Marketing planning is becoming increasingly challenging. The marketing team has to be short on time for marketing campaigns, marketing promotions or media campaigns and not infrequently has to plan this across different teams and team members to launch a successful omnichannel campaign. The biggest pain point for many marketing teams is the lack of oversight that arises because the various schedules are no longer aligned in Excel. The bigger the team, the more Excels, the greater the lack of overview among those responsible for planning campaigns and campaigns. While each individual marketer may feel comfortable in his or her Excel, media planners, campaign planners, marketing managers or marketing directors struggle with the planning overview. The result? Lost time, misunderstandings and mistakes when launching campaigns.
The solution is to merge all Excel schedules. In doing so, we have to reconcile 2 worlds. The individual marketer likes to keep the simplicity and insight into his or her planning, while those responsible at a higher planning level need the overview of all planning. In this article I describe – using 7 concrete examples – how to combine the simplicity of Excel with the flexibility and overview of a specialised marketing planning tool.
In this article, you will learn:
There you are: with separate Excels for each form of marketing within your team. Event planning? A separate Excel with a specific format. Content planning? A separate Excel with a specific format. Advertising planning? You guessed it ... Your first thought might be: let's combine all the planning in one Excel document. Quite feasible for a small team of say 2-3 marketers, but totally impractical for a team with dozens of marketers working within separate, specialised teams.
Your second thought might then be: let's move to digital planning tools we know for project and task planning, such as Trello, Asana, Monday, Jira, ... A logical thought, but quasi-unfeasible because those project management tools are built entirely around collaborating for projects and tasks within teams, not for mapping marketing, media or campaign planning. You end up in a task logic in these tools, not a planning logic. If you start your translation of Excels in these tools, your colleagues will no longer recognise 'their' Excel. Result: they turn their backs on the new tool and continue working in familiar Excel.
The third solution is to use a dedicated marketing planning tool such as Husky, which combines the simplicity and setup of Excel with the power of digital planning tools. In the example below, you can see the setup of a content schedule translated from Excel to Husky:
This looks very much like the setup of a schedule in Excel, doesn't it? The content team perfectly recognises in this the way it used to manage its content planning in Excel. But be sure to read on, because a digital tool has additional strengths.
"And where is our campaign planning," I hear campaign planners ask. Well: at the top left of the navigation, you can surf from one planning to another. If you click on 'Campaigns', campaign planning opens following the same logic, but with a different setup in terms of projects and channels, tailored to the campaign team.
This is a perfect example of how we within Husky translate a multitude of Excel schedules into Husky, with each schedule (old Excel) coming into a separate digital environment, where you quickly surf from one schedule to another.
Sure, you can. This saves you a lot of time manually transferring the data from Excel to Husky, especially if you have an extensive schedule. You then need to import the Excel into Husky in a structured form.
Sure. That's the second advantage of a specialist marketing planner like Husky. You're not squeezed into a canvas, you can completely determine your project structure and the construction of channels and moments.
Below, I have visualised 3 key words within a marketing planning context:
In the first examples shown, you can see that the structure in terms of projects and channels within the 'Content' plan and the 'Campaigns' plan are not the same. That's fine, then each team can keep its own layout as before and further optimise.
At the top right, I have outlined some functions within Husky:
One feature that exists in Excel is the use of filters, but it is quasi unusable to use within a marketing planning context. Within that, you want to filter as follows:
In the above example, I set a filter for:
This is the result:
Great right? This is a way of filtering that is unfeasible in Excel, especially when you put filters that are applied in different schedules. Filtering marketing and communication planning is a special added value within Husky, a feature that gives you a lot of overview and time.
From now on, we will dive into features within Husky that are not possible with an Excel schedule, but which make your life as a marketer easier. One is adding dates to moments in the schedule. Imagine wanting to attach a briefing to a coloured block in an Excel schedule. Not impossible, but anything but practical. Not so in Husky. When you click on a moment, a side window opens up where you can assign numerous dates to a moment.
In this example, I have put a summary briefing for a Valentine's campaign. That briefing can be as comprehensive as possible and is visible to any colleague who has access to the schedule and clicks on the moment.
Another example of data belonging to planning is linking files to planning. Are you planning a social media post? Then it is useful to attach the image of the post or a screenshot of the posted post to the schedule. Are you launching an online ad campaign? Then it's handy to attach the images of the online ads to the schedule. Are you sending out an e-news? Then you can attach a preview of it to the schedule. That way, you have a great link between the planning and the visuals of the communication moments from the planning.
Linking files in Husky can be done in 2 ways:
Husky has a thorough integration with Microsoft365. Making files stored on the server visible in the schedule is a useful example.
