几天内回答年度规划的三个关键问题

Annual planning can feel like a herculean task. In fact, I wrote a four-part series on the topic last year; it came in at around 18,000 words. Admittedly, that probably didn’t make the process feel any less daunting.

So this year, I’m taking the opposite approach. I want to help you create a lightweight, first draft of an annual plan—especially if you’re at a smaller startup or working at an AI company where annual planning can feel like a fool’s errand given the pace of change.

You can boil most of marketing planning down to 3 questions you’ve likely already been asked for next year: What will marketing do to drive growth? How much budget does marketing need? Marketing, can you hit this revenue target?! This newsletter and our new tools will help you answer these questions.

Of course, if you want to go deeper after making your lightweight plan, you can still read the full series from last year. But if you want to plan 2025-style, you can use our vibe-coded tools to guide you. Two are totally free, and one’s for paid subscribers. Because my MKT1 2026 annual plan says: make the MKT1 paid subscription even better and more valuable.

• Answers to the 3 big questions you’ll get asked during annual planning. Here’s the short version:

  • Question 1: What will marketing do to drive growth next year?

    Answer: Plan 3–5 big bets for the year, based on your specific marketing strategy. New: Marketing Decision Dashboard tool - for paid subs only

  • Question 2: How much budget does marketing need?

    Answer: Start with marketing efficiency metrics to ballpark the right budget range. Bonus: Budget calculator - free tool

  • Question 3: Marketing, can you hit this revenue target?

    Answer: Build a bottom-up forecast to see if your top-down target is realisticBonus: Forecast estimator - free tool

• Plus, how to take these basic planning exercises to the next level of detail

• Our new video series, MKT1 Unboxing: Attio

• More details about our Gen Marketer Virtual Summit on 12/10/25

We only include sponsors we’d recommend personally to our community. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

Profound helps brands like Ramp, MongoDB, and DocuSign understand and control what AI says about them. With the largest dataset of AI prompts and conversations, Profound generates AI-optimized content in minutes—complete with brand kits, citations, and topic research.

🎁Offer: Use code MKT1 for 20% off Profound Lite (new customers only).—Primer: Primer lets you build, enrich, and sync custom B2B audiences using your CRM, CSVs, and Primer’s proprietary datasets, then deploy them across Meta, LinkedIn, Google, Reddit, and DV360 at 40–90% match rates.

🎁Offer: Get 10% off an annual subscription with code MKT110.—Closing Media is a boutique agency that runs LinkedIn and Google campaigns for growth-stage startups. They know the best ways to build and scale ad campaigns in 2025 (hint: thought leader ads!) and have years of expertise (I worked with them in 2018!).

🎁Offer: Reach out to Closing Media here & mention MKT1 to get $5,000 of free ad spend for your next campaign.

Whatever you do, do not answer this question with “We don’t know yet.” If you do, you’ll be flooded with “What if we did X?” and “Have-you-seen-what-this-company-is-doing?” Slacks. That’s a recipe for Random Acts of Marketing (RAM). You need a plan that includes the big bets you’re going to focus on, whether you run content, growth, or the whole marketing show.

So before you jump to a quick answer or start calculating forecasts or budgets, figure out what projects can actually move the needle. To do this, codify and evaluate your marketing strategy, then identify 3–5 big bets for the year.

The output here isn’t a laundry list of incremental improvements. Those don’t count, they just keep the lights on.

• To truly answer this question, you should share 3–5 big bets, each with its own GACCS Brief™, which stands for Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, and Stakeholders.

• Your big bets should be initiatives that combine Fuel and Engine™ for a specific audience, with a specific goal—and have a strong chance of driving step-change growth.

• You should also share your strategic thinking that led to these big bets, for those who want to dive deeper. This can be a one-page strategy doc, I like to use a Marketing Decision Dashboard™.

• Getting to the right answer here requires a varying amount of pre-work, depending on how well you’ve defined your marketing strategy already. The steps below will help you zero in on the most useful exercises for identifying big bets. » But if you need to back up & do a deep dive on your strategy first, the MKT1 Field Guide is a good starting point, as is last year’s annual planning series.