Build Your 2026 Marketing Plan and Win Budget with AI

Are you feeling anxious about your Q4 marketing strategy? Pause! Let’s break away from the ordinary and find some joy!

In this webinar, I’ll guide you on how to create a practical marketing plan for 2026 by harnessing the potential of AI.

It’s not about allowing AI to take control; it’s about becoming more intelligent and sophisticated in your approach to using it. You’ll discover my 3-Act Storytelling Structure to craft a presentation that instantly captivates executives.

We’ll examine each slide, and I’ll provide my exact prompts for leveraging AI to quickly validate your buyer personas and construct a solid campaign timeline.

Stop spending time on generic strategies. Find out how to strategically blend your human insights with AI’s capabilities to create a plan that is coherent, logical, and guaranteed to secure budget approval. Watch now to uncover the specific AI prompts that will transform your planning process!

Guest & Host Info

Host: Amy Gabriel

Guest: Pam Didner

Find out more about working with Pam HERE.

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Other publications: 

• Pam Didner Blog
• Pam Didner YouTube
• Pam Didner Books

Check out:

Interested in learning more about Pam’s AI Training, including her exclusive AI Copilot Training for enterprises? Feel free to schedule a complimentary call.

Transcript

Amy Gabriel: Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s session,  building an actionable marketing plan with AI with Pam Didner. We’re excited to have you join us today. I’m Amy Gabriel, demand gen manager with ZoomInfo. I’ll be your moderator for today. We’ll be kicking things off shortly.

First, just need to do some housekeeping. First, technical issues. They happen. So, if you are experiencing any technical issues with viewing, just try refreshing. This is a web-based platform. Otherwise, you can use the Q&A feature on the right side of your screen, and I’ll do my best to help resolve that for you. In the Q&A, please feel free to ask us any questions you might have. You can submit these questions as they come up, and we’ll try to get to as many as we can. Again, just submit the question using the Q&A feature on the right side of the screen. And I’d also like to note that there’s an upvote feature.

So if you see a question asked that you’d like answered, by all means, above that record this session will be recorded.

You will receive an email with a link to the recording within 48 hours after we conclude. So keep an eye out for that. And finally,  our safe harbor statement. Zoom Info is a publicly traded company. This presentation may contain forward-looking statements. Any buying decisions you make should be made based only upon currently available products and offerings. So, without further ado, I’m gonna pass this over to Pit. All right.

Pam Didner: Thank you so much, Amy. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Okay. Amy, can you hear me? Excellent. And just want everybody to know, ask me any questions while I’m presenting. And I have about 60 minutes. What I want to do is actually go through the presentation and then answer your question at the same time. So Amy, if you can watch out for the question in the chat and also in the Q&A and then feel free to interrupt me anytime and if there are way too many questions, I may stop you and then say, “Hey, you know what? Reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I will address your question personally.” Okay. All right. Let’s get going.

I know now it’s a Q4. A lot of you are probably working on a marketing plan, and a lot of you are also using AI at the same time.

So what I want to do is share with everybody in terms of what you have in mind in terms of the marketing plan, especially in Q4. But if you have attended my session in the past, my session is very casual. Okay, this is very casual. Our job is to find joy. It’s having a little fun. So relax. Seriously, let’s not get too serious. It’s only marketing.

The way that I usually structure my session is that I would like you to think with me.

That means I will share a lot of my thinking approach with you. If you are working on a plan right now or your

The team is working on the plan. I would like you to sit back, kind of like what I’m doing, and think about what I said. Some of them may apply to you, and some don’t. So you can listen to what I said, and you can disagree with me. Please do disagree with me. All right? Because that means you are thinking. Really, from my perspective, the only way I know to find joy in a business setting is to find new ways of doing old things, because our job can be pretty mundane sometimes. And the way to actually add a little excitement and spice into it, it’s like, oh my god, I can do that differently. Oh, how interesting. In a business setting, that’s how, at least, I find joy. I hope that will happen to you as well.

