If you’re here looking for structure and maybe a few gems on how to create an annual marketing plan, then you’re in the right place.
This annual planning guide organizes the process into four phases:
- Preparing for annual planning
- Creating and optimizing an annual plan
- Sharing and presenting your annual plan effectively
- Planning post-annual next steps
Here are the 10 most important steps, with checklists to simplify your annual marketing planning.
Preparing for annual planning
This phase largely involves reviewing the past performance of your marketing activities and begins by collecting every piece of data from marketing spend per tactic and customer interactions to revenue per channel and changes in the target market.
The quality of your dataset—and how accurately it reflects the reality of your business—is one of the most important factors in creating a successful marketing plan. It forms the foundation for your projections and future initiatives.
Ideally, don’t wait until the end of your fiscal year before starting next year’s marketing annual plan. From our experience, the most successful marketing teams update their plans on an ongoing basis.
If this is your first year of annual planning, these next steps will make sure that you start off on the right foot.
1. Gather data with cross-functional teams
Effective annual marketing planning is built on comprehensive data collection.
Engaging with cross-functional teams—such as sales, finance, and product development—to learn the story behind your data will enrich your dataset. Work with them to gain a holistic understanding of market dynamics, customer behavior, and internal capabilities.
Assess data accuracy together and identify patterns and anomalies that may impact future performance.
Goal: To establish a reliable baseline dataset agreed upon across the organization.
Checklist:
Use consistent terms across teams
Land on a comprehensive dataset for analysis
Specify revenue by major streams and channels
Gather detailed customer data, including churn and retention metrics
Decide on the baseline period for projections
Take note of outliers such as unique events or shifts in market conditions
2. Analyze the dataset for predictive insights
Historical data can only provide so much on its own. In order to turn old news into predictive and actionable insight, it’s important to analyze the trends to determine where they are coming from and how your data points are related.
For example, a company’s sales data and consumer purchasing demographics could reveal that peak demand for their sunscreen product varies across demographics over the summer months. By recognizing the demographic differences during peak season, the business could drive more sales by launching targeted advertising campaigns accordingly.
Understanding the trends in your data, whether seasonal, event-driven, or consumer-specific, can greatly inform future decisions.
Goal: To make historical data actionable.
Checklist:
Analyze historical data to identify trends (e.g., seasonal, behavioral)
Plan campaigns around peak seasons for product and service demand
Adjust marketing strategies to capitalize on identified opportunities
3. Align your plan with business goals
Your marketing strategy should be tightly aligned with the business’s overall objectives, whether they focus on profit, revenue growth, or expanding market share. Start by defining clear marketing objectives that support these strategic goals.
If you aim to increase market share, focus on:
- Brand awareness
- Customer acquisition strategies
For profit-focused objectives:
- Optimize the marketing mix to reduce costs
- Consider tactics like upselling and cross-selling to boost average order value
Ultimately, your annual plan should contain marketing initiatives that are tied to attainable business objectives, supported by data.
Goal: To have marketing efforts strategically aligned with business objectives.
Checklist:
Identify key business objectives (e.g., profit, sales targets)
Define specific marketing goals supporting these objectives
Use historical and predictive data to align marketing initiatives with business priorities
Creating and optimizing an annual plan
At this phase, you should be ready to start laying out the marketing plan by defining where and when to spend. You should consider the entire sales funnel, deals you already have on hand vs. prospects, new product launches, competitors, and expected changes in the market.
You will begin scenario planning, modeling your data to forecast outcomes, and forming contingency plans for potential deviations.
Here’s an annual planning template to help you ask the right questions and structure your projected spending and revenue values. Combined with the following steps and checklists, you’ll be in good shape to get your team behind a unified vision.
4. Net Present Value of marketing and budget allocation
The Net Present Value (NPV) metric allows executives and finance to put a monetary value on long-term marketing initiatives. By calculating the NPV and ROI for each channel and tactic, you support your decisions with data for more effective budget advocacy.
The importance of having good metrics to support your budget needs is made evident in Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend Survey. The report reveals that marketing budgets have continued to decline, indicating that budget growth needs to be earned.
Having a healthy mix of top, middle, and bottom funnel tactics is what leads to the highest ROI. Use this table to help you classify your marketing strategies.
| Stage of the marketing funnel | Marketing tactics |
| Top of funnel | Brand advertising Content marketing and SEO Event sponsorships Influencer marketing Social media engagement |
| Middle of funnel | Webinars Product comparisons Case studies White papers and eBooks |
| Bottom of funnel | Conversion rate optimization Promotions and discounts Cart abandonment emails Product demos and trials Customer loyalty programs |
Striking the right balance of spend on top-of-funnel brand awareness vs. transactional tactics will start becoming more evident when comparing the NPV and projected ROI values for different top and bottom funnel ratios. We demonstrate this process in our case study on balancing top and bottom funnel spend, where a 70-30 ratio resulted in the highest ROI for one of our clients.
Goal: To prioritize marketing investments based on their financial returns.
Checklist:
Assess the financial impact of long-term marketing initiatives
Justify budget allocations using NPV calculations
Balance investments between brand awareness and transactional tactics
5. Forecasting and scenario planning
If you’ve reached this stage and established a solid baseline dataset, complete with NPV insights, you’re well-prepared for forecasting and scenario planning. From regression and time-series analysis to marketing mix modeling (MMM) services, this step is where the quality of your data matters most.
