How to build a marketing plan from 0-1: beginner’s guide

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Reminder: a marketing plan is NOT a brand strategy.

Brand strategy is WHY you will win.
Marketing plan is HOW. The plan is the levers you will pull to hit your goals.

A simple marketing plan contains 3 components

1. Brand goals / OKRs
2. Strategy TL;DR
3. Channel strategy / goals / OKRs

Who & how:

It should be done top-down / bottoms up.

What does that mean? It starts with the marketing leader (or CEO) creating # 1 and # 2.

Then the channel owners create # 3 and give to leader.

Leader confirms all are aligned.

How often?

I like to create Marketing plans quarterly to enable teams to iterate based on the needs of the business, customer and changing marketing landscape.

A note on OKRs

OKRs are part of the marketing plan.

O = objective
KR = key result (tangible measurement)

You will have over-arching brand goals for the department and goals for each team / channel.

*OKRs do not contain tactics! This is a common mistake

Brand OKR Ex:

I want to increase brand awareness (O)

as measured by 10% increase in recall by women ages 20-29 through quarterly third party survey (KR)

Try to limit to 2-3 objectives for focus.

Strategy TL;DR

Now that you have your brand goals, it’s helpful to do a strategy TL;DR.

I frame it as the 3-4 levers you will use to achieve that brand goal.

It’s like going on a road trip. The goals are the destination and the strategy is how you plan to get there.

For example:

We will achieve our Q4 brand goals via:

- influencers for earned media
- Releasing 2-3 PR insight papers
- Focus on Twitter engagement / channel growth

This top-down strategy shows where the team is focusing major energy that quarter.

Next up: Channel OKRs

So you now know the destination (brand goals) and high-level directions you get there.

Now each team/channel gets to plan their own road trip.

Each team/channel will create their own OKRs in order to move the needle on the brand goals.

Note on goals:

It’s important to get alignment on WHAT goals to track weekly vs. monthly and do we have the tools to measure them.

I don’t like tracking more than 3-5 top line metrics.

Ex:

PR metrics:
- Top tier Placements
- Impressions
- SOV (against competitive set)

Last stop: channel strategy

Each channel will create their strategy TL;DR to communicate HOW they will hit their OKRs.

Again, you will try many things over the course of a month and quarter. This is the elevator pitch of what big levers you want to pull.

Hope this is helpful!

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