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Brand strategy is WHY you will win.
Marketing plan is HOW. The plan is the levers you will pull to hit your goals.
1. Brand goals / OKRs
2. Strategy TL;DR
3. Channel strategy / goals / OKRs
It should be done top-down / bottoms up.
What does that mean? It starts with the marketing leader (or CEO) creating # 1 and # 2.
Then the channel owners create # 3 and give to leader.
Leader confirms all are aligned.
I like to create Marketing plans quarterly to enable teams to iterate based on the needs of the business, customer and changing marketing landscape.
OKRs are part of the marketing plan.
O = objective
KR = key result (tangible measurement)
You will have over-arching brand goals for the department and goals for each team / channel.
*OKRs do not contain tactics! This is a common mistake
I want to increase brand awareness (O)
as measured by 10% increase in recall by women ages 20-29 through quarterly third party survey (KR)
Try to limit to 2-3 objectives for focus.
Now that you have your brand goals, it’s helpful to do a strategy TL;DR.
I frame it as the 3-4 levers you will use to achieve that brand goal.
It’s like going on a road trip. The goals are the destination and the strategy is how you plan to get there.
We will achieve our Q4 brand goals via:
- influencers for earned media
- Releasing 2-3 PR insight papers
- Focus on Twitter engagement / channel growth
This top-down strategy shows where the team is focusing major energy that quarter.
So you now know the destination (brand goals) and high-level directions you get there.
Now each team/channel gets to plan their own road trip.
Each team/channel will create their own OKRs in order to move the needle on the brand goals.
It’s important to get alignment on WHAT goals to track weekly vs. monthly and do we have the tools to measure them.
I don’t like tracking more than 3-5 top line metrics.
Ex:
PR metrics:
- Top tier Placements
- Impressions
- SOV (against competitive set)
Each channel will create their strategy TL;DR to communicate HOW they will hit their OKRs.
Again, you will try many things over the course of a month and quarter. This is the elevator pitch of what big levers you want to pull.