Here’s a month-by-month guide to what you should be doing THIS year to help you plan your 2025 marketing.
It’s tight between now and the end of the year. Somehow you need to finish the year strong while working around holiday schedules, squeezing in a series of leadership planning sessions and throwing a team party. I can’t help you with all of your planning, but I can give you a marketing checklist!
October
This is the last full month that you will have before the chaos of holidays and vacations, so I recommend scheduling these two October meetings as early in the month as possible. Use this month to make sure you answer some basic questions about the direction of the business, and begin to discuss the marketing plans for the next year.
Meeting #1 – Early October: Set Company Goals
If you do quarterly planning, this should be a walk in the park. Depending on your typical agenda, you may not have much time allotted for marketing, but that’s an easy adjustment. Make sure that you include a year-to-date marketing recap and leave the meeting with some top level revenue goals so that you’re marketing team will have clear direction. Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Review Company YTD Goals – October is the official start to Q4. At this point, you should already know how you are tracking for 3/4 of the year. It’s an important time to check in on the company’s goals.
Review Marketing YTD Results – Hopefully, you have had some planned marketing activities for the year, and can review some reporting to see how well your activities performed. Which would you do again? Which do you need to improve? Which should you drop, and will you need a replacement?
Set 2025 Revenue Goals – You should also be able to set some very high level goals for 2025. Start with a revenue goal. Some businesses can reliably forecast sales or revenue goals, but If you find this overwhelming, pick one of these simple models:
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- If you have been largely flat, or feel like you don’t have control over your revenue, use last year’s number.
- If you have been growing, look at the percentage increase or decrease in business over the past three years and use that information to predict next year.
If possible, break the revenue goals down:
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- sales/revenue growth targets by product or service line
- growth by: product, service lines, geography, audience segments
Meeting #2 – Mid October: Marketing Discussion
This is too much to wedge in at the end of a general planning session, so give it it’s own meeting with specific purpose. If you have a marketing team, your job as the owner/CEO is to share your company goals and the marketing team should work on providing ideas. You should also provide the team with a budget or a range that they should be working within.
If you do not have a marketing team, you will need to block more time to work on this yourself.
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- Share the 2025 Growth Goals with the Marketing Team
- Big Picture Marketing Activities Discussion
- Confirm 2025 Marketing Budget
November
We are all fighting the short month with the Thanksgiving holiday in November. Staff and vendors may be hard to reach later in the month, so your marketing team will want to begin work on their marketing plan as early as possible. It’s important for you (or your team) to block the time you need for this planning on the calendar right now, knowing you will need to spend the first two weeks developing your detailed plan.
Weeks 1-2 of November: Finalize Your Marketing Plan & Budget
I have seen one page marketing plans that are more effective than entire binder’s worth of detail. The actual production of the marketing plan should not take center stage. The effort should be on the quality of the thought and research going into it.
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- Finalize your marketing plan – At a minimum, restate the company goals, the marketing goals that map to them, identify the audience(s) that you intend to reach, the tactics that you will use, the ways you will measure success and also include an estimate for the budget for each of those activities.
- Finalize your marketing budget – Create a line-item budget that includes the costs per month for the activities that you are proposing.
Meeting #3 – Before Thanksgiving: Marketing Plan Presentation
The marketing team should be presenting the marketing plan to the Owner/CEO or potentially to the leadership team. The leadership team may not have insights into the specific marketing tactics, their expected returns or industry benchmarks, so the marketing team should be prepared to answer questions. A marketing team should also come into this meeting flexible and expect feedback. There may be budget limitations, historical experience with specific tactics or operational challenges implementing some of the ideas. A marketing team should openly listen and plan to adjust the plan based on feedback received during this meeting.
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- Present the marketing plan
- Be prepared to answer questions or follow up with additional details
- Make plan adjustment based on feedback
December
By the start of December, your company should have a final marketing plan and budget that is approved, because you need to be working on things in December for January of the next year! This is another heavy holiday month, so everyone willed to front load the activities and block time on calendars now to ensure success.
Meeting #4 – First Week of December: Marketing Plan Approval
In early December, the marketing team should meet with the CEO to finalize the marketing plan. All remaining questions should have been addressed and budgets should be approved.
Weeks 1-4: Work on Fleshing out and Executing Next Year’s Plan
With an approved marketing plan and budget in hand, the marketing team should be already be focussed on 2025 activities. This includes fleshing out the details of the 2025 calendar, placing media buys, finalizing any creative needed for January, and developing a dashboard to track results.
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- Develop a 2025 schedule
- Begin working on January campaigns and initiatives
- Create a 2025 dashboard to measure success
The Owner / CEO’s Role in Marketing?
It’s a key leadership function to make sure that a marketing plan is developed, expectations are clearly set and marketing accountability is firmly assigned – all of this while closing the year strong. The best way to ensure that these critical steps happen is to put the dates on the calendar right now.
Robot Creative is ready to help, when you’re ready.
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