Annual Strategic Planning: Agile Marketing Plans for 2022
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been seeing articles on planning, goal-setting, and 2022 resolutions since early November. The start of a new year signals an opportunity to review and renew your goals, both for your business and yourself.
However, too many marketing teams and small businesses weigh themselves down with the expectation of creating a detailed annual plan. I don’t want you to engineer a perfect 2022 strategic plan that dictates your next 12 months of marketing initiatives. If 2021 has taught us anything, it’s the importance of agile thinking.
You can be more responsive to customers’ feedback, changes in the market, and your changing workload when you don’t saddle yourself with a rigid marketing plan in January. Annual planning should be high-level. Rather than a schedule of campaigns, focus on setting one or two goals to guide your marketing efforts.
Use a template to create your annual marketing plan.
I’m obsessed with simplifying marketing efforts, so I suggest starting with a template. It’s easy to get bogged down in all the complexity when we start with something as big as “create a strategy for the year.” A template makes the process more concrete. Let’s look at a planning template suggested by Bob Stanke, a marketing leader and digital strategist with an IT background.
1-2-3 Plan
1 Goal: Set a high-level goal for your marketing. Don’t include metrics here. Keep it general.
2 Initiatives: Select two initiatives that build toward your goal.
3 Tactics: Break up each initiative into three tactics.
Building a bigger opt-in email list is a common goal, so we’ll use that as an example.
Goal: Grow your opt-in list.
Initiative: Do more content marketing.
Tactic: Improve keyword optimization.
Tactic: Run monthly webinars.
Tactic: Boost SEO on existing blog posts.
Initiative: Run paid media campaigns.
Tactic: Work on campaign segmentation.
Tactic: Use existing content marketing materials in paid campaigns.
Tactic: Leverage user-generated content.
How many goals do you need?
The number of 1-2-3 plans you put into your annual marketing strategy is going to depend on resources. If you’re working with a large team, you could get away with multiple goals. However, for a small team, a single goal will be better than five.
Be realistic about what you can accomplish. If you’re dividing your efforts between too many goals, you’re less likely to excel on any single one.
Develop a systemic approach to your marketing work
Setting goals is essential, but the execution is where dreams become a reality. How do you transform an annual plan into action?
You need a system.
I’m going to talk about a couple of different parts of the Agile Scrum framework. Like the 1-2-3 plan, Bob Stanke introduced me to this method. One of Bob’s pet projects is to bring Scrum from the world of software development to the world of marketing.
Create a backlog
A backlog is a prioritized list of all the tasks that you want to accomplish.
Once you have your 1-2-3 plans in place, start generating tasks for each of the tactics. These tasks will go into your backlog. There are no limits or perfect numbers here. Come up with as many backlog items as you want. You’re just brainstorming possibilities, not making commitments.
There is one rule: write down your backlog. I like to use Trello because you can easily sort the backlog items, but any Kanban tool or spreadsheet can also work.
Work in sprints
A sprint is a unit of work time, typically 2-6 weeks. Within the sprint, the goal is to stay laser-focused on specific tasks until they are complete. Although Scrum talks about features and user stories within a sprint, the method works well for marketing.
At the start of each sprint, review and prioritize your backlog items. Prioritize according to impact, not how long an item will take or how much you want to do it. Starting from the top of the list, select the items you’ll complete in this sprint. The idea is to finish a task during one sprint, starting with the most important tasks.
Don't let other projects that pop up derail your efforts. New ideas are great, but they go straight into the backlog, not into the current sprint. This sprint is just for the tasks you already selected.
Reflect and prioritize after each sprint
In Scrum, retrospectives happen after each sprint. Retrospectives are an opportunity to review how the last sprint went, identify successes and challenges, and improve your plans for the next sprint.
When you’re conducting a marketing retrospective:
Review KPIs for anything that went live.
Reflect on whether projects took more or less time than anticipated.
If some tasks weren’t finished, think about what blocked them.
Find out why specific tasks went well.
Use what you learn when reprioritizing your backlog.
Scrum principles are all about iteration: deliver quickly, get feedback, and adjust. It’s easy to put off review and reflection -- we’re busy! But when we delay, it’s hard to remember the details. Instead of waiting for that imaginary free time, schedule a retrospective at the end of each sprint.
“Marketing should not be set in stone. By staying agile in your marketing approach, your business can thrive, even in uncertain times. The difference between the businesses that grew and failed in 2021 came down to their ability to pivot quickly.”
Annual marketing plans need flexibility
Each new year is an opportunity to set goals and organize your work with intention, but it won’t serve you to invest time in a marketing plan that’s too detailed to be flexible. Overplanning makes it hard to respond to changes. And changes, as we all learned in 2021, are inevitable.
Instead of a heavy process that puts all your planning at the start of the year, adopt a system of planning that’s agile, flexible, and adaptive. Start with one or two high-level goals. Make time to fill in the details and prioritize tasks throughout the year. Work in focused sprints. Most importantly, make time to regularly review your marketing efforts so that you’re learning from your mistakes and your wins.