So with that being said, today is really like how can we create our marketing strategy and marketing plan with the power of AI. So I want to touch on two topics.  One is how to create a marketing plan. The other one is what AI can do for you. So these are two. All right. And the way that I would like to address that is really – I’d like to frame a question for my session like this, which is a specific question I would like to answer throughout the whole presentation.

And the question I would like to address is how to boost your marketing strategy with the power of AI, specifically, how we can improve our marketing plan by using AI while maintaining a human touch. That’s the key, right? AI can do a lot of stuff for us, but we don’t want to sound like a robot. Okay,  that’s not going to work.

So, think about how we can do that. Before I dive into the details, there’s one specific question I want everybody to be on the same page on: what do your executives want to know? Okay, because obviously, we create a marketing plan, a lot of time is spent trying to get approval for the budget or trying to brief our team. Most importantly, we want to showcase to our management our recommendations for 2026. A lot of the time, what they want to do is what they want to know: what have you done so far? How successful or unsuccessful were you in terms of your efforts, and also what do you want to do next? How and when?

What do you want them to see or what you want them to know is the same. What have I done so far? How successful or unsuccessful were my marketing efforts in relation to the business goals?

What am I planning to do next? How and when. So if you think about it, what they want to see and what you want them to know are exactly the same.  However, the attention is on the detail. Okay, at a high level, that’s to make sure we are all on the same page. So, the key is you just need to structure your marketing plan in a very logical and coherent way. Structure in a way that provides a sense of clarity.

That’s what you need to do. That’s it. You’re like, “Yeah, that’s pretty simple, but why do all of us struggle with that?” So I’m going to break that down and also take AI into account in terms of what we can do for that. From my perspective, I’d like to focus on thinking about how you should approach creating a marketing plan. There are two ways now with AI on board, right? Number one is AI takes the lead, and you edit it.

The other one is you take the lead, and AI assists.

So I want to talk about these two approaches. There is no right or wrong way of doing it; at the end of the day, it is what gives you the outcome that you need. Does that make sense? I have my own preference. I will share that with you. But I want to share this with you so you can somehow explore.  Some of you might like to explore having AI take the lead and see what the outcome is. Okay.  So let’s talk about option number one, the AI let flow. And this is a prompt. Okay. And this is not like the most sophisticated prompt.

This basically says Hey, develop a six-month actionable marketing plan for say bamboo health, a company which offers clinical and behavioral health solutions, including a smart signals network, that is their product, right to the clinicians and the pharmacists in the retail pharmacies and hospitals. So you kind of give a little bit of an intro about what your company is about and what you offer, right? And then you said you want to create a plan that includes the following objectives, KPI, audience segmentations, campaign plan for six months, channel strategy, what other channels you use, dial up and dial down, monthly content, editorial calendar, the budget allocation, and then a mix of strategic insight and technical action for each phase.

So this is just giving AI a little bit more guidance in terms of what your plan should be.

You can also try to create a six-month actionable marketing plan for this company and then scan this website.

You can write as simply as that by scanning your own website, and you can also test it and see if AI can come up with some interesting marketing plans to share with you. Right? So for this right here objective and measurement they created a table right they created the five different objectives demand generation qualify lease thought leadership very typical strategic focus they made that very clear is it drive the brain awareness or is it the demand generation or thought leadership the KPI in terms of a different objective have different way of measuring it the target I did not I don’t know how they come up with the KPI but somehow they did. Okay, I did not upload any files. So, from your perspective, you should take that with a grain of salt.

Measurement tool, Zoominfo, HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever tools that are similar to that. You may not use similar tools, but you should look into what your sales are, what your CIM tool is, what your marketing automation tools are and what your analytics tools are. Is that helpful?

So they give you some information, and they also have audience segmentation bias persona right they are not they are kind of not bad hospital and health health system executives the role the pinpoint the motivation the channels where they go to they are very very concise and get to the point of course you can also tell them to give you more information right six to Three.

Number three is a six-month campaign plan. They actually write down from month one to month six what you need to do and give you a theme, strategic focus and also tactical action. All right. Then they give the very details in terms of the channel strategy SEO, what do you need to do on social media, they actually say LinkedIn first. That’s pretty good.

