Why Your Marketing Plan Keeps Getting Cut—and How to Fix It for Good

What is the purpose of marketing? Sounds like an easy question, and surely one you would expect your CEO, CFO, and COO to answer correctly without hesitation. Except that, when your annual marketing plan is sent back to you with queries, reductions, qualifications, or even outright rejections, you’re suddenly confronted with the realization that defining the value of marketing to the C-suite isn’t always so simple. When this happens, you may discover there’s a disconnect between your company leadership and the marketing department.

If you don’t learn how to position your plan in a way that reminds leadership of how the marketing department supports the mission of the company, you’re likely to find yourself facing this same challenge year after year… after year. Here’s how to break the cycle and get your annual marketing plan approved with fewer obstacles.

Also Read: Marketing Strategies for Corporate Businesses: Expectation vs Reality

The Typical Annual Marketing Plan

A quick Google search shows that there are hundreds of free marketing plan templates available online representing what most marketing departments submit to their higher-ups each year. Whether these kinds of generic annual plans are sufficient and successful is debatable. These conventional annual marketing plans usually include some or all of these seven standard sections:

1. An executive summary that provides a brief overview of the business goals for the year, along with key marketing objectives and a summary of major initiatives.
2. A market analysis examining current industry trends, your competitors’ strategies, and the target audience.
3. Goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) for brand awareness, lead generation, customer acquisition, customer retention, etc.
4. Marketing strategies containing the details of your plans for content creation, social media, email campaigns, advertising, influencers, and community engagement.
5. A budget request breakdown outlining the estimated costs you predict for each marketing channel you plan to target.
6. A monthly or quarterly workflow timeline of campaigns and milestones.
7. A monthly or quarterly timeline for how you will measure and adjust your strategies based on data and feedback.

As you scan down that list, you’re probably thinking, “That looks right to me.” And it’s true! Each of the above seven sections can make a valid contribution to your overall presentation by providing the third-party verification or analytical reasoning your leadership feels is necessary to approve your plan. Given this value, there’s nothing wrong with including these or additional sections in your annual marketing plan. There’s just one problem.

The Risk of a Task-based Annual Marketing Plan

In practice, getting caught up in this format can lead to the unpleasant and unexpected surprise of having your plan approved, but with a severely trimmed-down budget. Why? Because on paper, this type of marketing plan looks like a series of tasks paired up with their corresponding expenses. Although this setup might seem like the most logical way to show what you’re planning to do over the next year, a long string of line items on a page will always invite a “well, we don’t really need this, or this, or this” reaction from the C-suite. Worse, when presented this way, the money you’re requesting isn’t coupled with a tangible outcome. And, in spite of a reduced budget, there is often an expectation you’ll provide the same results with fewer resources.

When your annual marketing plan looks like an invoice but is unconnected to the growth and financial outcomes the C-suite is looking for, you’re giving the wrong impression. Namely, you’re subconsciously implying that the marketing department is a cost center rather than a revenue generator. This can be especially true for small businesses that have historically relied on referrals and walk-ins and haven’t needed the type of advertising that is necessary in the digital marketing world. While sales generated organically are a wonderful supplement to the bottom line, they aren’t guaranteed and can’t always support sustainability or growth. That’s why every business needs a strong marketing strategy.

Shifting your annual plan from a task-based format to an outcome-based format, in addition to showing specifically how that annual plan will cover the costs of the marketing department, is far more likely to be successful.

Shifting to an Outcome-based Annual Marketing Plan

To secure executive buy-in, your annual marketing plan should be able to answer two questions:

1. What is the company’s desired growth metric for the year?
2. How does this annual marketing plan support that growth metric?

If what you submit doesn’t match with the company’s objectives, leadership won’t be able to understand how your plan contributes to the overall goal for growth that they’ve decided on. So, before you begin your departmental planning process, make sure you understand exactly what your C-suite executives are aiming for in the upcoming year.

One important reminder: never assume you know the goals. No company is the same and no business plan is the same from year to year. The kind of growth a business needs to be successful has to evolve over time. For your company, the goal for the upcoming year might be to increase profitability by a certain percentage or to expand the customer base into a new demographic. Last year, the goal may have been to inflate the typical customer spend or launch a new product—or perhaps it was a completely different target specific to your product or service. Regardless, make sure you’ve confirmed and fully understand this year’s targets before starting on your annual marketing plan.

Laying the Groundwork for a New Method

With every department submitting annual plans at or around the same time, the leadership team has a lot on their plates. Keep your format simple and personal so it’s easy to scan, understand, and absorb. Make a clear and concise presentation of the investment needed and the outcomes expected.

Again, as you set out to actually construct your plan, your first step should be to fully understand what growth and metric your leadership team is looking for in the upcoming year. Next, you need to conduct research and collect internal data to inform, and eventually support, what you want to do. Without strong data, you’re just guessing at the budget you need and what marketing activities are most likely to be successful. For your marketing department to build credibility with the C-suite, speculation simply isn’t good enough.

Of course, internal data based on past campaigns or customer profiles won’t be useful for supporting your objectives if you’re interested in moving into a new marketing space. What do you do if you need to “show your work” but you don’t have access to relevant data? In this case, you can use a competitor analysis and your own experience to predict what the outcome of a similar campaign might be for your company.

Another point of uncertainty can come from the knowledge that best practices, trends, and tools appear and disappear within the field of marketing at lightning speed. If you’re too strict in your forecasting, you can lock yourself out of taking advantage of new opportunities throughout the year. To avoid this problem, you should always propose a small budget for testing that allows you to be responsive to the latest technology and to experiment with new ideas.

Building a Stronger Annual Marketing Plan

The simplest and most effective annual marketing plan can be reduced from the above listed seven to these four sections:

1. A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis
2. A statement of the objectives, strategies, and reporting metrics
3. A budget request directly connected to those objectives
4. A calendar outlining your campaign and reporting schedule

Creating an annual marketing plan that highlights outcomes rather than tasks will go a long way to getting your plan approved. But, even with all the energy and thought you put into preparing the ideal marketing plan, you may still face challenges. Before finalizing your annual marketing plan, do some troubleshooting.

Brainstorm objections from leadership, anticipate where you might need to pivot, and be prepared to immediately respond with an alternate plan. If you’re ready to propose a reduced outcome with a smaller budget, you can protect yourself from the unrealistic expectations and inevitable resentment of being asked to do more with less. This will be especially beneficial should the higher-ups call out a specific campaign as excessive.

Another challenge you may encounter is in your ability to report results accurately. As privacy laws become more stringent, attribution grows more difficult. Showing how well your marketing is working, or even knowing when you should pivot, is much more difficult when you’re not able to explicitly track movement through the customer journey. There is no simple solution to this problem yet, but you can set reasonable expectations by calling this out in your marketing plan.

Most importantly, if you prioritize showing how what you’ve strategized for marketing is designed to support the overall annual business plan, you’re far more likely to be quickly approved and on your way to a successful year!

Need help creating and executing the perfect annual marketing plan? Talk with one of our marketing experts today!