Just kidding. This episode is about marketing planning, marketing strategy, and marketing budgeting. As autumn rolls around, companies begin the extensive planning process for the coming calendar year, and one of the most searched-terms during the next 6 weeks is “marketing plan template”. In this episode, Katie and Chris discuss marketing planning, how to plan for uncertainty, what your plan should look like in case of a recession, and even a few sneak peeks at an upcoming research paper on what social networks to pay attention to in 2020. Tune in now!

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn

In this week’s in your insights is the first hints of autumn that coolness and they can see your breath in the morning, there’s pumpkin spice, everything pumpkin spice brake pads, pumpkin spice pet washes. But for everyone in our world, the real focus is on marketing, planning, marketing, strategy, strategic planning. As we roll into past the Labor Day holiday in the United States, everyone spends most of the month of September and a good chunk of October into planning and budgeting. So I can think of no one better to talk to about planning and budgeting and making sure that we’ve got our heads on straight, then you, Katie, because this is literally has been your life the last 20 years. So obviously, we have we know the basics, you need your business requirements, you need to have some sense of a goal, you need to have some sense of what resources you have available. What In your opinion, are the things that people do wrong? They’re doing marketing planning? Where does marketing planning go off the rails? Is it just not having clear goals? Is it not having enough resources? One thing that I’ve seen in a lot of the feedback we’ve received from our surveys is people saying, you know, I may asked to do twice, twice the results for half the resources. So how can people start to make sense of the planning process and keep their heads on straight?

Katie Robbert

Well, before we dig into that Fun fact, for anyone who doesn’t know, pumpkin spice dog wash is is really a thing. It is. It is vile, and horrible. I don’t know why you would want your dog to smell like that. But, you know, to each his own. So back to the planning piece of it. You know, I think the thing that people do wrong, or I shouldn’t say that they do wrong, it’s it’s easy to forget to look at the data. It’s easy to forget, especially if you’ve been following along with us this year, we’ve been preaching the whole set it and forget it, set up an automated dashboard, you know, set up something like Google Data Studio. Well, if you’re not in it every day, and you know you have an automated then it’s very easy to forget that it’s even there. And so what I’ve seen a lot of my experience, and what you know has happened to me earlier on in my career is I’ve started to make a plan. And then you know, started talking about it with like, higher ups and managers and clients. And then oops, I took a look at the data. And it’s different from what I was planning on doing. And so it’s forgetting to actually check if you are on track with your KPIs if you’re on track reaching your goals. So I think that that’s one thing is, you know, don’t forget to actually pull the data in. And if you’ve been looking at your data all along, then you’ve been co course correcting. As you’re seeing things go, you know, off track. Don’t try to