Annual marketing planning often produces a document nobody opens again. It is written in a hurry in December, borrows heavily from last year, and sets targets chosen because they sound ambitious rather than because anything in the business suggests they are achievable.
A marketing plan for next year is more useful when it starts from evidence you already hold: which enquiries turned into customers, what each channel cost, and where the work slowed down. That takes a few hours of honest review before any targets are set.
Start with what happened
Before deciding anything, write down what the last twelve months actually produced. Enquiries by month, how many became customers, which services sold, and roughly what marketing cost. Even approximate figures beat memory, which tends to remember the loudest campaign rather than the most profitable one.
Look for patterns rather than single results. A channel that produced nothing for three months and then two good customers may still be worth keeping, while one that produced steady enquiries that never bought is quietly wasting money every week.
Decide what next year is for
Plans work better when the year has one main purpose. Growing a particular service, entering a new area, replacing a lost contract or simply making enquiries more predictable are all reasonable aims, but they lead to very different spending.
Write that purpose in a sentence and keep it visible. When a supplier offers something attractive in March, the sentence is what tells you whether it belongs in this year’s plan or next.
Half of planning is deciding what you are not going to do. A plan with nine priorities is a list of hopes.
Marcus Bennett, VP of Strategy, Media @ Marsons
Set targets you can check monthly
A target like “grow the business” cannot be checked. Targets such as twenty qualified enquiries a month, a cost per enquiry under a set figure, or two new customers in a particular service can be reviewed in ten minutes at the end of each month.
Choose a small number, three or four at most. Each should have an owner and a place where the number comes from, so nobody spends the first week of the month arguing about whose figures are correct.
Budget in ranges, not to the penny
Exact annual budgets rarely survive contact with a quiet quarter or an unexpected opportunity. Planning a range for each channel, with a clear view of what gets cut first if trading is poor, keeps the plan usable when circumstances change.
Leave a portion uncommitted, perhaps a tenth, for tests and for whatever the year turns up. A plan with no slack forces you to either abandon it or ignore new opportunities entirely.
Plan the quiet months deliberately
Most businesses know which months are slow. Deciding in advance what happens during them, whether that is a maintenance push, a content run or simply reduced spending, prevents the usual pattern of panicking in the quiet month and overspending in the busy one.
The same applies in reverse: if you know demand rises in a particular season, the work that supports it needs to happen two or three months earlier, which is the part most plans miss.
Write down what you will stop
Every plan adds activities and almost none remove any, which is why marketing work expands until nothing is done properly. Name the things you are stopping, whether a channel, a report nobody reads or a directory listing that has never produced an enquiry.
Stopping things frees the budget and the attention that new work needs. It also forces a useful conversation about which activities anyone can actually defend on their results.
Review it four times, not once
Book four short reviews into the calendar now, one a quarter. Each is a chance to compare what happened with what the plan assumed, and to move money towards whatever is working rather than waiting until next December to notice.
Treat the plan as a decision record rather than a commitment. If the first quarter shows a channel outperforming, the right response is to change the plan, not to follow it for another nine months out of loyalty to a document. The digital marketing hub covers how the individual channels fit together.
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