7 Marketing Imperatives for Strategic Planning: A Prioritization Framework
When you can't do everything, how do you decide what matters most? A holistic guide to prioritizing your brand's in-market efforts.
Struggling with marketing prioritization? Discover the 7 critical imperatives every marketing team should focus on to drive growth, from customer-centricity to simplified workflows and better data leverage.
The Prioritization Challenge
Efficiency and prioritization are consistently top of mind for modern marketing leaders. We all grapple with reviewing a brand's in-market efforts holistically.
The core question keeps coming up: If you can't do everything, how do you figure out the most effective use of your time?
Too often, prioritizing becomes a battle of opinions rather than a strategic exercise. To cut through the noise, we naturally gravitate toward frameworks that force clarity. Below are 7 imperatives effectively a sketchbook of probing questions designed to frame your planning for the year ahead.
1. Become More Customer-Centric
True customer-centricity moves beyond buzzwords to actionable decision-making based on deep empathy and data. It's about shifting your vantage point from "how do we sell this?" to "how does the customer buy this?"
When you trace the customer journey from a point earlier than your competitors, you unlock opportunities to be helpful before a purchase decision is even made. This builds trust equity that pays dividends at the bottom of the funnel.
Ask These Questions
- How can we leverage data about our customers to empower them to make better decisions in less time with less stress?
- How can we better handle customer, competitor, and opportunity analysis?
- How can we trace our customer's journey from an earlier point?
- How can we deliver a more unified customer experience?
2. Simplify Processes & Improve Workflows
Complexity is the enemy of execution. As marketing stacks grow and teams expand, friction naturally creeps into every process. The goal isn't just to work harder, but to remove the invisible drag on your team's velocity.
Streamlining monitoring, reporting, and approval workflows frees up mental bandwidth for creativity and strategy. If your team is spending more time reporting on work than doing it, your process is broken.
Ask These Questions
- How can we simplify processes and improve overall team efficiency?
- How can we better track and report project progress?
- How can we simplify stakeholder asks and the approval process?
- How can we help key decision-makers understand the impact of their decisions?
- How can we make stakeholders more aware of the available data and implications?
3. Better Leverage Data
Technically, we have more data than ever. Practically, we often have less insight. The imperative is to move from collecting dots to connecting them—transforming raw metrics into strategic narratives.
This means going beyond vanity metrics to look at competitive gaps, audience overlap, and actual acquisition costs. Are you defending your brand terms effectively? Are you actually personalizing experiences based on the data you already have?
Ask These Questions
- How are we conducting keyword, competitor, and gap analysis?
- What is the cost and competition to defend and compete on branded and non-branded search terms?
- How are we leveraging audiences, geographic and firmographic data to improve ad targeting?
- How are we engaging with customers and influencers on social networks?
- How are we personalizing landing page experiences based on the ads we serve?
- How are we proactively monitoring and managing user reviews and ratings?
- What is the maximum CPC you are willing to pay and anticipated CPL?
Precision in targeting often outweighs breadth of message.
4. Improve Audience, Behavior & Account Targeting
Refining who you talk to is often more effective than refining what you say. In an era of increasing noise, precision targeting is your competitive advantage.
Whether it's account-based marketing (ABM) strategies like Terminus or Demandbase, or simply better segmentation of your existing lists, treating net new prospects differently than loyal customers is table stakes. If you're shouting the same message to everyone, you're heard by no one.
Ask These Questions
- How do you leverage account-based targeting to increase customer engagement (Terminus)?
- How are we connecting information on actively engaged accounts (Demandbase) with records to enable sales pursuit?
- How are we nurturing existing customer lists, past website visitors, or people who have previously engaged with our ads?
- How do we treat net new versus existing customers differently?
5. Create a Faster & More Relevant Content Deployment Process
Speed to market matters. Your content engine needs to be agile enough to respond to market shifts, yet disciplined enough to remain relevant.
The sweet spot lies in understanding the user's intent at their specific stage of the journey. Content for a user just becoming problem-aware should look vastly different from content for a user comparing solutions. Replicating successful formats speeds this up—once you find a structure that resonates, double down.
Ask These Questions
- How can we simplify and speed up the content creation and deployment process?
- How do you identify and replicate easy ways to create compelling content that connects with your audience?
- What stage and step are you creating content for?
- What is the keyword or topic focus of the user at this stage and step of their journey?
- What are the customer's top priorities versus those of the company?
Alignment across product, shedding silos, is essential.
6. Simplify Cross-Team Requirements
Silos kill strategy. The most common point of failure isn't bad ideas, it's bad handoffs. Unifying your efforts across acquisition, retention, and product teams is essential for a coherent brand experience.
Your audience definitions should be shared language across all teams. If Acquisition calls them "Users" and Sales calls them "Leads" and Retention calls them "Accounts," you have a fragmentation problem. Alignment streamlines deployment and ensures the message lands as intended.
Ask These Questions
- How can we streamline the ad deployment and campaign management process?
- How can we target content to customers at different stages of the buyer journey?
- How can we unify audience definitions across targeting, acquisition, and retention stages?
- How is our final content created with the particular platform conditions and context of use in mind?
- What competitor content will our ads be fighting for attention with?
- How can you test and monitor engagement to ensure successful campaign management?
7. Improve Lead Outcomes
The job isn't done when the lead comes in. Nurturing and proximity to sales are the final mile where ROI is actually realized.
Automated nurturing shouldn't feel robotic. It should enable sales to open relevant conversations at the right time. Reviving dormant customers or effectively warming up cold leads requires a synchronized dance between marketing automation and sales outreach.
Ask These Questions
- How can we simplify customer nurturing and retention efforts by enabling sales to automate campaigns?
- What important touchpoints can improve conversion ratios and increase pipeline velocity?
- How can we increase sales proximity to dormant and dead customers by opening relevant conversations?
A Final Word of Caution
Don't Miss the Main Task
While answering these questions is a great way to frame your delivery efforts, this critically misses out on the main task at hand: coming up with the message.
Your story and punchline is the secret sauce to winning influence once you have found your audience. Never forget that.
Hope this helps with your planning. Always happy to discuss these imperatives in more detail.
Need help prioritizing your marketing strategy?
Our audit framework can help you identify exactly which of these imperatives needs your immediate attention.