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Oct 26, 2022 BY A Mighty Citizen UX Design & Content, Marketing

How to Use The Mighty GPS to Plan Your Marketing Next Year

Mighty Insights

Insights, delivered.

It’s nearing the end of the year!

We’re not quite sure who makes the call on the official start of “planning season.” The arrival of Q4 feels like a natural indication—but if there is nothing else, we’re here to declare that NOW is the time to plan for next year!

You may know exactly where to start on your annual planning (like clockwork!). Or, you may be dreading the thought with no idea which direction to start moving. At any rate, we invite you to approach your planning a little differently this year. It’s easy to focus on everything you want to do. If you can name it, you can put it on a timeline and build a plan to do it. More organizations could benefit, though, from a better understanding of what they are doing right now.

Consider this question: How are you measuring the results of your marketing right now?

And a chaser: If you’re not measuring your current marketing efforts, how are you planning on measuring any new initiatives?

Your planning shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. If you don’t know what is (and isn’t) working for you right now, you’ll only be positioned to keep spinning the wheel, guessing what might work for your organization. It can also be hard to tell what is working for you without a way to quantify it.

So, what’s the best way to picture and analyze your current marketing efforts? We had the same question. Two years later, a solution: The Mighty GPS™ Assessment.

The Mighty GPS Assessment

The Mighty GPS is a 10-minute self-assessment for measuring your organization’s marketing maturity. We’ve spent years brainstorming, crafting, testing, re-testing, and refining this free tool. The survey questions are spread across six categories. When combined, these categories account for every element of organizational communication and marketing:

  1. Research & Analytics

  2. Branding & Strategy

  3. Marketing & SEO

  4. UX Design & Content

  5. Technology

  6. Team Dynamics

example bar graph of GPS scores across six key categories
Example bar graph outlining assessment scores across the six key categories.

With all six category scores combined, you’ll receive a final “score” and “stage” for your organization’s marketing maturity. You’ll also immediately receive a custom report with the next steps for each category that you can use as a roadmap to improve your marketing maturity.

Using Your Custom Report for Annual Planning

The Mighty GPS custom report is your organization’s guide for getting from where you are to where you want to be. It’s full of helpful, valuable resources that you can immediately leverage to improve your marketing effectiveness based on your overall score and marketing maturity stage.

You can take a few steps with your custom report:

1. Identify Areas for Improvement

Your custom report can be the foundation of your annual planning. You have all the information you need at your fingertips along with an understanding of exactly where (and how!) you can improve. Knowing your weakest areas will be your biggest strength in planning.

Now, it’s up to you to ask the deeper questions:

Should you emphasize those areas?

What resources are needed?

What is the cost of not doing so?

Keep in mind that your needs may not always require money—it just depends on what needs to get done.

2. Put Your Plan Into Action

Your custom Mighty GPS report is chock full of ideas so if you’re finding it hard to know where to start, we developed the Mighty GPS Get Started Planner to get you going. Our planner offers an action plan to help you workshop your lowest-scoring categories. There’s no better time to put it to use than during annual planning!

Using the Get Started Planner, you’ll have a place to document overall goals as well as activities and tactics that help you tackle those goals. It asks a series of questions to help you think through what’s next and includes an example to help you understand how to complete it.

Below, you’ll see how the Get Started Planner can help you identify your top goal, the activities you’ll need to take to reach that goal, how you’ll measure those activities, the tactics needed to achieve your activities, the timeline, how you’ll put the activity into action, and the budget.

Example section from the Get Started Planner
Example section from the Get Started Planner

Download the Get Started Planner:

3. Set Metrics

The biggest favor you can do for yourself in planning is to identify every single metric you want to track next year. Get granular with it! If you’ve workshopped using the Get Started Planner, you already have a running list of most to all of the metrics for each activity that you want to track.

We recommend keeping tabs on:

  • What you’ll track

  • The activity/goal it supports

  • Who is responsible

  • Where to find the data

4. Check Your Results

With a quantified score for each key category, you can see after six months or one year’s time just how much you’ve moved the needle due to your efforts by taking The Mighty GPS again.

The Mighty GPS should be an ongoing resource for your organization as you make changes today, a year from now, or five years from now. You can revisit The Mighty GPS multiple times (bookmark it!) to see how your marketing maturity has evolved and share these results with leadership. This time next year, you’ll have an even better foundation for your annual planning!

5. Benchmark Your Efforts Against Your Peers

Download the Marketing Benchmarks for Mission-Driven Organizations report to view marketing benchmarks and see how your efforts compare to your peers after taking The Mighty GPS. It showcases how well mission-driven organizations currently perform with their marketing and provides recommendations and best practices to improve. Where does your marketing shine compared to organizations like yours? Where do you need improvement? This is a great tool to use as a benchmark as you track your progress:

Want to Learn More About Marketing Maturity?

There’s so much to know! We’ve got a full suite of resources to help you better understand what marketing maturity is and how it can serve your organization.

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