Do you still need a marketing plan? Yes, but constant updating is key.

Marketers today face a different challenge than their predecessors just a decade ago. The constant rise and fall of new networks of people and online platforms, from MySpace to WhatsApp, have changed the way businesses find, connect and acquire new customers.

Real-time marketing has involved companies demonstrating rapid response to public events (think Oreo’s tweet about last year’s Super Bowl blackout). Effective digital marketing today is characterized by the use of rapid A/B testing, iterating and optimizing ideas and campaigns, and aggressively scaling tested strategies that prove most successful. promising. This more scientific approach was formulated by forward-thinking online marketers under the pressure of managing constant change.

In today’s fast-paced world, the old marketing plan is outdated. While planning is still important, it needs to evolve into a more iterative and agile process.

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Agile contemporary marketers know that there’s a good chance that conditions will be different next month. Unlike marketers a decade ago, they have better visibility into which programs are succeeding and which are failing. Successful campaigns can be doubled, shifting resources from underperformers to maximize growth. This rediscovered dexterity is the key to their success.

Since marketers have adapted, why haven’t most budgets and marketing plans?

In a world of constant adjustment and real-time performance feedback, long-term plans and fixed budgets are becoming increasingly unrealistic. That’s enough to make anyone wonder if marketing plans are still relevant. Yet, implementing a marketing program without any sort of plan or strategy seems not only reckless, but downright reckless.

So what does an agile marketing plan look like today? I posed these same questions to the community on the site I created, Growthhackers.com, where marketers share ideas and best practices, and conversation participants had lots of great insights, which I have summarized below:

1. Company stage and size matters.

Startups and Fortune 500 companies have very different priorities and challenges. By definition, their planning needs are different. For startups, getting noticed and acquiring new users trumps spending hours developing a long-term vision. Big brands have a different challenge: finding initiatives that will create meaningful growth is key, and those big bets require more planning to protect the business from big losses. The first step in creating a more agile planning process is to properly size it for the stage of the business. There is no single marketing plan.

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2. Agile companies need agile plans.

For startups and perhaps all businesses, the 50-page Powerpoint marketing presentation is a relic. Shorter feedback loops require shorter-term, more focused planning. Companies that attempt to create annual plans and budgets lock themselves into a structure that won’t allow them to capitalize on rapidly emerging opportunities or cut campaigns that are clearly losing money.

Large companies can miss out without built-in flexibility in their planning and execution.

Rather than formulating one- or two-year plans, many companies are now opting to create three- or six-month roadmaps designed to target the next business step as quickly as possible. In such a short-term plan, the goal could be to focus on validating a new market segment or conducting a series of tests to find ways to better attract and convert more consumers into buyers. .

Once these growth assumptions are proven (or disproved) over the course of a few months, the next stage of a plan might focus on deeper market expansion, testing ways to acquire customers in a complementary segment, or retention strategies to manage new customers.

3. Devise a coherent plan, with an adequate vision.

In a time of constant change, keeping everyone in an organization on the same page is a challenge. Acting quickly can throw even the closest groups out of sync, especially when staff members work in a large organization. Even if the day-to-day operational reins are loosened so teams can capitalize on short-lived opportunities, everyone needs to row in the same direction.

Yet the plan should always keep everyone aligned on a business vision: what the business is – its branding, positioning, target markets, competitor analysis and product information – must be clear. Set the growth objectives, the main initiatives to achieve them, the key performance indicators that will be used and the resources required. The plan should also express the company’s knowledge of what worked and why.

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4. Be open to change and iteration.

Marketing plans should be created in a format that allows staff members to provide feedback and learn based on a campaign’s performance and suggest new opportunities to drive growth. Rather than a PowerPoint set in stone, agile plans should be living documents that are constantly referenced and updated. With team members providing real-time data, this document can serve not only as a blueprint, but also as a nerve center for the marketing organization to keep tabs on what’s working.

A continuously updated plan, filled with relevant test results and programs, is not only more relevant. It’s also more effective at driving growth, keeping employees aligned, and ensuring opportunities are taken advantage of. Business owners can then allocate resources not based on annual budgets but based on performance, putting more wood behind their most powerful arrows and skillfully making adjustments as conditions change. Keep planning documents on a corporate intranet or wiki that can be updated and commented on, or use Google Docs for small teams.

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5. Collaborate across departments.

Today’s fastest growing businesses have not done so with traditional marketing campaigns. It is the products themselves that generate growth. Where marketers were previously not involved in product decisions, closer collaboration is needed across departments. Products, engineering and marketing must work together to create sustainable growth.

In researching successful businesses, Morgan Brown and I have repeatedly found that breaking down barriers between teams is key to finding new opportunities for growth. For the 10 companies we featured in our book, Startup Growth Engines, agility requires coordination within a company, with each department involved and invested in growth. Plans need to consider growth everywhere, not just in marketing campaigns.

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