Having a marketing plan is table stakes.
Moving fast when plans need to change and executing well is what separates great marketing organizations from everyone else. Instead of rehashing every best practice on campaign execution, you want to focus on two key areas that are often overlooked:
These two areas play a crucial role in determining your marketing organization’s agility and its reputation within the company.
You’ve rolled out a comprehensive marketing plan to the business and questions start pouring in immediately.
“What are you doing right now to drive more traffic for my brand?”
“What campaigns are running in my territory this month?”
There’s a sinking feeling in your stomach as you realize that stakeholders across the business have no way to know what is happening right now, or even in the near future. Socializing and communicating the marketing plan frequently is critical to keeping your stakeholders informed and inspiring confidence in your plans.
Stakeholders outside the marketing organization look very different in B2B vs. B2C:
Agility won’t happen unless everyone is following the same plan, at the same time. But different stakeholders need different views of the marketing calendar, all with real-time information. An enterprise can’t solve this with PowerPoints or spreadsheets that always end up buried on some corporate drive. Teams struggle to figure out which version is the latest one, making it easy to go rogue. What’s more, these files are completely separate from where marketers actually work on campaigns.
The shareable, single source of truth for marketing plans can only happen with a purpose-built marketing calendar. A calendar that all stakeholders can reference ensures everyone has real-time visibility into what campaigns are live and coming soon. These insights keep global marketing teams aligned and reduce friction when plans need to pivot.
Along with a universal calendar, regular meetings and email updates should be a cornerstone of your socialization strategy. Hold weekly small group meetings and monthly leader briefings to share the updated marketing plan, review KPIs, and discuss any shifts in strategy. Sending out weekly email newsletters that share cross-functional success stories, upcoming goals, and any changes in priorities is another great way to keep everyone in the loop. Regular communication builds trust, streamlines efforts, and maintains the momentum needed to hit your targets.
A universal calendar is critical to socialize and communicate your marketing plan with external and internal stakeholders. To supplement the calendar, you should have regular meetings with stakeholders and email updates.
Marketing has an uphill fight for credibility in every organization. You need to be transparent about what your team is doing, why, and the results.
Finance is a critical stakeholder that needs to be aligned and bought into the marketing plan. Regularly socializing your plan and investment strategies with finance ensures that marketing efforts continue to support company objectives. However, creating a strong working relationship between marketing and finance is more than just fixing your processes for month-end close. (Although, that's a good start.)
Here’s an example budget cycle for a global tech enterprise. Budget owners and StratOps need to regularly track planned, forecasted, committed, and actual spending on a weekly basis. Having a standing mid-month budget sync between marketing and finance helps create alignment about how marketing is tracking against their goals and what changes need to happen. In the example budget cycle we’ve shared, you can see how forecasts are updated and projected spend is recalculated on a monthly basis. All of this needs to happen before accounting closes the books at month-end. A smooth reconciliation process is essential for knowing exactly what is left in your budget, helping you distinguish between working vs. non-working spend and enable smarter, faster investment decisions.
Unfortunately, this is often where communication gets stuck in a battle between marketing numbers vs. finance numbers. When reconciliation happens in spreadsheets or departments use incompatible taxonomies, it can take weeks to get the final (sometimes contentious) result. This significantly impacts your opportunities to get the most from the marketing budget.
As you saw in the previous chapter, finance and marketing speak different languages when it comes to budgets. Obscure GL codes are not actionable for marketers and don’t provide the granular details of campaign spend. However, the line item views by audience and program from marketing are far too granular for finance. Your taxonomies need to align so that information can flow between finance’s ERP systems and marketing’s budgeting software. This way, both departments can confidently look at the same numbers, in the view they need to see them.
The amount of money the company set aside for marketing activities over a specific period. It’s sometimes referred to as budgeted spend.
How much the marketer or campaign owner anticipates they will spend on a specific activity in this next month or quarter.
There is a signed contract where marketing has promised to pay a vendor a certain amount of money.
This money was spent, the vendor sent the invoice to accounting.
Marketing and finance have two fundamentally different views of the budget that need to be aligned and reconciled for marketing to effectively support company objectives.