MKT1 Newsletter with Emily Kramer

MKT1 Newsletter with Emily Kramer

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MKT1 Newsletter with Emily Kramer
MKT1 Newsletter with Emily Kramer
How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing
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How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing

Part 3 of 3 in Annual Planning Series

Oct 21, 2024
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MKT1 Newsletter with Emily Kramer
MKT1 Newsletter with Emily Kramer
How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing
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👋 This is a bonus free edition of MKT1 Newsletter, and the 3rd newsletter in our 3 part annual planning series. Become a paid subscriber to receive an additional newsletter each month, access our archives, post to our job board, use our template library, and attend monthly office hours with Kramer.

“At every startup I’ve worked at, we burn 4-6 weeks at the start of the year stuck in the confusion phase between ‘we’ve made this rough plan’ and ‘how do we execute’. Meaning we don’t get sh*t done until mid-March, even though the fiscal year starts on Feb 1.”

— Actual Marketing Leader at a high-growth, late-stage SaaS startup

To set the stage for this newsletter, imagine you’re planning for the year or the quarter. You have a laundry list of random marketing ideas for next year. Panic sets in. There's too much on the list. 

You’ve set a sound marketing strategy, but you aren’t sure if the work you are planning to do—especially the big projects—will help you achieve said strategic goals. You’re still getting *urgent* requests from other teams and your founders late in the planning process. The list of work is getting longer, not shorter, and you’re feeling stuck.

You know if you don’t prioritize effectively and choose the right activities for your specific company, you’ll fall into the random acts of marketing (R.A.M.) trap—where everything feels urgent, but nothing truly moves the needle. But what’s next?

Let’s also assume you’ve read my last two newsletters, which detail how to set the strategy and foundation of your plan:

  • Planning Part 1: Anatomy of a marketing plan 

  • Planning Part 2: Marketing strategy exercises for planning

  • Planning Part 3: Prioritization of marketing ideas

  • Bonus Part 4: Setting a marketing budget & tracking efficiency metrics

Extras for paid subscribers:

  • Templates to run all of the exercises in this newsletter

In this newsletter:

Instead of getting stuck in planning purgatory for several weeks, not knowing how to start working towards your plan, follow the guidance in this newsletter:

  • How to go from an almost done plan to starting to work on the right things.

  • How to prioritize your list of work systematically and relatively quickly—similar to how a product manager would manage a product roadmap.

  • Note: The prioritization process detailed in this newsletter can be applied to almost any list of marketing work–whether you lead a team, a sub-team, or are just trying to figure out what you should do individually.

  • Bonus for paid subscribers: Video walkthrough of how I prioritize work in an Asana project, a prioritization template in Google Sheets, and a Marketing Decision Dashboard(™) template in Google Slides.

PSA: Whether you’re on a team of 1 or a team of 50, prioritization is always hard. So, get good at it as soon as possible. Long before I understood all areas of marketing or knew how to lead teams, I was a ruthless prioritizer and it’s a skill that took me far.


Recommended products & agencies

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.
__
Fiverr Pro: Finding the right freelancers can be a time suck. Fiverr Pro has pre-vetted experts ready to help with complex marketing projects. We’re using Fiverr Pro at MKT1 to create social videos.
🎁 Get 15% off your first Fiverr Pro order with code MKT15.
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Caspian Studios produces podcasts for B2B companies–and will be producing my upcoming podcast too! Whether you want an interview-style podcast or a fiction series with real actors, they’ve done it before.
🎁 Reach out to Caspian and mention MKT1 to get $1,000 off your podcast.
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42 Agency, Demand Gen & RevOps Partner: Start next year with clean data and processes using their free Hubspot Audit Checklist or reach out for full-service help hitting your ops and growth goals.
🎁 Mention MKT1 to get $500 off your Hubspot audit.


Prioritization process overview

How to generate ideas

Before you can prioritize, you obviously need to have things on the list to prioritize. When it comes to annual or quarterly planning, here’s where those ideas come from:

  1. Running cross-functional marketing strategy exercises, as defined in my previous newsletter. 

  2. Requesting ideas from other teams. It’s helpful to do this before planning begins and to ask teams like sales and CS their biggest challenges marketing can help solve (rather than jumping to the exact deliverable).

  3. Ideas that didn’t make the cut last time–especially those that weren’t possible given your ops set-up, team size, or a dependency on another project being done. 

  4. A list of the programs and work you are already doing—after you’ve done a start, stop, continue exercise. 

Start, stop, continue exercise for existing work:

  • Before heading into planning, it’s helpful to make a list of the initiatives you’re already doing and then categorizing the work into “start, stop, continue” or more accurately “stop, stay the course, scale” categories.

  • Why? You can’t just keep adding new things to your list. You’ll be spread way too thin no matter the size of your team.

