Want to supercharge your marketing planning? Plan with Earnest
Sometimes, marketing planning is easy: clear objectives from the business, a simple ‘strategy on a page’, defined product/solution roadmap, and clear audience definitions and priorities.
But let’s face it, we don't often find ourselves in this utopian paradise.
In the real world, there are simply too many plates to spin, objective blurriness, and ambiguities to unpick. Marketing leaders at B2B brands are also just not given the time or headspace they need to make simple plans out of complex circumstances.
This is why we’ve created Plan with Earnest.
What’s Plan with Earnest?
Plan with Earnest is the busy marketer’s shortcut to a practical and actionable marketing plan.
Although it’s no replacement for a comprehensive and research-backed marketing strategy, it’s designed to help marketers quickly define objectives, organise activity streams, and provide their agency with clear direction for their agency.
And it works in three steps:
Step 1: Input gathering
- We gather key info from you and your team through a straightforward online survey.
Step 2: Interactive half-day workshop
- We bring together your team – and stakeholders, if desired – to facilitate agreement on objectives, the programmes of activity that ladder up to these, and key dependencies.
Step 3: Consolidated write-up and ‘plan on a page’
- We produce a concise ‘board-friendly’ top-level summary that charts a clear path forward and overview of all key programmes of activity.
What are the steps, in detail?
It begins with a short conversation. No brief is required – the key for us is to hear you describe your challenge. This helps us to see clearly where Plan with Earnest can help you accelerate your planning and light a clear path through the murk of conflicting priorities and internal opinions.
Step 1: Input gathering
We send you a short survey to gather the inputs we need from across your team – and selected stakeholders if desired – to get a fair and accurate reflection of your past and current marketing activity.
The questions are always tailored based on our initial conversation, and will ask things such as:
- What does your business want to achieve in the next 12-24 months?
- If there was only one thing you could achieve this/next year, what would it be?
- What’s the key ‘ask’ of marketing?
- What’s getting in the way of that ask?
- How did marketing perform commercially over the last year?
- How is marketing viewed within the organisation?
- What’s the key ‘ask’ of marketing?
- What’s getting in the way of that ask?
- What activities did you undertake last year?
- What worked? What didn’t?
- What did you try that was new? Did it work?
- What were your biggest obstacles over the year?
- What were your biggest successes and failures?
Step 2: Interactive half-day workshop
The workshop takes a structured approach to tackling the challenges:
- Replaying of inputs received
- Restatement of the key objectives of the session
- Programme structure and design: whiteboarding with you to develop a set of marketing programmes that can help clarify and simplify the many marketing requirements that B2B brands have on their plates.
Step 3: Consolidated write up and ‘plan on a page’
Following the workshop, we produce a structured write-up that organises all the inputs and discussion points.
Typically the key outputs are a series of marketing programmes that align to overall business objectives and provide a structured and clear way for marketing to gain internal alignment and deliver on.
The plan will include:
- Marketing programmes: suggested activity streams, including how these align to or include existing plans
- Budget and resource requirements
- Specific and measurable KPIs
How much does it cost?
Plan with Earnest costs £10,000.
I’m interested, what’s next?
George Sanders, our Head of Business, is who you need to talk to. You can drop him a line right now, or you can go and give him a prod on LinkedIn (he’s always there, you can’t miss him).
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(Header photo: Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash)
