The 12-Month Marketing Plan is Dead

It’s no secret that companies that respond fast to market changes win big.?

We saw it happen in real-time when Peloton ran a problematic commercial and Ryan Reynolds’ brilliant response went viral. We watched it unfold when Netflix went from DVD mailers to 100% streaming, shifting in perfect sync with the market.

And then the pandemic hit and brought us more timely examples:?

Wine tastings, food tours, and cooking classes went virtual.?

Michelin-starred restaurants offered takeaway options for the first time ever.?

And Zoom rolled with the punches, growing by leaps and bounds and still managing to serve their newly enormous customer base and become the go-to video conferencing platform (by contrast, 66% of the fastest-growing startups fail because they can’t respond to demand quickly enough).?

If there’s anything the past can teach us, it’s this: speed matters—and it only matters more over time.?

The good news is that companies are building that reality into their strategic processes—both in and out of the marketing department—more and more each year.?

We’re one of those companies.

We’ve been in marketing for a long time, and the norm used to be long-term planning. Annual meetings set budgets, deadlines, campaign plans, and marketing timelines. Companies took the long view. We all liked to assume that we knew how the year would unfold.?

Now, we’re still big fans of strategic planning, but our timelines have condensed to leave room for more rolling with the punches. Because the world can change in an instant—for better or worse. And companies with agile mindsets and processes are the ones reaping the rewards when those big changes show up.

Rolling with the punches might mean a new market opportunity crops up, and we rush to take advantage. It might mean a new marketing platform hits the mainstream and we divert budget to test it out. Or—as we all learned the hard way last year—it could mean dealing with large-scale changes outside our control. Pandemics. Lockdowns. Worldwide economic shifts. Closed borders.

We’re adopting a nimble planning process that prioritizes fast response to big change.

And in a world where it’s becoming ever-clearer that adaptability is a lynchpin to success, we think you should too. Here’s how to start:

1. Schedule more planning sessions farther apart.

Instead of planning once a year for the whole shebang, plan your campaigns, brainstorm new ideas, and assess your budgets and capacity on a quarterly basis. Build in the ability to change on a dime by planning on said dime.?

2. Don’t throw the big picture out with the bathwater.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t have overarching business goals, metrics you plan to track, and other strategic plans for the whole year. It just means the more detailed planning for campaigns, schedules, launch plans, and which team members you’ll need on a given project happens in something closer to real-time.?

So don’t cancel your yearly planning. Don’t skip the step of identifying your yearly goals and preparing to track the metrics that’ll get you there. Just think of yearly planning as a high-level activity and let the details get worked out on a shorter timeline.?

3. Give your talent room to breathe.

Companies love to book their talent down to the minute. And we get it. Nobody wants people standing around when they could be knocking a new campaign out of the park. But the truth is that little stuff comes up. Your designer might need to do an extra round of revisions. Your developer might have to deal with a system crash. And if things are booked down to the minute, something gets deprioritized or potentially delayed.?

If, however, there’s some space in people’s schedules, there’s room for not only the unforeseen oopsie-daisies that come with being a marketer but also room for innovation, ideas, and building proposals.?

One of our own writers is a good example of this. She went from a booked-down-to-the-minute job to a more flexible one. In the second, more flexible job, she spent her unscheduled time developing a blog proposal and strategy, presented it to leadership, and ended up leading a blog effort that kicked off SEO efforts at a major real estate company.???

4. Data, data, data, and did we mention data?

So, how do you know if you need to pivot? The answer is data.

With our own marketing, we use tools that collect data and can tell us what’s working and what isn’t—in real-time. We’re pulling and analyzing that data regularly so that we can make better strategic decisions and pivot when we need to.?

This is foundational to success.?

And if you need some help figuring out how your business can roll with more punches? We’d love to hear from you.?