  • How? If your team is more than a few people, I recommend each sub-function does this independently. Then put the initiatives or programs that you’re planning to continue onto your list of work for next year.

Marketing prioritization principle: Balance breadth and depth–with an emphasis on depth

You’re likely familiar with the “impact and effort” framework for prioritization. It’s useful, but in marketing it’s not enough.

Effective marketing prioritization requires balancing breadth and coverage with focus and depth. You need to balance:

  • New vs proven: Test new ideas, but also focus on what’s already proven successful.

  • Short vs. long-term: Do the work that helps you hit short-term KPIs while making time for work that sets you up for success in future quarters or years.

  • Project sizes: Do a mix of work with high-potential impact things that may require a lot of effort, and lower effort work that leads to quick wins and learning.

  • Coverage and focus across multiple strategic inputs: Including ICPs, marketing advantages, perceptions aka storylines, revenue levers, and products (if you’re a multi-product company).

Why this works: If you try to reach too many audiences, tell too many stories, or use too many channels, you’ll spread yourself too thin. But if you focus on just one or two things in each area, you risk missing big, net new opportunities—or worse, becoming too reliant on something that stops working. So, always be testing, scaling, and doubling down.

Rule of thumb: Spend as much combined time on “depth” areas, as combined time across all “breadth” areas. For example, if you’re doubling down on video and data as content mediums, dedicate as much time to those two as you do all other content mediums combined.

Don’t skip this process: Spending time upfront on prioritization avoids wasting time on irrelevant work in the future

The time spent prioritizing is balanced out by not spending time on work that doesn’t matter or move the needle in the future. So while you might think this prioritization process is arduous, time-consuming, or unnecessary, it will save you more time in the end. Think like a Product Manager building a product roadmap!

And yes, getting some of the initial “scaffolding” together to make these prioritization decisions does take time. But once you have your marketing strategy nailed, it’s easy to make yourself a template and do this pretty quickly.

Steps to prioritize marketing work for the year or quarter

This newsletter will cover all these steps in detail.

  • Step 1: Set strategy, put decisions on a Marketing Decision Dashboard

  • Step 2: Categorize laundry list of ideas into categories

  • Step 3: Add “meta-data” to each item on your list

  • Stage 4: Size each line item by effort, impact, and maturity

  • Stage 5: Refine your list and get to work


Step-by-step guide to prioritizing marketing work

Step 1: Set strategy, put decisions on a Marketing Decision Dashboard

The first stage is setting your marketing strategy for the year–or quarter. Making these big strategic decisions upfront will massively speed up the time it takes to prioritize–and dramatically improve your ability to pick the right things. Previous 2 newsletters cover this in-depth: Anatomy of Marketing Plan & Marketing Strategy Exercises.

When you are done doing this, you should have the start of an annual plan, but you likely don’t have your goals finalized, or your big initiatives mapped out. 

Prioritizing your list will help you fill in these details. But, to make sure these big decisions don’t get forgotten about and are front and center as you do your day-to-day work, I recommend making a Marketing Decision Dashboard(™). 

The Marketing Decision Dashboard™

Problem: When marketers attempt to prioritize a laundry list of ideas, panic typically sets in.

So many ideas. So many teams to make happy. Such massive goals. So, I find it’s really helpful to have a place to go when prioritization panic sets in. That place is your Marketing Decision Dashboard. You can use this when planning for the year or quarter, but also day-to-day when you feel yourself getting stuck in the random acts of marketing trap. 

Solution: The Marketing Decision Dashboard includes all the inputs you need to make prioritization decisions on projects and tasks.

It includes the following—details in last week’s newsletter:

  • ICPs organized into tiers

  • Your company’s marketing advantages

  • The 4 revenue levers, ranked in order of importance at this moment

  • 3-4 perceptions (aka storylines) that drive your “fuel” (aka content & brand) strategy

  • Your highest-level goals as a team, and red, yellow, green status for each (once you’ve set them)

  • Any qualitative reminders for your team, e.g. “We focus too much on engine and not enough on fuel”

How to use this framework to drive marketing prioritization:

  • The format here doesn’t matter, what matters is keeping it up to date with the big strategic decisions you’ve made, so when it comes time to figure out if you should do x, y, or z you can use it to prioritize.

  • You can make a doc with all this information, organize it into a sheet, make an elaborate figjam—maybe even go old school and print it out for your team? Paid subscribers can get a head start with our Google Slides template.

  • Take this dashboard and make custom fields in Asana or your project management tool, that way it’s super easy to track this “meta data” across projects and tasks:

If you add custom fields in Asana for each prioritization category and strategic input, you can re-use them across projects.