They pick this up more like a B2B type of play.

PBC if you do a pay media email marketing nurture automation they give a very specific campaigns partnership how do you work through the ecosystem and then the editorial calendar right from month January to June what are the themes what are the key assets and even recommending the frequency of assets the content mixed the channel ROI and how do you track the ROI and the phases like phase one, phase two, phase three and it breaks down into six months. Each phase is about two months and includes key deliverables. All right, that’s not bad, right? What is missing, given that we only have a short period of time, which is actually pretty solid.

If you’re just asking for an actionable marketing plan, they are giving you a lot of information in terms of what you need to do, but they don’t have a lot of past data, even though they give you metrics. So you have to take that with a grain of salt. The things that were missing are a lack of past data, a lack of context and a lack of storytelling. But how do you actually formulate and articulate that? There are specific examples from my perspective that are missing. What are the executive priorities, and what are some of the past campaign results that we can take into account as lessons learned? What are some of the highlights and lowlights that we should inform our management about?

Also, the marketing’s impact on sales.

Even though the KPI is actually very sales-oriented, they are definitely taken down to the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, but we need to make that even clearer. And there’s no sales enablement effort in the competitive landscape. That’s because I did not give them the very specific instruction.

Maybe there’s other relevant information that’s unique to your company’s marketing effort that was not included as part of that prompt. So what you can do is you know writing is rewriting, prompting is reprompting.  So if you want to do an AI-led marketing plan, what you need to do is add a whole lot more information to it to actually help you. First of all, you started with your role.

You know, hey AI, you are creating a marketing plan for a specific company, wherever you are, and what does the company do, and your role as AI is a CMO or director of marketing with expertise in a specific field. What are the specific fields that you have? So you give AI additional wings, and the current marketing challenges are. Let’s talk about what our challenges are. Okay, be very transparent about it. You know what, we have not met our lead target, or our content needs improvement, whatever that is right, then you upload specific files, and for each file, you need to give specific guidance on how to analyze it.

Sometimes you have to give the necessary guidance on how to do the analysis.

But you can also try not to do that and see if they can do the analysis on their own. Right? You have to define an objective AI-generated marketing plan. What are a couple of objectives you want to accomplish? Made that very clear because from my perspective even though you let AI take the lead on this but you still need to have a vision in terms of what you want to accomplish for your marketing plan.

And you have to give that guidance to AI you can basically say hey eventually I’m going to create a PowerPoint so can you give me a recommended slide sequence and AI I want you to think give me two versions two variants and choose the version that’s most likely to achieve whatever objectives I identify right here and address my marketing challenges. So you are challenging AI to give you two different versions and also ask for a voice recommendation on which one is better.

This is what I learned this week when I went to marketing props working with Chris Penn and he always if some something that’s very sophisticated and he will end it take your time AI take your time I love that I thought that’s so cool so you can end it take your time to do analysis all right so try and see if that you get your results so that is what I want to share with you in terms of if you want AI to take the lead or you want AI  to give you additional insight, this is one way of doing it. You are continuously reprompting and optimizing it. That makes sense.

Amy, does anybody have any specific questions so far?

Amy Gabriel: Yes, Pam, there’s one question for you right now.

Tracy had just asked, “Isn’t there some risk of uploading your own company docs and then those being aggregated and used in the future by AI?” If we have the paid version, can that be prevented or other ways to prevent the info from becoming public domain?

Pam Didner: That’s a great question. I love that. In general, you know, for any kind of company information and files, I will not try on ChatGPT. I won’t. So if your company have issued some sort of legal guidance or the AI policies, you should follow that directly.  Many of the companies actually will say this is the tool that you can use. A lot of enterprises will say you can only use Copilot. Okay, if that’s the case, a lot of that information is inside the firewall. And some company also have their own LLM chatbot. You can use that as well. But a lot of time when

I talk to different marketing managers and they say usually they are not getting the very ideal version responses and I totally understand that’s assume your company in the worst case scenario does not have AI policy does not have any guidance and you are very concerned about that um the the AOM or any other companies will be using your tools or share some of your confidential information with others. What I would do is actually not use some of the confidential information, or use something called look like. Is it possible that the information you uploaded is a little bit more generic? That’s number one.

