How should marketers formulate plans for the whole year of 2023?

Annual planning is something that relevant personnel need to do at the beginning of each year, but we should not treat it as a task, but should seriously think about the strategy to determine the direction of the whole year. The author shares the ideas of marketers in formulating the 2023 annual plan, let's take a look.

Recently, marketing professionals should be busy making plans for 2023. From a process perspective, large companies will set up a link at the end of the year. Depending on the leadership style, some departments just set goals for employees. But in my personal experience, this link should not be regarded as a process, but really use this opportunity to systematically and strategically think about the business focus for the whole year of next year.

This process is painful because it requires deep thinking, but most of our work is done based on inertia and intuition, without much thinking and analysis. Setting goals and strategies requires deep thinking and gradually developing strategic capabilities. I have a few experiences to share with you:

01 Develop marketing plans based on "business thinking" rather than "brand thinking" and have the ability to think from other people's perspectives

• Is the company's development strategy goal to B or to C business model?
• If it is To B, is it big B or small B?
• What percentage of sales does the Big B business account for and what percentage does the Small B business account for? What is the current market penetration rate? What is the profit situation?
• Which markets and industries will be the focus of development? Why? What is the size of these industries and markets?
• Should we focus on developing new channels or adopt a DTC marketing strategy to reach the terminal directly?
• What new products will support these specific markets and industries that you want to develop? What is the unique value proposition?

These are all considerations combined with business development goals.

The formulation of marketing strategies, which is what marketers generally pay most attention to, must also be based on the company's development goals and business objectives.

Only by elevating marketing to a business perspective and dimension can the marketing goals and marketing strategy plans that are formulated truly empower the business.

This requires that the majority of marketers have the ability to "put on other people's shoes". If you are a marketing service provider, then you must have a "client mindset". For example, what customers really want is not a lead scoring model or a digital tool. What they really want is how these means can help achieve business goals, and business goals need to be linked to business growth.

If you are a digital marketing practitioner, then you need to reach up, have a "leader" mindset, and consider issues from the boss's perspective. For example, what the boss really wants is not to do SEO for the sake of doing SEO, but to capture traffic from search channels through SEO to prevent being throttled by competitors and to maintain brand position and traffic share.

Once you have real business and operational thinking, your perspective on problems will naturally be at a higher level. Only by looking at the actual problems you face from a higher dimension can you truly solve the problems.

02 Think beyond conventional tactical thinking and think strategically about work priorities

Strategy is the planning and tactics that guide the overall war effort, while tactics are the methods of guiding and conducting battles; strategy is high-level and large-scale, while tactics are shallow-level and small-scale.

Tactical thinking is the inertial thinking that you will have after doing execution for a long time. The perspective of thinking is bottom-up, which should be abandoned and replaced with top-down thinking. For example, when specifying a plan, do you first list the things you can think of and do, or think about what business goals you want to achieve next year? For example, do you first think about what I want to do for content marketing, what ads to shoot, and what media to put on? How to use data this year, how to build a data middle platform, and how to set up a lead scoring model? Do you need to think about these? Yes, but not first.

In other words, do you analyze why you want to do something, or do you just write it down based on your intuition? This is the difference between strategy and tactics.

The analysis step is essential. The purpose of the analysis is to review the achievements of the year and reflect on what can be improved and what can be continued. Of course, this is far from enough. It is just an upgrade of the old business. On the other hand, the essence of marketing is innovation. The premise of innovation is innovation with expected results. If you innovate for a long time but don’t see any results or can’t gain effective experience, I think it is not real innovation.

For example, in the second year, we set three strategic priorities: 1) Increase marketing investment returns by 10% 2) Increase potential business opportunities contributed by the growth market by 10% 3) Personalize marketing and user experience to increase customer acquisition by 10%

There must be quantified figures. The data of the current year can be used as a benchmark, and a certain percentage can be increased on this basis. As for the proportion of the increase, it should still be formulated based on the business goal of the first article.

On the basis of the goal, on the one hand, think about the details of the work that is already being done, which ones need to be maintained, and which ones can be improved, and list a few points. Whether it needs to be maintained or improved, it is based on your thinking at the strategic level of the work priorities. On the other hand, which ones have the opportunity to innovate and do new projects based on the first strategic priority, which will fill the gap between strategy and tactics.

03 Review existing mature resources, analyze feasibility, and choose the most likely thing to be done

Use the low-hanging fruit thinking model to describe the strategic thinking at this level. Low-hanging fruit literally means low-hanging fruit, and when used in business, it refers to goals that are easy to achieve.

Goal setting is to achieve these goals in the end. Sometimes we set goals with a beautiful vision. Ideally, with money, people, and boss support, tactics and results are not a problem and can be applied and achieved. But the biggest challenge is: having strong ability and being able to get things done are two different things. There are many factors to consider, such as whether the timing is right, whether there are people with the same goals and abilities who can collaborate with you, and whether the boss supports your work.

So the first step is to list all the stakeholders and participants in the project.

Stakeholders include your leader (the most important person), leaders of other collaborative departments (Sponsor, also called project sponsors), influencers of other collaborative departments, executors, and available supplier resources for an overall analysis.

Make good use of available resources, and for stakeholders who may become obstacles or have uncertainties, is there a way to remove obstacles or turn the uncertainty of cooperation into certainty? If you can foresee huge difficulties that cannot be overcome in the short term, such as inconsistent goals, budget shortages, low willingness of cooperative departments to invest, and no suitable executors to cooperate and complete these problems that cannot be solved in a short period of time, you should give up. Therefore, early communication is very important, with intention, strength, and concerted efforts.

Finally, there will be a lot of variables and uncertainties in the process of project execution. When setting goals, don’t worry too much about not achieving them. Goal setting is just a starting point, but it is very important. Goals that seem difficult to achieve are challenging and bring higher returns on investment. This is the same as investment and financial management, high risk and high return.

If you set the right goals, work hard to overcome difficulties in the process, and do things to the best of your ability and in the most detailed manner, the results will come naturally. Even if you don't achieve the expected results, the experience and process of accepting challenges and overcoming difficulties will be very beneficial to your personal growth and accumulation of experience.

Author: Zhu Jingyu, WeChat public account: Jade Digital Marketing