Now that you’ve established the campaign framework and strategic budget allocation through top-down planning, it’s time to shift gears. Enter the bottom-up planning phase, where campaign owners and agencies take the lead. This phase is crucial for translating high-level strategies into actionable plans. Campaign owners and agencies will create briefs for each campaign, detailing the programs, offers, content requirements, go-to-market activities, and media planning.
This is where organizing activities into program families can help align campaign tactics with strategic goals and avoid over-indexing on a single type of program. While the term “program family” might sound very B2B, this concept is versatile and works for both B2B and B2C marketing planning.
Depending on your organization, you may choose to use more than the four main program families. For example, in B2C industries, you might want to distinguish between customer engagement and customer loyalty which have different goals and metrics to measure success.
There are four main program families:
Building awareness and shaping the perception, interest, and urgency around a campaign theme.
Activating, validating, and accelerating new and existing opportunities or engaging consumers.
Developing customer-centric programs that drive adoption, advocacy, loyalty, and retention.
Helping execution, channel, or sales teams with campaign theme education and guidance.
Bottom-up planning is your reality check: Do you have enough money to bring these campaigns to life? Campaign owners need to strategically invest their campaign budgets across all the proposed programs and activities. The cost and effort to execute plans has to be weighed against the anticipated outcome.
Impact models can help prioritize activities based on the best conversion rates or the shortest sales cycles relative to the cost required to hit targets. However, it’s not as simple as investing your entire budget on programs that drive pipeline or wallet share.
This is why program families are so important. Brand awareness and demand generation both play a critical role, but it’s significantly harder to measure ROI on one of them. Campaign owners need to find the right balance and identify which activities must be funded, where to experiment, and what is a "nice-to-have" but not mission critical.
Keep in mind that the marketing budget isn’t final yet. You’re still using forecasted numbers based on last year’s total program budget; tweaked for any known changes. As advised in Chapter 1, using last year's budget helps provide a realistic estimate of what you might receive this year and rapidly accelerates finalizing your plans when the marketing budget is approved.
In addition to budget alignment, campaign owners need to ensure resources are properly allocated. They need to work together to review the final bottom-up campaign plans to identify resource gaps or redundancies, particularly in content needs and potential resource conflicts that could impact timelines. This review process ensures that no department is overloaded and that there are no redundant efforts or unnecessary line items in the budget.
Using program families to organize all the bottom-up campaign plans helps marketers think critically about the mix of tactics supporting their campaign.
After campaign owners, functional teams, and agencies are aligned, the next step is to develop a cohesive marketing calendar. This calendar is essential as teams move into the execution phase; ensuring that plans are communicated effectively across departments such as the sales team. A comprehensive, up-to-date marketing calendar is vital for coordinating efforts and maintaining transparency. However, achieving this can be challenging.
Often, marketing calendars are scattered across project management tools, PowerPoint presentations, and SharePoint sites, each with their own gaps. This disorganization leaves marketers constantly scrambling to update plans in multiple places, trying to keep everyone informed month by month. By consolidating all activities into a single, unified calendar, sales and customer success teams can see upcoming in-market activities and so better position their conversations with prospects and customers.
The ideal marketing calendar should offer multiple views to support different stakeholders. It should consolidate in-market dates for various campaigns, promotion schedules, and offer a comprehensive overview of all marketing programs and activities for the year while allowing users to drill down on specific timelines. This is where the campaign attributes that StratOps outlined in Chapter 2 can make or break your calendar. Your campaign owners can drill down and filter the calendar view to get granular details like timelines and schedules for specific tactics. Whereas filters like marketing objectives, working vs. non-working dollars, or geography give your CMO a high-level view of performance.
Keep your team aligned and effectively communicate with stakeholders with a unified real-time calendar that is accessible to everyone.