Step 2: Categorize laundry list of ideas

As you set your strategy and do the exercises mentioned in my previous newsletter, you should be documenting a list of ideas. This list will contain apples, oranges, and lemons. And that’s totally fine, but it’s helpful to organize this list into categories, and then prioritize within those categories.

Much like how I recommend setting K.P.O. goals (for KPIs, projects, and ops work), I use the similar categories to organize my list:

  • Big-bet projects, programs, & campaigns: Work that combines fuel & engine, and has the potential to drive meaningful (or even step-change growth). This work requires all hands (or many hands) on deck.

  • Core work: The day-to-day work and medium sized-projects needed to continue growing and keep the lights on. If you do all these things you may get linear growth, but likely not off the charts growth!

  • Ops & foundation: The behind-the-scenes work that the world doesn’t see, to help you improve efficiency as a team and build the foundation for your future work. Includes hiring, tooling and analytics, strategy exercises (like positioning!), etc. 

    • Not now: When I deprioritize work, but still think it’s a viable idea, I like to leave it on my list. This way, everyone knows it was considered, but isn't happening now. It’s helpful to include “why” you deprioritized some of the big items on your list or ideas from other teams. It may be helpful to divide this category into “on deck” and “no timeline” as well.

Note: When reviewing and prioritizing your list, you might move things between big-bet projects and core work categories—they’re not always mutually exclusive. For example, you may find that some big-bet projects should be scaled back to make room for higher impact work.

It’s also helpful to estimate an overall time allocation across these 3 buckets:

  • Big-bet projects: 30-40%

  • Core work: 50%

  • Ops, foundation, hiring: 10-20%

  • Not now: 0%

Step 3: Add “meta-data” to each item on your list

Note: In the next steps, I’ll primarily cover how to prioritize your big-bet projects but you can apply a similar process to any list of work that needs prioritization.

Categorize each item across a number of variables:

(or columns, or fields, depending on what tool you use to do this)

  • Size & scope: Type of work, maturity, potential impact, effort, $ cost

  • Team/function: Directly responsible individual (DRI) or team; primarily a fuel or engine activity, or both

  • Alignment with strategy: ICP focus, revenue impact, your marketing advantages, perceptions/storylines, primary engine, relevant team goal or objective (if you are doing additional prioritization after you’ve set your goals).

    Note: You’re simply prioritizing your work against the same strategic inputs you put on your Marketing Decision Dashboard.

I recommend starting with the strategy alignment categories, before sizing and scoping to get rid of any “random acts of marketing”. If the work doesn’t make sense for your business and strategic focus, its a waste of time to even scope it out.

This prioritization work makes it much faster to write project briefs in the future—you’ll be halfway there with the details. The project brief I recommend is MKT1’s GACCS brief, which stands for Goals, Audience, Creative aka Fuel Strategy, Channels aka Engine strategy, and Stakeholders.

Make sure your planned big-bet projects map to the strategy you’ve set:

  • Look at the revenue levers you hope to impact, and make sure you have work that aligns with the ranking you determined.
    E.g. If you decide you want to focus on efficiency, make sure everything isn’t a top-of-funnel activity.

  • If you have marketing advantages, make sure you are doing big projects to accelerate them.
    E.g. If you have the potential to grow through channel partners, but have done nothing to activate these partners, you should do a test to build relationships with a couple of these partners. If you’ve done the test successfully, set a goal for a big-bet project to scale this program.

  • Hopefully, you’ve identified 3-4 big perceptions aka storylines you want to focus on during this planning period. Similar to marketing advantages, make sure you have work lined up that will tell these stories! And on the flip side, make sure you don’t have tons of work that’s telling a different story entirely.

  • Make sure you have a distribution plan for each piece of work. I bucket channels into a just few categories: inbound, outbound, ecosystem, events & lifecycle (next newsletter is on this topic!) and then choose the primary strategy for each line item. The key here is to make sure you know how you will reach your audience. But, this exercise can also illuminate if you need to start proving out an additional channel.

    E.g. I see that 2 of my big-bet project ideas would benefit from paid distribution, so I should add an ops goal to hire an agency to build out this channel.

During this process, you should remove some things from your big-bet project list that aren’t strategically aligned. But also, you may add some things–especially to the other buckets of ideas and projects on your lists: the core work and ops buckets.

To see this process in action, paid subscribers can watch a video walkthrough of how I prioritize in Asana and access a Google Sheets template.


More from MKT1

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Fiverr Pro for finding pre-vetted marketing experts; Caspian Studios produces podcasts for B2B companies; and 42 Agency, a Demand Gen & RevOps Partner.

✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find planning and strategy templates here and at the very bottom of this newsletter.

👁️ Related newsletters: Anatomy of a marketing plan, Marketing strategy exercises for planning, and Setting a marketing budget & tracking efficiency metrics

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.

📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which shows how to add projects to your list, refine it so you’re only working on the right things, and start working!

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