Or you don’t include any kind of product road map information, or you basically shield any kind of revenue information, and you say a percentage. So you need to think through when you are uploading the information, what kind of information you are uploading, and who may be using it, then you need to be cautious about it. Does that make sense? Or you take a second approach, you take the lead, and you don’t have AI doing all the analysis, which is the second approach that I will talk about. Tracy, is that helpful? I think it’s a long-winded answer, but I hope that addresses your question. Is that good? Okay, any other questions?

Amy Gabriel: Yes, there’s one more. April says, “I still haven’t found an AI tool that makes good slides or a marketing plan template I love. Do you have any recommendations?”

Pam Didner: No, I don’t. That’s a short answer. I am also searching. I’m still looking. And the problem is, I use Copilot. Many enterprises I talked to said that the only go-to tool that they can use is Copilot, and I was using Copilot to do the PowerPoint slides. Not that great. And when I try to use ChatGPT to do a PowerPoint slide, I have to give very specific instructions. Even with that, the outcome is still not that good. And by the time I spend, you know, that amount of hours giving AI the specific instruction, you know what? I might as well just do it myself.

Would you agree? So, what I did right now is it’s more like a slide-by-slide improvement enhancement. So even if I actually have a solid outline, and when I’m still doing that myself, and I’m looking for slide-by-slide enhancement, that’s what I’m doing. But if any one of you actually has a better idea for any tools that we all should try, please put it in the chat. I would love to know. I would okay but like I said I try many I try different tools and it’s suboptimal and I think we will get there one day but not at this minute unfortunately but that’s a great question I mean holy grail is my god if AI can create power points for us just the way we want it no I am okay so Stephanie were talking about Notebook LLM.

So that’s actually from Google. If you have a paid version of it, you can actually upload like 300 files, I think, or more, to really learn about your website, learn about yourself. And you can also use notebook LLM to repurpose a lot of content. Stephanie, would you agree? Just enter a chat. But I don’t know about creating pre-PowerPoint presentations. But if you have a very good success, please also enter that in terms of you’ve been using a notebook and have a huge amount and have a high level of success.  Share that with us.

But I know exactly what you’re talking about. And I would suggest that if you are proficient in using ChatGPT or any kind of chatbot, you should actually test Notebook LLM, and in terms of how in-depth they can go into detail to do analysis for you, but again, be incredibly careful about the files that you upload. Okay, very good, Stephanie, thank you so much. You say I have used this for my speaking presentation at several events. Good for you, girl. Good for you.

What about can you also say about images, like can you share just one or two prompts with everybody, Stephanie, just one or two prompts, like the prompt that you are using in order to create, somehow, a fairly decent speaking presentation. If you have one or two, that would be great. Hopefully it’s not too long. If you can search and then just add it, that’ll be awesome. Okay. Yes, Stephanie, reach out to me. Connect with me on LinkedIn. My god, I love your answer. I’ll send you an Amazon gift card.

All right, I have to keep going. Everybody good? All right, so far. Okay, the next one I want to talk about is option two.

Obviously, you are taking the lead, and AI assist is right. So, in this specific approach, we humans take the lead, and the way I want to structure the talk, or the way that you look at the presentation, is that you need to use storytelling. You’re like Oh my god, do you really have to say that? Okay, that’s why that’s dated. Okay, don’t talk to me about storytelling.
Well, I only want to mention storytelling in one structure.

So remember, whenever we were in high school, we read any kind of play, they tend to have Act one, Act two, and Act three, like Shakespeare’s plays. And in general, movies follow a three-act storytelling structure. Act one, act two, act three. Act one is opening, Act two is the middle, and Act three is the end. So when you are doing a marketing plan, you need to think about what your opening is, what your middle is, and how you are going to close it. Right? So that will actually minimize the stress of creating a marketing plan.

