Your campaigns are in market, but your work has just begun.
Plans must adapt as marketers monitor performance and adjust to capture new opportunities, course correct campaigns, and maximize marketing investments. Your team's ability to pivot quickly is essential.
It’s time to get back to the fundamentals of following the money. You need to know where your dollars are right now to react to campaign performance and pivot spend to stay on target.
The key is not to “set it and forget it.” Great marketing teams never stop planning.
StratOps and campaign owners have to be disciplined about checking campaign performance regularly. Letting underperforming campaigns run on autopilot hurts your results—and your budget.
It’s easy to say “invest everything in the highest-performing channel,” but it’s not realistic. What works today might not work tomorrow. You can’t assume that one channel will always be a top performer, which is why monitoring performance and experimenting need to be consistent habits for your team.
Everyone plays a different part optimizing marketing campaigns, so the metrics you look at vary by role:
Most of the marketing team is focused on campaign metrics, but that’s only one part of the bigger picture. To truly understand how your efforts impact the business, it’s crucial to look at key performance indicators (KPIs). In a B2B context, KPIs might include engagement, lead conversions, pipeline, and bookings. In B2C, you’ll see KPIs such as household penetration, unit retail sales, e-commerce sales, share of wallet, and average order value.
You need to regularly look at business-level KPIs as well as campaign-level metrics to see what’s working and make timely pivots to keep overall business performance on track.
A common pitfall marketers make with optimization is focusing on how to improve tactics instead of the whole plan. It’s the same thing that happens when you’re overly focused on ROI or attribution.
There’s no single optimization or tactic that will fix your whole plan. Just like there isn't one magic number that can capture the total value of marketing. The key is to focus on a series of measurements that help your team plan better and spend smarter.
ROI and attribution both lead to better decision-making, but they answer different questions. You need attribution to be able to see the full picture of marketing’s influence. Attribution can help you understand which programs or channels have the biggest impact on ROI and see where to optimize your campaigns. However, attribution alone will never be able to answer questions about high-level KPIs.
ROI shows the business impact of marketing efforts and helps you optimize your strategy. Depending on your organization and the goals, ROI might be a traditional “return on investment” revenue metric. However, the return could be something other than revenue that represents a key indicator for you. It could be engagement, loyalty, pipeline, or retention to name a few.
In either case, you can’t measure ROI without clean investment data. Measuring the cost of all your resources—time, money, people—is critical to get to a meaningful metric, but it’s challenging when you have to account for how different agencies manage marketing spend. Holding your agencies to the same standards and procedures that you established between marketing and finance in chapter 6 will go a long way towards creating a clear picture of how and where marketing is investing—and the return.
ROI and attribution are tightly intertwined, don’t make the mistake of focusing on one over the other. Both measurements are necessary parts of any marketer’s toolkit to understand impact and where to optimize your plan.
As we’ve explored these seven steps, one thing is clear: you can’t truly succeed in marketing planning by just going through the motions. It’s easy to get lost in the complexities of marketing planning—managing deadlines, stakeholders, and dozens of business functions with millions of dollars at stake.
To stay agile and effective, marketing teams need to adopt a continuous planning approach with the right tools and processes. If your team doesn't have these skills in-house, consider bringing in planning experts to help build a solid process based around the seven steps.
For enterprises with complex marketing organizations, choosing the right marketing planning software is just as important as setting up effective processes. Running your plans and budgets out of a few dozen spreadsheets isn’t sufficient. Your team needs a real-time solution that ensures visibility, velocity, and agility across global teams.
Think of planning as an ongoing, strategic muscle that powers your marketing success. Strong planning skills are crucial not only for making a significant impact on the business but also for advancing your career. With this mindset, your team will be better equipped to navigate the challenges of today’s ever-evolving environment. After all, good marketing planning is both an art and a science, just like marketing itself.