Prioritize your Strategic Initiatives

Strategic planning is a great way to identify which initiatives can add the most value to your organization. The next step is to prioritize initiatives with a systematic method. Use our downloadable Priority Index Tool to guide you through the prioritization process, and help you drill down on the value added for each proposed initiative.

What are the Most Important considerations?

Feasibility

• Customer Value Proposition (CV) – what value does this deliver?
• Economic Upside Potential (UP) – what impact could this have on revenue?
• Industry Attractiveness (IA) – How well is this competitively positioned?

Strategic Fit

• Fit with Company Goals & Objectives (CG) – is this aligned to our goals?
• Ease of Implementation (EI) – how difficult would this be to do?
• Skills & Resources (SR) – do we have the required resources in-house?

Risk

• Over Forecasted Budget (OB) – how likely is this initiative to go over-budget?
• Over Forecasted Timeline (OT) – how likely is this initiative to go over-time?
• Technical Risk & Complexity (TR) – how complicated is this initiative?

Preparing an Accurate Marketing Budget

Although every department is expected to prepare an annual budget, most do not understand the intrinsic value of effectively leveraging this management process. Take a step back from the budget and evaluate what your department will be expected to deliver this year. Next, identify which budget model will provide the most value to your department. Use Demand Metric’s downloadable Department Budget Template to help you prepare your annual budget.

Budgeting Models:

• Zero-based Budgeting – this model assumes that you are building your budget from scratch this year. Working backwards from your department’s strategic plan, estimate costs for each planned program, determine staffing & resource requirements, and project expenses for any other expenditures.
• Priority-based Budgeting – some organizations do not have formalized budgeting procedures in place for the Marketing department. Instead, funds are allocated on an as-needed basis, depending on the priorities of the organization at that time. Use Demand Metric’s Priority Index Tool to help you justify spending in your department based on Feasibility, Fit, & Risk.
• % Change from Last Year – perhaps the most common model for budgeting, the % change model assumes you will spend roughly the same amount of money on Marketing activities, plus or minus a few percentage points. The standard in the industry is to allocate 3-10% of gross revenue to the Marketing department. Start-ups usually require a higher percentage.

Presenting Business Strategy Plans

 

Prepare for the Planning Process

 

 

·          Build a Strategic Planning Team – engage a cross-functional planning team to represent each department’s needs. Hold a kick-off meeting to set strategic planning goals, schedule meeting times, and get organized for the planning process.

 

·          Introduce the Balanced Scorecard Approach – review and distribute our Research Note “Map Strategy with Balanced Scorecard” to provide a framework to work from.

 

·          Develop a Strategic Planning Charter – use our  Project Charter template to document the goals and objectives for the planning process, and set plan completion timelines.

 

·          Document Strategic Planning GAPS – evaluate your current strategic planning process and add GAPS to our GAP Analysis Tool under the Strategy tab. You will be using this GAP Analysis Tool through the entire strategic planning process, so consider distributing this tool to the whole team.