Communicating Marketing Strategy: Plan-on-a-Page, Integrated Campaign and Budget Templates

Get everyone aligned to maximize impact

Is your annual sausage-making done? Many companies are putting the finishing touches on their annual financial plans. But that’s just the beginning of Q1 and Q2 detailed planning. Yay! You may have already presented high-level options as part of the planning process, but now it’s time to solidify the exact plans, detail campaigns, socialize with interdependent teams, and communicate across the company. Shoot, Q1 is already in swing! This post details the following to help you maximize productivity:

• Plan-on-a-Page

• Integrated Campaign Planning Templates

• Tactic Calendars & Content Maps

• Budget Planning

• Year-Round Tips and Tricks

Plan on a Page

This fall, I wrote on LinkedIn about an Annual Plan On A Page that I encountered on an Inverta / Uptempo Planning Webinar. I love this format for annual planning and quarterly plans, and the post was wildly popular. I have done OKRs, strategy docs, and budgets, but I've never put it all together on one page like this. I love the simplicity, communicability, laddering, and clarity of dependencies. I think it would be great for communicating quarterly plans as well, or maybe even a multi-audience, multi-product campaign structure:

—> You can download the plan on a page here and view the recording by Inverta / Uptempo here. This plan on a page is very close to an earlier SirusDecisions/Forrester template designed by Craig Moore, which is available to Forrester subscribers here.)

While that plan-on-a-page is fantastic, the next step is translating many of these goals and actions into integrated campaigns where all marketing activities work together. This is where the template gold kept rolling in the Inverta / Uptempo series (Inverta is a consulting company that works with companies on their planning, and Uptempo is enterprise marketing planning software that helps companies see campaigns, budget, impact, and marketing processes all in one, or detail by detail.)

Campaign Planning

An integrated campaign is one of the most important elements of a marketing strategy. Sometimes, companies get off-track, and each marketing department executes its own activities tied to the corporate messaging and briefly socialize but are not deeply integrated with one another. These efforts fail to multiply the “remember us” effect. Effective campaign planning can make all tactics more impactful by working together in combination.

Below is a template from the series that highlights an example. The THEME is the most critical part and must speak to the buyer's pain point, be simple to understand, and be broad and enduring enough to last for a while. How long? Ideally, campaigns last at least 6 months, but even better if they last for longer. It takes a while to build all of the assets, be heard in the market, and build lasting momentum.

This fantastic template:

And this one details the specific campaign plan and targeting:

Then you need to double-click on that overall plan into a more tactical planning calendar:

As the CMO, I like to have an even higher-level company calendar that may reflect campaigns but within the context of everything else that might affect it in the world, or from competitors etc. You need both high-level and detailed calendars for different audiences.

And what content do we need for each stage of the funnel for these campaigns? Let’s make a Content Map:

This webinar series was really rich. Inverta also went through how to be pro-active in planning about the decision matrix (RACI), about the workflows for planning and execution, and provided guidance on annual, quarterly, and monthly planning cadences.

—> Download all the templates above in this slide deck.

Budget Planning

The challenge of the planning season is that so many different workstreams must happen at the same time. Budget planning happens at the beginning (How much budget should marketing have overall (benchmarks here)), in the middle (how will we allocate it), at the end (exactly where will we spend it), and ongoing (are we on track with spend and impact?)

I love allocation models as an explicit discussion of relative priority. Last fall, I published a blog about bottom-up planning featuring Uptempo’s 7-Step Blueprint for Marketing Planning. This helpful resource includes chapters on campaign architecture, defining and planning campaigns, allocating budgets, executing campaigns, measuring ROI, and optimizing campaigns. It’s a great resource that, among other things, goes through a budget allocation model organized by the campaign (also published by Sirius Decisions/Forrester).

I’ve also used allocation models by segment / industry / geography “above” the campaign level as well. A “how would we spend $100” is a very helpful exercise for prioritizing all the things your company wants to do at once. A 20%/80% strategy is much different than a 50%/50% strategy.

In order to plan forward on what you’re going to spend, you have to have a pretty clear and accurate understanding of what you’ve already spent. I have often managed corporate budgets in an Excel file and shared my template in an earlier blog.

But the webinar also highlighted Uptempo’s product - operationalizing this budget planning and campaign process with the benefits of modern software. I can manage our overall budget in a spreadsheet, but I generally can’t keep up with tagging the spend in accurate detail to segments, campaigns, audiences etc. In my spreadsheet world, I’m guestimating these allocations more than accounting for them - which works for smaller companies, but becomes difficult in global, multi-product, multi-audience, multi-industry companies.

Uptempo lets you see the high-level spend allocations and actuals

And allows you to map activities by campaign, date and tactic, with drill-down detail and projections available on each tactic

You can see actuals and projections for the different campaigns and campaign elements:

Spend tracking:

And then, after you dug deep, tagging and connecting all of the inter-related details, you can go back up to the highest level again, summarizing impact and marketing contribution by channel, audience, region, campaign, or any other number of variables:

These are just a few highlights of the Uptempo feature set. But I’ve kept an eye on them since their acquisition of Allocadia several years back and am intrigued.

Planning is a Year-Round Project

Planning season can feel overwhelming - budgets, data, ROI, campaigns, assets, calendars - for the year, for the first quarter…. and we still have to deliver in the current quarter. It’s. A. Lot. But I’ve found that every year together, the team gets better at planning. We start to understand our unique rhythms and exec preferences, and we’ve kept track of our own performance of the last year better than the former. The most important elements of making planning season a success?

• Get your data in order - creating a strong budget process, integrated campaign process, performance management, and ROI process all year will make planning for next year even easier. You have to build the insights foundation. (This is why Uptempo’s 7-Step Blueprint for Marketing Planning is relevant all year with its almost circular process)

• Don’t lose the forest for the trees - there are details on details, especially the bigger your organization gets. But it’s important to bring it back up a level to communicate it more broadly. This is the “show them the beacon and not the blizzard” golden rule. Ideally, you bring out your annual plan on a page at the beginning of every quarter to check in, make trade-offs, replan as necessary, and reinforce the overarching strategy.

• Don’t plan at 100% capacity - big things are going to come up after you’ve inked the plan - an acquisition, a big competitor move, a new product, a new market reality. You need to leave space to respond to the CEO and market’s top demands. I tried to plan at an 85-90% capacity plan so we could deliver on plans and be responsive to new needs. It’s tricky, but you’ll be forced to drop something if you don’t.

Planning can be hard, but great templates and rhythms can make it easier. Nice job, Kathy Macchi and Jim Williams, on this series and helpful materials.

Any other planning templates you love that they missed?

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Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.

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