I’m not kidding, because before, like, oh my god, I need to create a plan with so many slides. But if you break it down to all right, I have an opening, I have a middle, I have an end, then you can put your slides in different buckets. Is that helpful? I know you cannot hear very well. I apologize. She’s good.

I sample contest. You me. Go ahead. Okay. Trivial Pursuit. What’s the name of the movie?

Eurovision. Yes. Okay. Jay, love you. Love you. Eurovision. April.
Yes. Who doesn’t love Will Pharaoh and Rachel McAdams? Honestly.
So, that is the opening. The first 90 seconds of the movie, that’s it. But if you watch

If you watch it carefully, the objective has been 100% defined. Will Pharaoh is going through a journey to win the Eurovision contest. Okay. But there is a subplot. You can
See, the dad kept saying, “Sit down. Sit down. What are you doing?” So the underlying The supply is the father, and the son’s relationship is not good.

Part of the middle Act two, in addition to his journey of winning the Eurovision contest, is going to be working on the father-son relationship, and there’s a little girl who shows up, you know, at the end of that 92nd opening.

There’s a love interest between that little girl and that little boy. So in the first 90 seconds, you know three things. This movie is about his journey of winning or losing a vision contest. You don’t know he’s going to win or lose. You just don’t know. Also, you don’t know he’s going to work on his father-son relationship.  You also know that they may fall in love or they may not. So that’s it. That’s the whole movie.  But the opening has been set up so clearly. Act two is going to be about these three story lines. That is it. That is what you need to do for your marketing plan.

Your opening needs to be so clear and to the point that you know what needs to be addressed in Act Two.

Did that make sense, everybody? I want to make sure you understand it. Your opening is so clear.
Remember, I talked about structuring your information in a logical and coherent manner. Provide a sense of clarity. The clarity comes from your opening. Your opening needs to be that clear.  Then you scope it. Pave the way for your Act Two.

That’s how you structure and how you approach your marketing plan. Then, of course, you’re going to have a great ending. Okay. Act one, act two, act three. So what do acts one, two, and three look like in the sense of a B2B marketing plan? The opening you should do 20 to 25 updates. 10 or two slides. Get to the point. How you perform, how you deliver in 2025. Then you have a two-pager talking about 2026, including success metrics. Once those are set, you use this as a starting point to pave the way for your Act Two.
Your Act Two basically is structured to follow your two-pager, and you incorporate all the key elements that you need to explain that two-pager.

And then you address additional concerns that management may have. Then you close it by reinforcing some of the key points or articulating what they need to do for you. That is the three-act structure storytelling in a marketing plan. You can also write this as an AI prompt. You know, upload the information as necessary and see what they come up with. But I want to do it, a human version of it. So, in Act One, you summarize your 2026 plan in one or two slides.

Set up what you want to tell and what they need to know in Act Two. Yeah. So in 2025, I know a lot of you will spend a lot of hours pulling the data together to show what you have done in 2025. My thought on this is you’re going to put about 40 hours into that. A lot of the time, we spent so much time pulling the data together that we showed them 20 slides. No one can summarize everything into the results that the management cares about the most. They may care about thought leadership, brand awareness, lead gen.

They care about revenue contribution, and how much money you spent. Okay. Showcase the actual versus the goal. Then you color-code it. If you met the goal, you put the background color green. If you didn’t meet the goal, you just say you looked at the yellow. The one you didn’t do, put it red. Be very transparent about it. Seriously, be transparent about it. Or you can do it this way. We have $72,000 in the budget. We increased the generated revenue by 5.5, and we impacted 30% of revenue, or we helped aid 34 opportunities, number-driven, get to the point, get to the point, get to the point, and then you can move on to your 2026 plan. Your 2026 plan should be like this.

What is the business goal that aligns with your business objectives? These two are your management care, right?

