5 steps to co-creating a high impact marketing plan
Whilst the leadership team sets company goals, its your job as a marketing leader to help your team understand why those goals matter and how they can benefit personally by achieving them.
Having aligned your team’s self-interest with the goals of the company, it’s then time to help them co-create your high impact marketing plan.
In this blog I summarise five tactics that will help to galvanise your team around your ambitions.
1) Be a coach not an autocrat
You won't be able to build a plan that'll have the buy-in of your team if they feel that it’s being imposed on them. Instead, seek to inspire your team by showing them how much you value their ideas, regardless of who they are.
Team leadership isn't about proving you’re the best in your group. It's about being the person who can get the best from the group. You’re a coach not an autocrat.
The best coaches build a culture of acceptance within the team. Not everyone will feel comfortable at first, but make sure your team knows questions are welcomed and new ideas valued. Many people with quiet personalities often have excellent ideas to contribute once they have the confidence to say them out loud.
2) Build a deck, don't write an opus
Even your most valued colleagues have limited attention spans. The last thing you should do is to spend weeks writing an opus in Word. Such plans are rarely read or flexible enough to adjust to the inevitable changes that occur in the course of a financial year.
Instead, outline your strategy in a slide deck - remember to go heavy on the imagery and light on the prose.
Share an early draft with your team and then work with them during a planning sprint to decide what tactics can be reasonably employed to achieve those results within budget.
3) Run a planning sprint
Invest in lots of flip charts and multi-coloured sticky notes. Camp out in a conference room with your high-level goals on a screen and lots of wall space.
Encourage team participation with time-boxed exercises. Get each team member to contribute their own ideas and vote for the best ones. Assign the most popular ideas to quarterly columns. Move them around and refine them until they make sense. Regular check-ins to refer back to your high-level goals on the screen will ensure you stay on track.
On the last day of the sprint have your team collaborate on the final draft of the plan using Office 365's PowerPoint or Google Slides. As team leader, you may need to clean up their copy and ensure a consistent tone of voice before submitting the final plan to the leadership team.
Make sure that credit for the plan is shared with everyone in the team. Don’t seek to be the sole beneficiary of any subsequent praise. However, when there is feedback make sure that you’re on point to address it. Don’t delegate responsibility to the ‘team expert’.
4) Be agile in your execution
Transfer the output of your marketing plan into your favourite agile project management tool.
I’ve written extensively on the pros and cons of tools like JIRA, Trello and Asana. Whichever one you chose, don’t be tempted to fallback on spreadsheets. Excel is great for budgets, not for organising stories and tasks by quarter!
Remember to apply Epics (JIRA) or Tags (Trello & Asana) to everything you do so that its aligned with your strategic goals.
Start two-week sprints to develop delivery momentum. Consider running 10-minute daily stand-ups to maximise focus when the pressure is really on.
More on how to choose the right tool for agile marketing.
5) Revisit goals regularly
If a company goal is important enough to be set, it’s important enough to be tracked and reported back to the team on a regular basis.
Your co-created marketing plan should specify what OKRs/KPIs you will track to see how you're performing against target. Where possible these metrics should be aggregated dynamically into one place.
Trying to hand-crank a set of slides every month with static graphs and tables from different sources is time consuming and will introduce inconsistencies into your reporting.
Look at commercial solutions like Tableau or Qlik to ingest multiple data points via APIs and have them displayed dynamically in a centralised dashboard. For those with the necessary technical chops, I would recommend using an open source platform like the ELK stack (Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana).
Most important of all - if your reports tell you things are not working out as planned, be prepared to pivot.
What next?
That’s up to you. Running a planning sprint over multiple days takes lots of commitment and patience. The success of the sprint will determine the impact of the plan itself. If you need help contact us to discuss your options.