Before the marketing team and agencies dive into campaign planning, they need clear direction on the campaign's themes and goals.
These are five foundational questions for top-down campaign planning:
Forrester recommends centering your campaign themes around the customer’s or buyer’s needs instead of the product you are selling. In some companies, product marketing handles this, but most of the time, it's up to the marketing leaders to set the campaign themes. A popular way to document this is following Forrester’s plan-on-a-page framework. This information is often documented in a PowerPoint or spreadsheets, but ideally it’s saved in marketing planning software to create a system of record.
After you’ve set your themes and goals, it's essential to allocate your budget wisely. This means making sure every dollar spent is aimed at achieving your goals. Yes, all marketers are “data-driven” but it’s critical to count more than “clicks.” To allocate budgets most effectively, marketing leaders can use impact models to predict how effective their campaigns will be.
Clear campaign direction and thoughtful budget allocation are crucial for effective marketing planning.
Impact models are essential tools in a marketer's toolkit. At their core, impact models predict the effectiveness of different marketing strategies by mapping out how investments lead to desired outcomes. Think of them as detailed road maps that show the journey from the initial customer interaction to the final goal, whether that’s a sale, a lead, or increased brand awareness.
The data for impact models comes from various sources, including historical campaign data, CRM systems, web analytics tools, marketing automation platforms, and sales data. Sometimes you won’t have all the data at your fingertips, and need to fill in the gaps with instinct and assumptions. By integrating these data sources, marketers can build models to predict the impact of their efforts. This enables marketers to allocate their budgets more effectively, ensuring that resources are directed towards the most promising opportunities.
Conversion rates for channels vary wildly, so take the time to customize your models instead of universally applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Let’s compare two different marketing channels: trade shows and paid ads. The conversion rate from a trade show might be influenced by factors such as the quality of the event, the relevance of the audience, and the effectiveness of the follow-up strategy. On the other hand, paid ads will have different conversion dynamics based on the platform used, the targeting criteria, and the ad creative.
By developing separate impact models for each channel, marketers can more accurately predict the number of sales or engagement generated from their investments.
For smaller marketing teams, using spreadsheets to build their impact models may be sufficient. However, enterprise marketing organizations need a more sophisticated solution like marketing planning software that can handle the complexity of building (and maintaining) multiple impact models based on the business line, program, channel, region or audience.
Build and use tailored impact models for each marketing channel, program, or persona to predict outcomes and invest in the best channel mix, maximizing ROI and overall marketing effectiveness.
Despite their benefits, marketers sometimes struggle with impact models. Here are a few common pitfalls:
Your marketing strategy and investment plan should be mirror images of each other—one cannot change without the other. They are simply different representations of the same plan: one in words and numbers, the other in money.
Therefore, how you allocate your budget needs to be tightly aligned with your marketing strategy. If your strategy evolves, your budget should reflect these changes. Forrester’s strategic budget allocation process can help you make the most of your resources.
Your total marketing budget should be initially divided into headcount, systems/technology, non-program services, and marketing programs. This is where marketers often run into problems. Rather than thinking about the impact of those dollars, marketing budgets are instead divided across functions such as field marketing, brand, etc., leading marketers to focus on how to use their allocated dollars for specific tasks rather than considering the big picture.
The concept of working vs. non-working dollars helps marketers rethink how budgets can be allocated. Working dollars are funds spent on media, placements, and activities directly engaging with the target audience, while non-working dollars are spent on the creation, production, and support of those marketing activities. The distinction is critical for marketers to accurately measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, identify operational inefficiencies, and highlight how marketing investments contribute to business goals.
While it's necessary to maintain a functional view of your marketing plan and budget, Forrester recommends a more strategic, holistic approach: allocate your budget based on campaigns, with the goal of dedicating 70% of program dollars to campaigns. This strategy has two significant benefits:
The remaining 30% of your program budget should go towards activities that don’t fit neatly into a campaign, such as maintaining your website or services like market research and brand management. This balanced approach ensures that campaigns receive the bulk of the focus and funding, while essential ongoing activities and services are also adequately supported.
Forrester’s strategic budget allocation process is a best practice for strategically allocating 100% of marketing’s spend.
Spreadsheets may be sufficient for managing the budgets of smaller marketing teams. However, for global organizations with hundreds of marketers and brands, relying on individual spreadsheets becomes impractical and error-prone. A multi-billion dollar enterprise cannot effectively manage a global budget on thirty separate spreadsheets no matter how many power users they have.
This is where marketing planning software that supports budgeting and plan creation becomes crucial. Such tools can handle the complexity of large-scale operations, ensuring accuracy and cohesion across all inputs, significantly enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise marketing organizations.
Tired of marketing plans that gather dust or being seen as just a “cost center”? Join this hands-on workshops series to get actionable advice and templates that will help you turn your annual plan into a strategic advantage.