Marketing Strategy – Calendar Year or Financial Year?

When it comes to putting together a marketing strategy and plan for your business, it is crucial to consider the timing of when you will be doing your planning. 

Should you plan and assemble your marketing strategy around the new calendar year or the new financial year? Although each has pros and cons, I outline why financial year planning may be the best path in this piece. 

Alignment

As a marketing professional, marketing should be one of the key business decisions and not just a side note. For this reason, marketing planning should align with the timing of other critical business decisions (e.g. budget planning). It also allows you to align marketing tactics and activities directly to strategic decisions being made within the business.

Putting together your strategy at this time also allows you to have input on other budgets that will affect your decisions—for example, headcount, technology and software. 

Reporting

Similarly, if your new year of marketing starts in line with your financial year, reporting and, therefore, decision-making based on data, will be better. Your monthly marketing reports can fit into other reports you are already looking at across the business. 

Mid-Year Optimisation

In Australia, the Christmas break is an excellent time to reset. By doing your overall strategy at the start of the year and breaking down your activity plans into quarterly plans, you can review how you are tracking six months in and pivot if required. 

Conclusion

Aligning your marketing strategy with the financial year has several advantages. Firstly, you create alignment between marketing and other business functions, which enables more informed decision-making. Furthermore, this alignment allows you to review marketing reports simultaneously with other reports within the business, allowing an overall view of the business and unlocking data-based decision-making. 

Ongoing optimisation is the key to marketing success; by planning around financial years, you can take advantage of the mid-year reset you see around Christmas and new year. 

Ultimately, your industry may impact what timing you choose. However, with the above in mind, positioning your marketing strategy alongside other business strategic decisions will put you in a better place to achieve your core objectives for the year.