How to create your marketing plan for Q4:
1) Start last week
2) Involve the whole team.
Adapt Some Large Company Discipline to Your Small Company Scale
While large companies with predictable/forecastable annual budgets can pretty easily plan marketing for a full year, growing companies often find annual planning impractical. It is common for planning to happen somewhat ad hoc from month to month. Strictly speaking, this isn’t ‘planning’ so much as ‘doing’ and it does work for a while. But I always advise growing brands to move to quarterly planning as soon as they can, and to begin the planning process early. A minimum of a quarter out, ideally about four months before the start of the quarter you are planning for. This gives you enough time to do some important things:
· get all the ideas in
· get fully organized
· solicit feedback from your experts
· and, put together an executable plan (including creative development) before the planned for quarter begins.
This discipline can be a tough gear-shift for companies used to doing things with much shorter turnarounds but is a necessary maturity step up for a growing company (if you are not there yet, you will be.) And it is a step that can make a material difference since the efficiency gains from early planning save money.
Solicit Broad Input
Collecting input from the team at large, not just marketing but across the company, can be powerful. Not only will you sometimes get great new ideas but everyone feels invested in what marketing is putting together. I have a format I like to use for this; DM me if interested and I’ll send it to you.