It’s not uncommon for marketers to develop forecasts in spreadsheets—a method that is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. But with software like Keen, you can quickly run more accurate forecasts. Our Bayesian approach can identify the point of diminishing returns for each channel across various scenarios. It also integrates real-time market data to enhance forecasting accuracy, empowering you to optimize budget allocation effectively.
When creating your forecast, consider both seen sales pipelines (e.g., current tracked deals) and unseen pipelines (e.g., prospective leads, emerging market trends). This approach lets you explore various scenarios by adjusting which pipelines to include.
For each scenario, pay attention to the point of diminishing returns per channel—where additional spending yields decreasing returns—to enhance your budget efficiency.
Goal: To develop a comprehensive forecast that prepares for multiple scenarios.
Checklist:
Predict future outcomes by channel, considering both seen and unseen pipelines
Develop multiple scenarios, including best, worst, and most likely cases
Identify and plan for points of diminishing returns in each channel
6. Adjusting the model
Refine the model with input from functional leaders, accounting for potential investments, market changes, and controllable factors (e.g., pricing, product launches).
This step grounds your marketing plan with your organization’s other initiatives. Your due diligence here can create synergies in execution across departments, aligning your marketing plan with the organization’s overall annual planning process.
Goal: To fine-tune projections to better reflect your organization’s overarching plans.
Checklist:
Incorporate specialized knowledge from various departments
Consider potential changes in pricing, product launches, and market conditions
Account for shifts in your current channel mix and market conditions
Sharing and presenting your annual plan effectively
Presenting your annual plan clearly to all stakeholders is an often overlooked but critical phase to get organizational buy-in for a cohesive strategy that drives the organization forward.
Poor communication of the plan leads to misalignment among departments, confusion about priorities, and uncoordinated efforts. This disconnect results in missed revenue opportunities, inefficient investment, and failure to achieve marketing goals.
Keen bridges this gap, enabling teams to visualize and analyze marketing performance from multiple angles. To create alignment, marketers could output reports and run scenarios to then present to the CFO, sales leaders, and product managers. With our MMM platform, it’s easy to output reports based on the model’s predictions for each scenario. Analytics include interactive channel-specific visualization, making it easier to present and explain channel-specific contributions.
7. Tying marketing efforts to revenue
According to DemandGen’s 2024 Marketing Measurement & Attribution Benchmark survey, 73% of organizations are pushing to show ROI from all marketing investments, a 14% growth from the previous year.
When presenting the annual marketing plan to stakeholders, clearly demonstrate how each marketing effort contributes to revenue growth with detailed reports and visualizations. If your modeling and scenario planning went well in the previous phase, you will have the data necessary to effectively show the financial impact of your marketing strategy.
By linking specific initiatives to projected revenue, marketers can build a compelling case for their strategies, facilitating better understanding and support from stakeholders.
Goal: To justify marketing investments and demonstrate their impact on revenue.
Checklist:
Present data-driven insights showing the financial impact of marketing
Highlight key marketing metrics, such as ROI and mROI, in relation to business goals
8. Communicating the value of each channel
Effectively communicate the unique contributions of each marketing channel to stakeholders. Separating predicted ROI contributions by channel will more effectively communicate budget needs, showcasing exactly how money-in will turn into money-out.
Support your explanations with all of the data modeling and analytics you performed by presenting exactly what they can and can’t tell you. For example, your model may predict a certain channel’s revenue increase at 95% accuracy but have limitations in attributing specific customer behaviors to it.
Goal: To communicate the strategic importance of each channel with stakeholders.
Checklist:
Present detailed data on the performance of each channel
Explain how each channel contributes to overall marketing and business objectives
Use visualizations to enhance understanding and engagement
Planning post-annual next steps
Now that everyone is on board, it’s time to set this plan in motion. You’ll soon realize that annual planning is far from a “set it and forget it” endeavor. The market landscape is always changing with shifts in customer behaviors and new competitors entering.
This is why having the pieces in place to monitor the success of your plan and adjust as needed are important ongoing efforts.
The biggest win is that when you prepare your next annual marketing plan, you will already have this one in motion. If executed correctly, this will become a rolling plan with ongoing optimizations, making future planning more efficient and effective.
9. Implementation and monitoring
Once the annual plan is finalized, begin implementation and prioritize continuous monitoring. Setting up real-time analytics is ideal for tracking campaign performance and making agile adjustments.
Goal: To maintain flexibility and responsiveness throughout the implementation phase.
Checklist:
Schedule regular check-ins to assess progress
Set clear criteria for implementing contingency plans if necessary
Make use of real-time data for ongoing adjustments where possible
10. Continuous optimization
Revisit and refine the marketing plan regularly based on new data and market conditions. Go back to your predictive analytics and adjust the data to reflect:
- Actual spend and ROI per tactic and channel
- Changes in market landscape (e.g., supply and demand)
- Marketing mix adjustments based on customer feedback
Goal: To actively adapt your marketing strategy under changing market conditions.
Checklist:
Conduct periodic reviews of the plan’s effectiveness
Incorporate new insights and data into the ongoing strateg
Adapt to market changes and customer feedback for continuous improvemen
Create your next annual marketing plan with Keen
When creating an annual marketing plan, you need to be aware of many moving parts, from gathering data to forecasting. Annual planning software like Keen frees up time for your team so they can focus on the most important tasks.
Keen’s patent pending Marketing Elasticity Engine complements your dataset with a rich foundation of market research built-in to its modeling, giving you prior coefficients and proprietary response curves. The result? Data-driven recommendations on timing and spending per channel, optimizing the overall marketing strategy.
Start a free trial with Keen to get ahead of your annual marketing planning with a well-informed and adaptable marketing strategy.