That’s to make sure they know that. You remind them of that, and you tie that to your marketing objectives and marketing strategies.  So you show them literally on one slide. Hey, this is your goal. This is what I’m going to do.  You show them it’s interlocked. Then you show them also who you are going to market to and how you are going to measure your success. Objective is what? Strategies are how. So let me show you very quickly right here. You can say you increase the revenue by 15% or you can say you increase the revenue to $500 million, not in 2025. Sorry, that’s a typo. Let’s assume it’s a physical year 2026.

You can also indicate what some of the industry segments that you want to go after are. Right? The business objective, obviously, you created this product. A lot of people like to say best-in-class.  Haha. All right. So that’s the product. You equip the audience with your product to do what? So they can have a better experience of what? So this is more like a template. Marketing objectives. I can tell you this marketing only has three objectives for everybody. Three. Number one, brand equity, aka thought leadership. Number two, customer acquisition retention, aka demand gen.  Number three, sales enablement aka sales enablement.

That’s it. That’s your marketing objectives. So, you obviously position your product as a go-to platform to certain buyers.

That’s a thought leadership play. You want to build awareness or drive demand.  That’s a demand gen customer acquisition, customer retention. You want to provide air cover for sales and sales enablement. That’s it. So if you have done your job right, your marketing objective should not, let me say that again, should not change very much from year to year. A lot of marketers need new marketing objectives. Do you? If you do your job right, you are optimizing.  Then your marketing objective stays very similar.

Okay? Three, then you can elaborate a whole lot more. Thought leadership, marketing strategies, how thought leadership, this is what I would do. Drive demand, this is what I would do. Sales enablement is what I will do. Two or three bullet points, right? Then these are the people I will market to. And my KPI rule of three is like Act one, Act two, Act three. Your KPI at this level should be the rule of three. Are you measuring MQLs, SQLs, and MQLs’ conversion? Are you measuring pipeline opportunities’ impact? Whatever higher level, higher level, not the number of content downloads, not the number of comments, likes, shares, higher level. The level that management cares about is your opening.

So when you talk about your opening, you also give a few specific details.

For example, if you want to talk about NQL, you can talk about it in terms of, Hey, based on my experience, or We’ve been doing a campaign, we notice there’s a positive correlation. More campaigns, more leads or more content, more traffic or more webinars, more SQL. So, you should have a point of view in terms of everything you do. Is there some sort of correlation with the outcome you are tracking? If there is, tell your management about that because you want more budget, right? You want more budget because you want to do more, and then you have a higher goal to achieve it and improve SQL’s conversion rate over MQL’s.

This is another thing you can tell your management in terms of what you will do. Hey, you are going to analyze the sales territorial data to identify the highest performing regions. Maybe the Southeast Asian regions. I’m getting too excited. Sorry. The Southeast regions are performing better than the Northeast. All right. Maybe you can use your ICP criteria in Zoom info to determine a number of highly qualified companies in those regions, and you can do vetted region-specific campaigns. While you’re doing that, you are increasing the probability of SQL. Does that make sense? So you talk a little bit about it in your opening.

What will you do? Set the stage for Act Two.

Your Act Two is a table of contents. You already set up a stage in Act One. Then, to substantiate your Act one in terms of the marketing strategies, which are the supporting documents that you need for Act two. You may be talking about competitive analysis, or need to have a buyer persona. You have a lot of products, but you cannot market all of them due to your finite marketing budget. So what is the product priority that people need to know? What is your campaign timeline? What is your editorial for content, and also your budget breakdown, that is your Act two?

So I just did a six-hour marketing planning session at the Marketing Profs B2B forum, and this is like a literal 45-minute version of it. I cannot go into each slide in detail. So I’m just going to share a couple of slides and also give you some ideas on how you can use AI to help you. Does that make sense? So I cannot go into every single one of them. I want to apologize in advance. So but now what you do is once you create table content you already have your Act two then you can look each session and then you can write the proper prompts to assist you.

Let’s use bias persona as example and this is CIO Charles.

This was created by human and you want to validate if this information needs to be updated or refreshed for plane 2026 what you can do is you can say create a buyer persona for the CIO for your product at your company. Name him Charles.  You include the demographics, personality traits, and summary. What about the day-to-day life?  Write short paragraphs, but not day-to-day in terms of they get up, you know, he gets up at 7 a.m. He exercises, and then he takes the coffee at Starbucks, and then he drives. No, no, no, not that. But you say day-to-day life.

