Millions of dollars at stake. Competing demands from teams. Long hours spent in brainstorm meetings.
At enterprise organizations, marketing planning is a complex exercise that can quickly go sideways when stakeholders, goals, and campaigns aren’t aligned. Now that Gartner reported marketing budgets have fallen 15% in 2024, there’s even more pressure on marketers to plan better, maximize their budget, and drive ROI.
Before marketers are knee-deep in spreadsheets this planning season, here are three common problems to watch for and how to fix them.
Problem 1: Marketers aren’t speaking the same language
Taxonomy might not be the most exciting topic for marketers, but it’s impossible to communicate—or measure ROI—when terms like “campaign” have different meanings depending on the team, region, or tool that you’re using. Getting a clear picture of marketing performance becomes a time-consuming deep dive into documents, email chains, and reporting methodologies.
How to fix it:
Using a common taxonomy is necessary for marketers (and their tech stacks) to connect the dots between spend, campaign plans, and results. There will be far less headaches and hours of time saved with a consistent naming convention for marketing campaigns, programs, and tactics.
Problem 2: Too many (bad) budget surprises
When asked what budget is available or already spent for specific programs, most marketing teams take days (or weeks) to come up with a clear answer. That’s because budgets are often spread across static spreadsheets, disconnected from the tools finance is using, and aren’t always updated as new costs are committed or spent. This limits marketing agility, and erodes confidence that marketing is wisely managing critical financial resources for their campaigns.
How to fix it:
Marketing organizations need to get out of spreadsheets and into a centralized campaign planning tool that’s integrated with finance systems (like your ERP or Purchase Order software). By consolidating and automating the reconciliation process, marketers can get an accurate, live view of their actual vs. committed spend and shift available budget to top-performing campaigns faster.
Problem 3: It’s impossible to fit everything in one calendar
Calendar features in marketing tools are usually focused on content—social, video, and articles. Which means communicating the higher-level campaign plans to different teams and regions often ends up being done through slide decks, email chains, and project management tools that need constant updating. This makes getting an idea of what’s in flight across markets a convoluted best guess instead of a clear, accurate snapshot. And when you don’t know what’s launched—or launching soon—coordinating promotions and tracking performance is difficult. It’s also hard to understand team capacity, performance issues, or project timelines.
How to fix it:
To get a live view of current campaigns, marketers need a single marketing calendar that can capture and track activities in real-time. More importantly, it needs to be filterable by several tags—like region, products, audience, messaging—so that staying in the loop and communicating change across different areas and levels of the organization takes minutes instead of hours (or days).
These are just a few of the hurdles that can crop up amid the intricacies of marketing planning at enterprise organizations—especially when teams aren’t using marketing planning software. If you feel like your planning process is a mess, know that you’re not alone and there is a solution. Learn more about the seven critical steps for marketing planning and impress your CMO this planning season.
