How to answer 3 big, scary annual planning questions (in days, not months)
Tools and guidance on how to set a basic forecast and budget range and choose your big bets for next year
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Annual planning can feel like a herculean task. In fact, I wrote a four-part series on the topic last year; it came in at around 18,000 words. Admittedly, that probably didn’t make the process feel any less daunting.
So this year, I’m taking the opposite approach. I want to help you create a lightweight, first draft of an annual plan—especially if you’re at a smaller startup or working at an AI company where annual planning can feel like a fool’s errand given the pace of change.
You can boil most of marketing planning down to 3 questions you’ve likely already been asked for next year: What will marketing do to drive growth? How much budget does marketing need? Marketing, can you hit this revenue target?! This newsletter and our new tools will help you answer these questions.
Of course, if you want to go deeper after making your lightweight plan, you can still read the full series from last year. But if you want to plan 2025-style, you can use our vibe-coded tools to guide you. Two are totally free, and one’s for paid subscribers. Because my MKT1 2026 annual plan says: make the MKT1 paid subscription even better and more valuable.
In this newsletter:
Answers to the 3 big questions you’ll get asked during annual planning. Here’s the short version:
Question 1: What will marketing do to drive growth next year?
Answer: Plan 3–5 big bets for the year, based on your specific marketing strategy.
New: Marketing Decision Dashboard tool - for paid subs onlyQuestion 2: How much budget does marketing need?
Answer: Start with marketing efficiency metrics to ballpark the right budget range.
Bonus: Budget calculator - free toolQuestion 3: Marketing, can you hit this revenue target?
Answer: Build a bottom-up forecast to see if your top-down target is realistic
Bonus: Forecast estimator - free tool
Plus, how to take these basic planning exercises to the next level of detail
Our new video series, MKT1 Unboxing: Attio
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Question 1: “What will marketing do to drive growth next year?”
Whatever you do, do not answer this question with “We don’t know yet.” If you do, you’ll be flooded with “What if we did X?” and “Have-you-seen-what-this-company-is-doing?” Slacks. That’s a recipe for Random Acts of Marketing (RAM). You need a plan that includes the big bets you’re going to focus on, whether you run content, growth, or the whole marketing show.
So before you jump to a quick answer or start calculating forecasts or budgets, figure out what projects can actually move the needle. To do this, codify and evaluate your marketing strategy, then identify 3–5 big bets for the year.
🪞What the answer looks like
The output here isn’t a laundry list of incremental improvements. Those don’t count, they just keep the lights on.
To truly answer this question, you should share 3–5 big bets, each with its own GACCS Brief™, which stands for Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, and Stakeholders.
Your big bets should be initiatives that combine Fuel and Engine™ for a specific audience, with a specific goal—and have a strong chance of driving step-change growth.
You should also share your strategic thinking that led to these big bets, for those who want to dive deeper. This can be a one-page strategy doc, I like to use a Marketing Decision Dashboard™.
Getting to the right answer here requires a varying amount of pre-work, depending on how well you’ve defined your marketing strategy already. The steps below will help you zero in on the most useful exercises for identifying big bets.
» But if you need to back up & do a deep dive on your strategy first, the MKT1 Field Guide is a good starting point, as is last year’s annual planning series.