Write three short paragraphs. Describe a typical set of responsibilities and activities as a CIO.

Explain how he might use your product in his role. That’s an important part. And then describe where he goes to source his channels to get information related to your products. Right? So I get down to very specific what I want to see in those three paragraphs. Goals and aspirations. Please provide four to five bullet points, challenges and pinpoint the same thing. So you can see when you give a very specific instruction like this, and this is what AI does. It follows your instruction paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three, goals and aspirations, and pinpoint. Yes, you know Stephanie is correct.

You can also use Notebook LLM to do that. If you uploaded your past buyer personas in that, and see what they come up with. Okay. So then you create the AI examples. You can use AI examples and the human examples, and you can do a comparison. Then this is another version, or a refreshed or revised version of your buyer’s persona, without working directly with the marketing research. Sometimes, the marketing research department may take longer than you anticipated to get the information to you, but this can be a placeholder. Is that helpful, everybody? So that’s one way of doing it.

The one specific slide I really want to talk about, given I only have 15 minutes, is the product launch and marketing outreach timeline. It’s very important.

You have one slide to show the 12-month rolling calendar. Any kind of campaign road map should be 12 12-month rolling calendar. Within these 12 months, what campaigns will you be doing? What are the company’s earnings reports for? When is the customer event? What major events will you go to? If you actually have a lot of events you’ll go to, break this down into two slides or even three slides. Okay?  And this can be a placeholder. When you start it, you don’t have the campaign complete in one timeline. No problem. Do a placeholder.
Show or highlight what you know. Then you go back and edit and update this slide on a regular basis.

You can also use the arrow to the right here to keep tracking it. For example, you’re going to do an update in March. Move this green arrow to March and then change everything before
March to a different color. Highlighted either it’s done, postponed, or not done. One slide. Okay? Or you can do several slides. That makes sense.

So for each product and campaign have you April you don’t depends if you if every single business unit or your product like for example your product is1 billion dollar product and you have a lot of events going on then you do it by product but you don’t have to do it by product I would focus on hero products does that make sense it focus on where your marketing money will be spent and that product pri ility will drive the campaign plan. Is that helpful, April?  That will be the high-level guidance. The next one, you can see this again, everything is interlocked.

So I created this slide. Next one. The next slide is where I’m going to explain a little bit more about the product aid launch, rolling thunder, from January 7 to February 28. So I created a slide to show January and February.

We’re going to do a post-launch report on March 15. And what are the channels I will dial up specifically for the product, a rolling thunder?  But again, this does not have to be complete in November or December, right? You do what you can, and when you have additional information, go back and add it, right? The other one is content. Again, I know that you were like, “Oh, we have hundreds of content pieces throughout the year.” I get it. But what is some of the content that will spend the majority of your marketing budget?  Follow the 8020 rule. Are you going to have five ebooks?

Each ebook is like $20,000. Are you doing some sort of customer survey? That’s going to cost you $100,000. Whatever. Focus on the key content pieces. Does that make sense? I understand a lot of you, or a lot like me, who write blog posts every two weeks. Do I have to edit here? Probably not. But there are one or two blog posts I consistently refresh and update on a regular basis. In that case, that probably needs to be added right here. So sometimes you have to make a judgment call. Okay, it’s a judgment call.  So, those are some examples for Act Two.

I cannot go into all the details, given that I only have 60 minutes with you. Act three is to make your closing count. Closing is you can have a summary slide, or you are asking for a decision, like when, how or how much you’re going to approve my budget. That’s a seeking decision. The outline’s help is needed. The decision or the budget has been approved, but I need certain departments’ help, but I’m not getting it, or I need certain people’s approval. I’m not getting it. So, help is needed. And then if you don’t have any of that, you can determine, okay, you know what everybody, thank you so much for allowing me to present this marketing plan. I just want to share with you for the next three months.

These are the five things we will be doing. That’s the next step.

