Strategic and tactical planning for the year ahead
Purpose: To review the business goals, marketing campaigns, channels and plans for the year ahead.
An annual review of your digital marketing plans – ideal for ensuring we’re all in-sync with marketing strategy and activities planned.
Format: Typically a 60-90 minute chat (either in-person or on a zoom call)
Discuss your marketing plans for the year. We use a simple checklist doc (take a copy of the example doc here) to go through each of the following areas:
Business Goals
In very high-level terms, discuss your business goals for the year ahead eg:
- Growth plans and % goals
- New locations
- New products
- New services
- New audiences
Campaigns
Chat through general campaign ideas you have in mind for the year ahead.
They can be very general at this stage eg:
- ‘awareness campaign to promote our new XXX product’ or
- ‘campaign to introduce us to a new audience/market of YYY’ or
- ‘new brand unveiling’ or
- ‘retention campaign to grow revenue per existing customer’, etc
Content Strategy
In this section review:
- Audiences/Personas
(eg Are your personas up-to-date) - Topics
(eg Are there new content approaches you’d like to discuss and plan for the year) - Formats
(eg Are there new formats you’d like to work on eg video, podcast, infographic, etc)
Funnels
Chat through what stages of the lifecycle are working well and what needs work.
(ie how do we best ‘solve for the problem’?)
Example: do you have a traffic problem? Do you have a leads problem? Do you have a sales problem?
Reporting
Are your current reports and dashboards delivering the visibility you need?
(What extra reporting is required – what can be removed)
Channels
Review your promotion channels (eg advertising, social, partner sites) to clarify the focus.
As part of this, discuss which channels to focus on, which to reduce, and which new ones to test.
Budgets
Finally, get a sense of your top-level budgets (approx monthly) for:
- Strategy and planning
- Content creation
- Campaign promotion (ad platforms, social)