute with confidence with Uptempo.  

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