So these are the two things I’m sharing with you guys in terms of when you are working on this next year’s plan. You have two approaches.  Either way, you are going to use AI to help you one way or another. Either doing analysis or kind of set up a stage for you if you want the AI to take the lead, or you take the lead. So I’m showing you what you can do.

AI first of all artificial intelligence let’s be honest most of the intelligence we’ve encountered in our life pretty artificial right AI began we had all we had was real intelligence beginning of mankind right yes didn’t work so we were dumb still dumb so yeah all our thinking so we kept thinking until we could create a fake version of it so dumb people would seem smart. Yeah. And then we thought, well, maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing, cuz what if the fake brain gets smarter than the real brain?

We would look even more dumb. So, if I got this right, yes, we’re smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid we can’t figure out if we did the right thing. We don’t know because the first and it’s unbelievable. That is true. The first AI I think we ever tried was Frankenstein, which didn’t work well at all. Why was he wearing a sports jacket?
Why dress? We’re terrorizing villagers. It’s not a wine taste. No one’s going to say, “I’m sorry, Mr Stein. This jacket always.” All right. I think that actually highlighted the paradox of AI or the dichotomy that we are experiencing. So Jerry actually has a statement. We are smart enough to invent artificial intelligence, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid we can figure out if we did the right thing. Right?

Actually, I want to challenge that from my perspective.

We are smart enough to invent artificial intelligence, sophisticated enough to use it. So wise, we can figure out if we did the right thing, and you are very experienced marketers. You know what you are doing. The key is that you need to have a point of view. The most important thing is that you need to have a point of view. When AI gives you a response, always remember that it is a recommendation.

That’s not a panacea. You have to read it with a mindset like Is that right? I don’t know about that. Should I do additional prompting, or should I do another analysis even on your own? And you have to understand how to use AI to assist you because AI doesn’t know your audience, you do. It doesn’t have your expertise – you do. AI doesn’t understand the internal politics – You do. It’ doesn’t know your product or program offering. You do. And, you know your community.

You have a lot of tribal knowledge, and you have the expertise you need to be able to make that point of view.

I hope that you are have you had a good time and this is a good session worthwhile and I share like the opening with you in terms of like a movie right like how you should set up your Act one now in the future when you talk to anybody about marketing plan you always say what is my Act one. What’s my Act two and my Act Three. That’s how you should talk that’s how you should structure your plan together and at the same time.

I really hope that you’ll find joy attending this specific session, and I hope this is very helpful in terms of working on your plan. If nothing else, it gives you a little bit of an idea to think differently. Of course, if you have any questions, reach out to me anytime, hello@pamdidner. com, or you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. YouTube, TikTok, whatever.

I’m pretty active on all social media channels, but mostly on LinkedIn.

So if you have any specific questions, feel free to DM me anytime, and I have a little short survey with 20-second questions. If you can tell me how I’m doing, that would be greatly appreciated.

So, back to you, do any of you have any questions? I didn’t track it. Sorry,

Amy Gabriel: I didn’t see any other questions pop up, but if anybody has any, please pop them in now.

Pam Didner: Yeah, thank you so emojis. I see all the clapping. I feel the love. You guys are awesome. Seriously, seems like they really found some joy with you, Pam. Yeah. You know what?

Pam Didner: Here’s one more thing. I know how tough it is to be a marketer. I do. Okay, we all are. But I really, really hope that when you are doing your plan, you go like, “Oh my god, oh now the plane I have to ride. I’m crumbling down.” Okay. Well, just have a little bit of a different mindset. See, you know what? I’m creating a story. Act one, act two, and act three. And see if by flipping that mindset, you will add a little joy to it when you put your plan together. Of course, you’ll get frustrated. If you do, just send me a quick note, and we can have a therapy session together. Does that sound good?

Amy Gabriel: Thanks again, Pam, for your time and insight. I know I always love learning more about AI and how it can help marketers everywhere. So, thanks to everybody for joining. Hope to see you all soon.

Pam Didner: Yeah, thank you so much. Take care. Bye-bye.