How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing
Part 3 of 3 in Annual Planning Series
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“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
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.
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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:
Running cross-functional marketing strategy exercises, as defined in my previous newsletter.
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).
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.
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:
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.
Prioritization video & template for paid subscribers
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.
Stage 4: Size each line item by maturity, effort, and impact
Next up, add how much work is required for each item on your list, and also indicate the impact you think it can have.
I start by indicating maturity for each line item:
Much like I use tiers to organize audiences, I use a tier system to indicate maturity. The prioritization principle here is to always be testing new things–or planning for your next big-bet project. But you need to balance that with the core work you do to keep the lights on and doubling down on big projects that can cause inflection points in your growth. So you want to make sure you’re balancing activities across brand new ideas and proven out work. I use these tiers or categories, but feel free to adjust these for your team:
Tier 1: Proven & Core
Tier 2: Scaling
Tier 3: Testing
Tier 4: On deck/not a priority now
Tier 5: Tried, didn’t work (for now)
Then, I do a back of envelope estimate of impact and effort, using high, medium, and low rankings:
When thinking about impact, I also add an option for “step-change”–these are the projects or initiatives you think will change the game for your company. Here’s how I use this information:
Focus on low effort, medium-high impact work and medium-high effort, high to step-change impact work:
No high effort, low impact work. And try not to focus on medium effort, low impact work either.
Medium impact, medium effort work is okay: You’ll need work to balance out the ebbs and flows for individual roles and teams.
Do 1-2 big-bet, potentially step-change driving projects per quarter:
The idea here is that you have all hands on deck, focused on something massive.
I find that anymore than that is too many, really for any size team. The projects get bigger as your team scales, but the number of big-bet projects shouldn’t increase that much.
Remember: The 1-2 highest potential impact projects per quarter should be represented in your high-level goals too.
Lastly, I estimate cost:
By cost, I mean marketing spend, not headcount costs. So things like cost to sponsor an event, money spent on paid campaigns, $ spent on new software to do just this thing, etc. I don’t include the headcount cost in here, because I consider that part of the effort. If you use contractors a lot, it might be worth it to categorize that cost too.
I’m planning to send a budget template to all paid subscribers in the next week-ish! Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Stage 5: Refine your list, get to work!
Once you’ve categorized everything, start cutting things:
I sort by each column or variable, which usually makes it obvious where you have gaps and overlaps in planned work.
I check for coverage across my focus areas (like ICPs, growth levers, marketing advantages, and perceptions/storylines).
I make sure there are enough big things planned, that can drive step-change growth.
I then start putting timelines on all my work:
I organize big chunks of work into quarters or months depending on the planning period. I double check that the same DRI doesn’t have 2 massive projects at once.
Planning tip: Don’t plan for the whole time-period.
We always overestimate what we can do. Plus, things always pop up as the year goes on that are actually important (but remember, most things are probably just random acts of marketing).
A fast way to allow for buffer time: For annual planning, plan for Q1-Q3 only & for quarter planning, plan for 2.5 out of 3 months.
And finally after I map out my big-bet projects, I go back to my ops and core work lists:
Make sure you have the work needed to support the big-bet projects
Consolidate core work and ops line items into programs or initiatives, so I don’t need to add timelines for every single task.
e.g. A series of web conversion tests and changes can be classified as “web conversion improvements” rather than having a line item for each.Add timelines to ensure any dependencies line up right.
E.g. If I need to buy software for outbound (ops), test outbound in a small campaign first (core work), and then use outbound as a distribution channel for a big-bet campaign (big-bet project), I make sure this is sequenced correctly.
What’s next?
Finalize the your KPO (KPIs, Projects, and Ops) goals
Go back to your annual plan doc. Maybe you had goal placeholders before, but now you should have what you need to finalize and refine those goals.
Make sure your biggest-bet projects are represented by project goals, so you make time for this work and don’t let the day-to-day projects get in the way—and so the rest of the company knows what you’re focused on.
Check that your core work can actually get you to your KPI goals. Use a bottom-up forecast to help you figure this out.
Set ops goals that enable your big-bet projects and core work.
Connect the dots between you strategy, goals, and the work—ideally in a project management tool
To make sure you stay on track and do the work you’ve so carefully prioritized…
Keep your Marketing Decision Dashboard updated with your strategic inputs at all times.
Add fields for these strategic inputs into your project management tool.
Create a project for your goals in your project management tool.
Link those goals to the projects for each initiative. Make sure projects for each initiative have the strategic input fields and other prioritization criteria in them, as well as a GACCS brief.
Link each goal to the reports & dashboards that show progress as well.
Use the No RAM Checklist
Remember, the goal of prioritization is to make sure you focus on the work that will move the needle–and to avoid doing a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter.
So when an “urgent” work request comes in, don’t panic and say yes or no quickly. Determine if it’s a priority over other work you have planned, and don’t be afraid to swap things out.
Run the idea through the below No RAM Checklist, review it against your Marketing Decision Dashboard, or throw it in your Asana project with the fancy fields for your strategic inputs and prioritization criteria.
Then, make the prioritization decision and share how you arrived at this decision, and move forward with your RAM-free day.
To avoid RAM, make sure you answer yes to most of these questions before you do it:
Did you pre-plan for this work or did it come up ad hoc? If ad hoc, is it taking the place of work of a similar size on your list?
Is this an idea for my business specifically (as opposed to copying another company’s playbook or tactic)?
Does this work have medium to high potential impact?
Does this work align with our overall marketing strategy?
Does this work help us reach one of our focus ICPs?
Does this work help us accelerate a marketing advantage?
Does this work help us tell the stories we want to tell?
Does this work help us drive growth in the highest leveraged ways?
Does this work align with the goals we set for the year or quarter?
Does this work use a content type or medium we have the resources to make?
Can this work be distributed through one of the channels we already have built out? If not, is this a channel we want to test anyway and can use this project as a forcing function?
Do we have data that shows this is a good idea?
Does someone on the team have high-conviction in this area?
More from MKT1
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✂️ Templates & video walkthrough for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find planning and strategy templates here and at the very bottom of this newsletter.
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free!
📰 Next newsletter: I’m working on a guide to selecting your primary growth channels for all subscribers—and a highly requested budget template for paid subscribers.
📚 Additional reading: For more on how to handle requests from other teams in your organization, read our internal marketing newsletter.
Video: How I prioritize work in Asana [for paid subscribers only]
