Almost every company develops an annual marketing plan. Unfortunately, there are as many different approaches to the annual marketing plan or annual business plan as there are individuals who develop them. Results from the survey that EMM Group developed for the Association of National Advertisers indicate that annual marketing planning in many companies is broken. Here are some of the problems

• Internal teams consume thousands of man-hours developing a plan that is put on the shelf and never used.
• Many plans do not integrate go-to-market elements across marketing and sales.
• Many do not leverage customer insights across the plan.
• Few link short-term annual goals to longer-term efforts to build brand equity.

EMM Group's annual marketing planning process reflects the best practices of some of the most successful marketing companies such as Gillette/P&G, Microsoft, and GE. The process follows specific principles such as:

• Starting with an "outside in" view of the plan by profiling the target customer or each individual target segment.
• Using a 360-degree key issues/opportunities analysis to help identify the annual planning initiatives.
• Ensuring the annual plan reflects long-term business objectives as well as short-term needs.
• Providing a tight link between insights, the target customers and the individual integrated marketing campaigns that compose the annual marketing plan.
• Developing rigorous objectives for each integrated marketing campaign within the overall plan.
• Using marketing analytics and marketing optimization tools for resource allocation.
• Linking every expenditure to a specific integrated marketing campaign plan or initiative.
• Archiving analytics for use in continuous improvement of next year's plan.

EMM Group has a comprehensive suite of more than 400 templates and tools to facilitate annual planning and other related marketing processes. We can deliver this solution via consulting or as software through our marketing planning software suite, EMMPower.

The EMM Group's annual marketing planning process ensures better-harmonized plan that "gets the process out of the way" so that teams can concentrate on the strategic issues. Users follow best practices to identify high-impact go-to-market programs while reducing the time and rework so common in today's marketing.