Years ago, we conducted a market survey on the biggest stumbling blocks marketers have when doing their jobs. In first place then was 'No overview of planning due to an overload of Excel files'. In second place was 'A lot of wasted time due to the mass of emails and chats within the team'. Do you also recognise the latter? Well: communication via e-mail or chat is good, but the problem is that in practice there is no link to planning at all. You get a question via chat about an e-news? Then you have to look at the schedule or within the e-mail programme first and then return to the chat to give the answer. Do you get an e-mail (often with one or more people in cc.) about an item within the schedule? Then you risk starting up a chain of communication that requires the schedule to be attached.
The solution within Husky? An integrated chat where each item within Husky can contain a chat history, meaning that the chat communication hangs on the relevant item in the schedule. In the example below, you can see chat communication between myself and my colleague Carine about a website banner for the valentine campaign. We didn't need to send e-mails with files in cc. but had enough with a short chat hanging on the campaign in Husky.
Advantages of this way of communicating:
So far, have you discovered many marketing planning extras compared to marketing planning in Excel? Fine so far. But there's even more! As stated in the beginning of this article: Excel mainly contains communication planning, while general project management tools like Trello, Asana, Monday or Jira are mainly task-oriented. Quite a few marketing teams choke on this combination, failing to combine the world of communication planning with the world of task planning. The result? Those who start up with Trello, Asana, Monday or Jira have a solution for task planning and for communication within the team. But for marketing, communication, media or campaign planning, there is no solution and they resort to ... Excel. ☹️
A shame, because an integration between task planning and communication planning only makes marketing planning complete. Well, Husky seamlessly unites both worlds. In the screenshot above, take a look at the top navigation. You sit Husky's 4 modules neatly lined up:
I definitely want to avoid describing all task features in this article, because there are quite a few. What I would like to do is show the link between planning and tasks. I will therefore build on the Valentine's campaign we used above as an example. Within that, we already have a good view of the campaign's duration, campaign briefing, campaign files and team discussions on this campaign. The capstone of optimal marketing planning is having visibility of all the to-do's within this campaign.
In the example above, we click back on the Valentine campaign and the side window opens. In it, you will see a 'Tasks' tab at the top where you can assign tasks within the campaign to yourself or to one or more colleagues. Each task gets an owner, a description (here, simply task 1, task 2 and task 3) as well as a deadline. This is the date by which the task must be finished.
At the bottom right, you can see the Add task list' function. This is a great feature within Husky, because within marketing there are a lot of recurring task lists for e.g. writing a blog, sending e-news, participating in a trade show, ... and so on. It would be a waste to have to set up those tasks in Husky every time. No, it can be done faster by creating predefined task lists that can be set up as a kind of retro planning. Task 1 is then, for example, 10 days before the blog is published, task 2 is 8 days before publication and task 6 is 2 days after the blog is published. Each time a blog article is scheduled in the communication planning, a predefined task list can be activated with one push, giving all marketers involved within the team 'their' tasks.
You'll find a list of those tasks under the 'Tasks' tab, sorted by deadline date. Again, the side window function exists, so clicking on a task means you can add briefings, files and chat communications.
Perhaps we the most unique task feature in Husky is scheduling a task in your calendar. Thanks to integration with Microsoft Outlook, your appointments appear in the Husky calendar and you can schedule tasks (such as Task 1) in your calendar (in this example, on Thursday 8 February between 9am and 10am. The deadline for this task is 12 February, you can complete it in one or several times, keeping your workload perfectly organised. Oh, when you look at your calendar in Outlook, you will see an identical screen with appointments and tasks. Great right?
'Give me an overview of all the campaigns you will be planning in the next quarter' or 'I want a briefing of all the content we have planned for product X this year'. Do these questions from management sound familiar. Not infrequently, some panic then sets in. Logical, if you have to collect all this info in various Excel files and then present it clearly (perhaps in a Powerpoint) to your management.
Because that data is in Husky, you no longer have to do such time-consuming reporting. Husky has 2 techniques to do the reporting to your management quickly and professionally.
Would you like to translate the fragmentation of marketing planning within Excel into a clear and dynamic marketing planning tool? Book a demo and free trial of Husky Marketing Planner today. You can get started quickly with importing Excel data, assigning marketers to the various marketing plans and you will now manage the marketing planning within a dynamic environment that saves you time and overview.
The recommended way to discover Husky quickly and professionally.
Demo by a marketer with experience in marketing planning. After the demo we will customize Husky for your trial period.
Ideal to get started with your marketing planning after a demo.
The previous demo is not mandatory, but it is recommended.
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