Bring Focus and Priority To Your Planning Process

Part of our job as marketers is to provide leadership when it comes to making smart decisions with your marketing/ad budgets. I've always been a big proponent of a strategic planning process. Start with your business objectives (which should be attainable, measurable, and time definite), define clear strategies to achieve those objectives, and finally derive tactics to execute those strategies.

What usually falls out of this process is a long list of tactics that can appear daunting. By prioritizing those tactics, you can help maintain focus and direction as you turn them into action items. This ultimately helps allocate your limited resources and budget to what will pay-off the most.

Assigning priority can be a tricky practice. There is usually differing views and subjective weighting applied and many times to fulfill personal agendas. Its no wonder that users, your customers, get lost in the banter. By applying a process to the practice, we can reduce the subjectivity.

I use a tool we call the Prioritization Matrix and it originated at Adaptive Path as far as I can tell. It has you rank tactics in two ways across four key categories.

• Importance: What is the potential payoff for executing the tactic. This is broken down in terms of importance to the business and importance to the user. Pretty straight forward.
• Feasibility: What investment will the tactic require.This is broken down into technical feasibility and resource feasibility. These usually take a little more explanation.
• Technical Feasibility: I look at this as level of effort (LOE). This is not about technology but more about the logistics of getting the job done.
• Resource Feasibility: This is a reflection of you having the right people with the right skill sets to execute.

The scores in these four categories will plot the tactic in one of four quadrants classified as 'Do First', 'Consider', 'Maybe Later', 'Don't Bother'.

While not sexy, and certainly not over complicated, this dispassionate approach to prioritization has proved invaluable. It can break through analysis paralysis and bring focus to planning sessions in disarray.

You can download the one I use here or the original one at Adaptive Path. Good luck!