About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
Many teams copy and paste last year’s strategy.
As organizations lock in their budgets and strategies for the new year, one of the most common mistakes in marketing happens quietly. Instead of planning forward, many teams plan by memory.
They pull up last year’s plan, adjust a few numbers, change a couple of headlines, swap in a new platform and call it good. The thinking is that if it worked last year, it should work again next year, and it feels efficient, safe and familiar.
I’ve learned that marketing moves fast while it compounds slowly. The temptation is to hold onto what worked, but the opportunity lies in what comes next. Search behavior changes, competitors adapt and artificial intelligence (AI) creates entirely new discovery paths, so when we rely purely on memory, we build strategies for a market that no longer exists.
Looking backward has a cost.
When teams plan by memory, a few dangerous things happen in the background. First, legacy tactics continue to consume the budget. Tactics that delivered a massive return two years ago might be providing diminishing returns today, but because they’re familiar, no one questions them, and we end up funding habits instead of funding growth.
Second, the team loses its agility. When you assume the coming year will mirror the past year, you don’t establish trigger events, the predetermined signals that tell a team when it’s time to revisit and revise the plan. Without those triggers, teams keep executing their checklists even when the data shows a clear shift in buyer behavior.
You can plan without repeating the past.
Planning season shouldn’t be about starting from scratch, and it also shouldn’t be an exercise in copy and paste. Here’s how we build on what worked while staying honest about what has changed.
1. Audit your channels for return on investment.
Don’t assume every channel or campaign deserves the same level of investment it had this year. Look at contribution as well as performance, and ask whether a channel actually drove pipeline or mostly drove activity. Sometimes the best decision is to reduce volume where results have plateaued and reinvest that budget into testing new search visibility opportunities.
Look at why something worked, too. Was it timing, a specific audience or a shift in the market that made the campaign more relevant? Success can be circumstantial, and assuming it will repeat is risky.
2. Ask why each initiative matters now.
For every major initiative carrying over into the new year, ask why it still matters today and whether it directly supports the business outcome you’re trying to influence right now. If the connection is weak, the idea may still have value, but it probably shouldn’t compete with efforts that are more clearly aligned with the future. This is also where plans quietly drift, because the company changes with new leadership, priorities and products while the marketing plan stays the same.
3. Treat the plan as a living framework.
You’re creating a direction that can flex as the year unfolds, rather than a rigid twelve-month checklist. If the past year taught us anything about agility, make sure that lesson is reflected in how you plan, and build in quarterly review cycles to evaluate your progress and change course intentionally.
Keep evolving your strategy.
Marketing is about continuously refining the plan to fit where the business and audience are going next, rather than finding one right answer and repeating it until it stops working. If you realize your plan is mostly a collection of last year’s ideas, it’s time to step back.
Demand clarity, challenge the status quo and build a roadmap designed for where you’re headed. If you want a structure for that work, the START Planning Process® in the Digital Marketing Success Plan® can help. Are you preparing for the future, or are you marketing by memory?