If you reach the rundown to the end of year and find yourself scrambling to pull together all the information and resources you need to create your marketing plan for the year ahead, here’s one simple tip that will make your life much easier and save your team loads of time: plan your marketing work in a tool that also captures your objectives and results.
It seems crazy, but most marketing teams are not using tools for their marketing planning that are actually fit for purpose. That means when it comes time to assess how the previous plan performed and to plan marketing activity for the period ahead, it’s chaos.
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Many teams struggle to understand what the objectives of the previous plan were, whether they were achieved, what media actually went live and when, whether media channels were optimised for the best possible results — and even what those results were.
That means there’s no clear view on what needs to be optimised to make the next plan better. Let’s face it – it’s hard to do a great marketing plan when you’re working in spreadsheets – and more than half of us use spreadsheets as our primary tool for marketing planning. Spreadsheets are fantastic for many things. But they’re not ideal for capturing objectives. And they’re not a great conduit of collaboration or creativity.
In fact, it’s so hard to keep marketing plans up-to-date that only one in 10 marketers say they manage to do it.
Read the study: Marketing Operations in the Age of Intelligence
What about the results? For the majority of marketers, those results are held in the data team, the media agency or a bunch of different technology platforms. Not only are they often not seen by marketers in real time, it’s not easy to know at a glance which metrics are the important ones.
For many teams, the optimum mix of marketing activity is guesswork at best: only 5% of marketers say their planning tool captures campaign results to enable marketing to be improved over time.
But imagine if you were to plan your marketing work in a tool that not only includes your objectives and marketing activity mix, it updates any and all changes to the plan as they are made – and it’s all automatic!
And it captures results in a marketing dashboard that makes it easy to know the key outcomes and the return on all that activity.
Simple’s Marketing Operations platform does this and more. To find out how Simple can help you optimise your marketing planning, get in touch to see how it works.
