It’s planning season for marketing and communications teams. Again.
The fundamentals haven’t changed much: clear goals, well-defined audiences, finance-friendly budgets, and meaningful KPIs. What is changing is how quickly plans need to be built and then evolve, as well as the tools we can use to create and pressure-test them.
Here are four questions I keep coming back to:
1. Is our budget breakdown driving the right impact?
This has always been a tricky question because not everything we do ties directly to the sales funnel.
Organic and paid social, for instance, can track which clicks result in lead capture. But a PR campaign might have influenced those clicks in the first place, and that influence isn’t always easy to measure.
The key is making sure we’re not confusing impact with noise. Too many of the wrong leads can get in the way of winning the right ones. Look at each line item individually and ask whether it’s delivering the value we need, even if that value doesn’t fit neatly into an attribution report.
2. Is our AEO strategy working? Are we falling behind competitors?
Measuring answer engine optimization (AEO) is getting easier as tools improve, but there are still plenty of quirks. The media outlets most frequently cited by AI can change, Reddit remains a bit of the Wild West, and the prompts people use to find information naturally evolve over time.
Prompts are still one of the best places to start when evaluating how you’re doing against competitors. Track relevant prompts, ideally quarterly, and pay attention to whether the prompts themselves are changing.
A decline in visibility for certain prompts might be a competitive problem, or it might signal that your prospects are asking different questions. We spend a lot of time worrying about whether AI is recommending our companies, but understanding what buyers are asking AI in the first place can be just as valuable.
3. Outside of core lead drivers like events and Gartner Magic Quadrants, what else should we be doing to reach our ICPs?
Knowing where to engage prospects and customers can feel like a guessing game, and we’re all susceptible to recency bias based on whatever seemed to work best yesterday.
Events are a good example. They can be major lead drivers, but they also consume a big chunk of marketing budgets. So beyond asking whether you’re getting the right leads, ask whether you’re doing everything to optimize your investment.
The same thinking applies across the marketing mix. Could your social media strategy benefit from a one-time influencer marketing push? Could a successful PR campaign create opportunities for more targeted customer engagement?
We all love net-new ideas, but sometimes the biggest opportunity is getting more value from what we’re already doing.
4. Where can we use AI to streamline processes and generate better results?
Every company is looking to AI for a productivity edge. For marketers, the challenge is keeping the slop index at an acceptable level.
Marketing and PR pros pride themselves on creativity, and in my opinion, that’s still where AI falls short. A lot of what it produces is mildly interesting at best, recycling ideas we’ve all seen before.
But there’s plenty that AI can do well, from polishing content and creating compelling slides to crunching budgets and even ordering the coffee that gets us through the planning season.
Rather than asking where we can use AI, I think the better question is: What do we want to do more of next year, and can AI help us get there?
Maybe owned content is performing well, and you’ve been thinking about launching a LinkedIn newsletter. Can AI help you pull that off without adding resources?
Don’t fall for the AI overload trap. Start with what’s working and figure out where AI can help you do more of it.
A few GPTs worth experimenting with
I’ve also been testing a few public GPTs to see how useful they might be for building marketing and communications plans. To be clear, I haven’t uploaded real company information or budgets. I was mostly interested in how they worked, what questions they asked, and whether they could offer anything beyond the obvious.
I was pleasantly surprised, although I’m still cautiously optimistic. And with GPTs migrating to plugins on December 11, it’s worth double-checking that any favorites you find will still be available.
- Presentation Maker Slides PPT Generator: This GPT starts by asking four basic questions about goals, audiences, and budgets, then provides slide-by-slide language and design suggestions along with options for building the presentation itself. It’s not a replacement for strategic thinking. Instead, spend less time building slides and more time thinking about what goes on them.
- Advisory CMO | Chief Marketing Officer: This was one of the more interesting GPTs I tested because it actually pushed back on some of my ideas rather than just agreeing with all of them. It asked follow-up questions, suggested areas to explore, and was particularly useful for pressure-testing budgets. It could examine spending patterns at similar companies, drill down into event budgets based on lead expectations, and consider whether hiring or outsourcing might make more sense.
- Marketing AI GPT: I used this primarily as a thought partner to sanity-check strategies. Rather than immediately recommending one approach, it presented options and the reasoning behind them. It also offers calculator-style exercises for exploring budgets, pipeline targets, and historical win rates. Like most AI tools, it gets more useful as you give it more context, which makes knowing what information to provide almost as important as knowing what questions to ask.
Making planning a little less painful
The marketing planning season can be a slog, and these tools offer interesting ways to work through the questions many of us are facing.
But I’m increasingly interested in using AI for more than just building the annual plan. Markets change, customer needs evolve, and even product offerings can look different a few months after the slides are finalized. The bigger opportunity may be using AI throughout the year to challenge our assumptions, revisit decisions, and adjust the plan as things change.
After all, the best marketing plan is the one that still makes sense a few months after we’ve presented the slides.
