You spend all that time working on your marketing plan with the right goals, activities, and owners.

Everyone’s on board and you let people start running with it. But it’s only a matter of time before your plan gets turned upside down (sup 2023).

On DGU this week, learn how we’re adjusting our marketing strategy so we can prioritize and refocus what we’re working on as a marketing team.

Listen to the full episode to hear how Mark and Jason are working through this process, or keep reading for the show notes.

PS check out episode 45 of Demand Gen U and see how we put out 2023 marketing plan together

Three top takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: Get sign-off on your initial marketing plan from the Leadership team

We learned this lesson the hard way at Metadata. 

We presented our 2022 marketing plan to Gil (our CEO) last year, made some changes based on his feedback, and hit the ground running right away. 

We made a huge mistake by jumping straight into execution mode. We didn’t share the plan with the rest of the Leadership team. They knew we were busy but didn’t know what the marketing team was working on (and why).

By skipping this step, we didn’t have legs to stand on when other teams came to us with new requests.

You’ll always get new requests after the initial plan gets locked in. But other teams will think twice when asking for stuff, if they know your goals, what you’re working on and why.

Takeaway 2: The best marketing leaders know how to prioritize and make tradeoffs

Saying no to other teams feels uncomfortable at first. You want to help as much as you can but you can’t keep saying yes to everything.

If every activity is considered “high priority”, then you don’t have actual priorities either. Something’s gotta give.

So rather than say no and call it a day (like we messed up at first), revisit your marketing plan and see if there are tradeoffs you can make. 

You can probably get to that new request after all. It just will come at the expense of something else.

The key here is having these tough conversations with your CEO and Leadership team, so you can be sure everyone knows what tradeoffs are being made.

Takeaway 3: Turn your marketing plan into a calendar and see where it breaks

The best marketing plans always look great in a Google Doc. Clearly defined priorities, quantifiable goals, and the right activities to get you to where you need to be.

But when you’re looking at a Google Doc, you can’t always see resourcing, timing, and where the plan breaks down.

Whenever we think we have a plan in place, our team gets all of their projects and activities into Asana, then assigns a priority, deadline, and rough level of effort. T-shirt sizing works (S, M, L) so keep it simple.

Completing this step makes it so much easier to see when and where your plan breaks. 

You can’t have a bunch of high priority projects ending on the same date unless you want chaos and a burned out marketing team.