Set Planning Process and Timeline

How to plan the marketing budget in terms of timeline. Set up your budget planning workflow, establish key milestones and internal deadlines.

Start by creating a visual timeline. Most companies follow a standard budget cycle: Department Planning → HR/Finance/Board Review → Revisions → Final Signoff.
Your finance team likely provides these high-level deadlines. However, you need to break down that first "Department Planning" phase into actionable steps.

Your Internal Marketing Planning Timeline

Let's breakdown the "marketing planning" into phases. Your timeline should include:

  • Clear outcomes after each phase
  • Deadlines for each phase
  • Where you need team members to add their input (in case you have a bigger team with some marketing leads owning some areas)
Don't do everything on your own! Use collaborative marketing budget software like Etropo to divide planning duties.

A structured internal planning process ensures your budget aligns with business targets and is backed by data. Each step builds on the previous one.

1. Baseline Proposal

Start by projecting your current performance forward, assuming no changes to strategy or resources. This means diving deep into your channel metrics, understanding seasonal patterns, and accounting for known cost increases.

You should end that phase with forecasts for key conversion (e.g. new customers or new business MRR) and budget required to make it happen.

Outcome: Forecasts and budgets for the forecasts
Time required: Up to 1 week

The best way to speed up this phase is to import the historic performance data and budgets and make linear prediction for the next year, assuming that nothing has changed and will change.

2. Growth initiatives review

Create a shortlist of potential new investments. Use a systematic approach (impact vs effort) to evaluate each initiative based on its impact on customer acquisition versus the resources required.

Outcome: List of initiatives with impact on the KPI and budget needed per initiative
Time required: 1-2 weeks

Always use one KPI for your team to evaluate all initiatives (these should be MQLs, Signups, New Customers). Having a list of initiatives with various KPIs makes it impossible to compare and evaluate.

3. Target Setting

This phase is about choosing the growth initiatives and adding their impact and costs to the forecasts from the baseline.

Outcome: Target growth numbers
Time required: 2-3 days

Remember: This phase is relevant when you have autonomy in setting targets. If you are receiving the target growth number from the CEO or the Finance Team, then just focus on the resources (budgets) needed to make these growth initiatives happen.

4. Resource Mapping

This is where your budget plan gets real. Map out exactly what you need month by month – from hiring plans to tool costs to agency support. Be specific about timing, especially for new hires where you need to factor in recruitment and ramp-up time.

Outcome: Final budget
Time required: 2-3 days

Always add a 10-15% buffer to your new initiatives costs estimates. New initiatives often require more support than initially planned.

5. Plan analysis

This step is very often skipped by CMOs. It's about going through a short checklist metrics and updating the budget plan if you see some failure points and wrong assumptions. The checklist includes analyzing your budget on charts such as quarter over quarter growth, breakdown by category, goal and correlation with targeted conversions growth.

Outcome: Budget visualization on graphs
Time required: 1-2 days

If you are using a spreadsheet then the time required will be much longer, as you will need to build the graphs and pivot tables on your own. In marketing budget software like Etropo you get a dashboard with the planned budget charts automatically.

6. Pitch Preparation

Package your plan into a compelling story. The key goal here is to show the direct connection between spending and results. Use the charts from the plan analysis to show the quarterly budget growth and how it corresponds with the targets realization.

Outcome: Deck that shows strategy and investment reasoning
Time required: 2-3 days

7. Submit for signoff

Send in one file the strategy pitch deck with visual budget analysis and your raw budget file required by the finance team.

The most common mistake is skipping the plan analysis phase. Your stakeholders will come back with the questions that you could have already answered with your budget plan charts in your pitch deck.