Around 70% of marketing agency time is spent on the marketing planning process.

Only about 30% of our time is spent on the “sexy” work of creating content for campaigns and posting it.

Despite what the ads you see may tell you, marketing campaigns take a lot of planning. The number of moving parts involved in even the smallest campaign takes hours of meticulous thought and planning.

Because this part of the process is so labour intensive lots of people jump over it and get stuck into the fun part making the final content. But by saving themselves the headache of planning their marketing the content they create lacks any direction and often fails to hit the mark.

Let’s take a seemingly simple social media post.

In theory, you can type it straight into the website, copy and paste a link and pick an image. Some social platforms will even help you with the graphics and copy using AI if you really can’t be bothered thinking for yourself.

All that can be done in minutes without any regard for marketing strategy, or reference to any type of goal that drives your business forward.

There are a lot of people out there, marketing businesses, who are shooting from the hip, or worse, letting Generative AI do all the work and trusting that it got it right, without any strategy or marketing planning process to speak of.

In most cases, if these posts had been held to the scrutiny of the strategy and planning process they would never have seen the light of day.

Businesses who invest in strategy and marketing planning succeed thanks to the process.

To plan your marketing effectively you need to put the time in

At the core of every marketing planning process are insights into the problems your customers face. These insights give you the nuggets of truth that your marketing strategy will be based on.

Finding that insight isn’t easy.

Insight comes from immersing yourself in all kinds of things.

• What is your customer’s mindset?
• What are your competitors doing?
• What have you done before that applies to the current situation?
• What’s happening in your industry?
• What’s happening in culture in general?
• What’s happening in the world?

It’s not enough to have a great idea in the shower or walking the dog and apply that. Ideas need to pass the sniff test if they are right for the business, fit the strategy and importantly can be pulled off by the marketing team within the constraints of budget and resources.

For every 100 ideas you have, only a few will pass this test and be worth moving to the marketing planning process.

Marketing planning vs Marketing strategy

Marketing strategy defines what the business wants to achieve with its marketing and how it will be able to measure when it has achieved it.

Marketing planning deals with how the goal will be achieved, how much it will cost etc.

A marketing strategy might include:

• To be the preferred supplier of our service to 10% of our chosen industry by 2030.
• To increase sales by 40% entering the gluten free desserts market and signing exclusivity deals with 3 top tier retailers by 2030.

Obviously, every business will have its own marketing strategy and these are only bland examples.

Your marketing planning process, however, would feature:

• How you’d make more sales.
• How you’d open up new markets or industries.

Marketing planning is distinct from strategy, as it’s where you get down to every single detail of rolling out your marketing campaigns.

Your marketing planning process is:

• Where you set the budget and the outcomes you will measure.
• Where you allocate resources and begin to select tactics.
• Where you look at formats and media choices.
• Where you set time lines and critical events.

Planning isn’t the destination, it’s the road map and the vehicles you are going to use to reach the destinations set out in the marketing strategy.

What is a marketing planning process?

With a good marketing planning process, which includes a clear marketing strategy, the scope of marketing campaigns, the tactics, and includes testing and reporting on all marketing activities, businesses can be more sure that all their content, from the selling pages of their website to customer emails, all pull in the same direction.

Marketing planning is not the sexy part of marketing. Not many people get excited about pulling together a marketing strategy and planning out every stage. People like jumping in and making cool videos for TikTok and showing how clever they are on LinkedIn without a care in the world.

But businesses that plan their marketing strategy in a way that allows them to focus on a goal, while still having fun and adapting to changing conditions, will come off best in the long run.

Where do you begin with your marketing planning process?

When it comes to developing your organisation’s marketing planning process, the first place to start is always the customer. If your marketing plan doesn’t revolve around your customer and how you solve their problems, then you need to begin again.

As such, marketing plans should not be concerned with how you might, for example, make £5,000,000 in the next year, and rather the activities that will enable your campaigns to drive a higher turnover.

It’s not that money isn’t important, but if your plan is just a figure, then you are unlikely to best serve your customers and without them you have no business.

Establishing your marketing planning process

A good marketing plan helps your team to understand individual goals and what their part is in helping you achieve those goals.

Discovery Phase

When we plan for clients, we create marketing discovery documents based on the tactics which fall out of the creation of the strategy.

These are very in-depth documents which we work through with our clients to ensure we create as detailed a marketing strategy as we can.

12-Month Plans

From our discovery documents, we begin planning marketing campaigns over the coming 12 months. This ensures we have a broad overview of where we need to be in the medium term. Some people may advocate a 5 year marketing planning process, but so much can change in 5 years that a plan that far out will inevitably change.

In our plans, we outline monthly activities, which include all the business’s strategic aims, and plot those against channels such as SEO (including landing page content), Blogs, Social Media, Paid Ads, events and PR.

3-Month Plans

With these broad brush marketing plans in place, we then focus on three-month sections, which we add more detail to. In these rolling parts of the plan, we look at how past campaigns have performed and see if any learnings can be applied to campaigns going forward.

From these three-month sections, we then breakdown the exact details of every campaign, to ensure we know exactly what will be happening on each day of every marketing campaign we are working on.

Is considering your marketing planning process making your head hurt?

If all this planning is making you dizzy, don’t worry. It can be quite a chore, and you’re not alone if you are putting it off or just not bothering.

Luckily for you, the team at The Marketing Optimist are already doing this for our clients and we can do the same for you too.

Fill in the form on our contact us page or call us on 0113 477 1210 and we can begin the marketing planning process for your business.