2018 planning – reuse, repurpose or rethink?

Planning and budgeting your advertising and marketing for 2018? Time to decide whether you are developing the best plan for 2018 or simply editing 2017.

As we draw nearer to the final quarter of the year, many of us are already planning and budgeting for 2018. Some will be tempted to simply continue or extend those marketing programmes that are successful and cut back or cancel those that are not performing. Others that face potential budget cuts may consider reviewing or dropping programmes according to budget size. We’d always recommend a total campaign strategy rethink or, at least, a good revisit.

All organisations want to build on past or current successes. That’s a given. However, when annual communications planning is reduced to an editing job of the previous annual plan, opportunities will be missed. We’d argue that revisiting core objectives, strategies and the assumptions that helped shape them is a must.

Clearly, your senior management heads will have a birds-eye view of where the company is winning, where it is weaker or threatened and what’s changed. Better to start seeking input earlier. when that input could help shape your thinking, rather than later, and increase the chances of input disrupting the work you’ve already done.

Secondly, instead of limiting your review of your current year to successes and failures, why not dig deeper into what you have learned about your customers during the past year? Context is critical for your marketing and, today, the context in which your marketing activities find themselves is changing faster than ever.

It’s conceivable that your customers habits, preferences, interests and needs have moved on since you planned this year’s campaign. There may be global or regional research illuminating this, or you may have your own customer data. However, important as this may be, this never tells the whole story.

So, before you begin setting objectives and budgeting for programmes, why not revisit your customers’ needs and behaviours with your sales and customer service teams? Ask yourselves straightforward questions like: how your organisation has improved the customer journey over the last eighteen months? where are the new or growing opportunities? how much of your marketing message has been understood by your audiences? and how do your data insights map to what your frontline staff have learnt during the past year?

Discussing what your organisation has learnt about your customers and their experience since your last plan, may just take your thinking out of the realm of matrices and spreadsheets long enough to sanity-check your strategy and help ensure that your objectives and core programmes are more tightly focused, and not over-edited placeholders, nor flights of fancy.