There are many ways to plan for the next year of marketing activity and you might experiment with more than one to see what works for your brand, just as you might blend more than one to suit your needs. But as a starting point, you might want to ‘attack’ the year ahead with one of these three frameworks:

• A Marketing Plan – a fairly traditional way to structure your proposed marketing activities based on the objectives you define for the year ahead. It can become a lengthy document as you describe your target market and the current position of the business, but it becomes a great source to refer to throughout the year and certainly in years to come. Importantly, it includes measurements and metrics to ensure you track your progress towards achieving your goals. Given the time needed to write a comprehensive marketing plan, you would only do this once per year, so might need to frame it per quarter (objectives, activities and metrics) so that it is valuable beyond its initial creation. A marketing plan might be too much for a small company but is important to convince other stakeholders, such as budget holders, that marketing plays an important role in achieving business goals.

• A Media Plan – if a marketing plan is too exhaustive for the size of your business, a media plan might be more appropriate. It focuses on marketing activities categorised as owned, earned, shared and paid media. The benefit to small businesses of thinking this way is an acknowledgment that not all marketing activities require financial expenditure. If you focus efforts on the first three media types – covering activities like blog posts, webinars, press releases and social media content, then you might only require a little bit of paid media budget, such as for advertising, to experiment with new channels. The limitation of this approach is a lack of objective setting and a focus on promotional activities. For a broader view of marketing, the marketing mix might be more suitable.

• A Marketing Mix – very often marketing departments are pigeon-holed into promotional activities. In larger organisations, however, marketing has influence and/or control over the full marketing mix, that is, promotion, product, price and place. If this is the case, then detailing the marketing mix each year is very time consuming and might therefore not be re-written annually, but bi-annually instead. The use of a marketing mix is more likely to sit within the marketing team’s remit in a B2C organisation, where pricing strategies are tweaked and changed more regularly. In B2B marketing, marketing teams have very little influence over the product/service offering, pricing structure and place of distribution/purchase, unless a CMO is able to influence the leadership team.

Your choice of attack point will depend upon the size of your marketing team, the size of your organisation and the size of your budget. If all of these are small, start with a media plan and use your paid media budget to experiment and learn. Once you have more experience in the market and can justify more budget from those holding the purse strings, then a marketing plan is the next logical step. If your organisation is large enough to warrant a CMO who can influence products and prices, then it’s time to think about the full marketing mix. And if you’re still unsure how to plan for the year ahead, get in touch for consultative support.